His latest novel, Surveillance, is published by Picador next Friday, £16.99. A British soldier has died from injuries sustained in a shooting incident in Iraq, the Ministry of Defence said today. The soldier, who was serving in 58 Battery, 12 Regiment Royal Artillery, was injured when his patrol came under fire in Al Qurna, north of the southern city of Basra, on Tuesday.. Hundreds of Palestinians including politicians and intellectuals have told Tony Blair they do not want him to visit Palestinian areas on his visit to the Middle East this weekend because of his excessive support for Israel. Unless and until that happens, the Bush administration is likely to go on using the images and memories of September 11 to reinforce and justify the enormous boost of power it received on September 18. What further discord this turbocharged presidency may engineer here and in the larger world between now and January 2009 is the stuff of international bad dreams.Jonathan Raban's books include My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front, a collection of post-September 11 essays, Picador, £9.99.

The administration's renewed efforts to conflate every militant Islamic organisation across the globe into a single homogeneous force, the terrifying equal of Nazism, fascism, and Soviet Communism, is at last beginning to ring hollow in the ears of a distinct majority of Americans. The President's approval-ratings (between 36 per cent and 38 per cent last week) suggest that he is now very nearly down to his unshakeably faithful core base.Were the Democrats to gain control of the House of Representatives and/or the Senate in the November mid-term elections (not very likely but certainly possible), that would at least restore the separation of powers, allowing a Democratic legislative branch to check and balance the Republican executive. Bush's presidential rhetoric has never been so widely disbelieved. The fiction that in Iraq we're fighting terrorists abroad to stop them attacking us at home is increasingly being recognised for what it is.

Here's a straw: in the most recent polls, the number of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 plot, which stood at 80 per cent in 2002, and 64 per cent early in 2005, has now slipped to the high twenties - roughly the same numbers, give or take a percentage point, as those of the conspiracy theorists who believe that the Bush administration planned the atrocities, or at least allowed them to happen, in order to further its imperial ambitions in the Middle East. As the "global war on terror" has proceeded, governments - in Britain as in America - have erected around us all the necessary machinery of the security-and-surveillance state.This is an anniversary so cheerless that any straw is worth clutching at. But the administration, supported by a loyal Republican majority in Congress, and armed with the carte blanche of AUMF, chose another far more dangerous, lonely and audacious route.Five years on, we're mired in the bloody wreckage of Iraq (and the rising chaos of Afghanistan) The US is increasingly isolated from its traditional allies. At home, Americans are more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War. A small but growing minority of Muslims are telling British pollsters that they admire the jihadists.