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liberal society in line with the ideas of the Enlightenment, constantly striving for progress not only in technology but also on a moral and spiritual level. A man who, let’s say, pulled an insurance scam might not be crushing the whole of society, but he was spreading uneasiness and suspicion among at least some part of the population. And, as everyone knows, many small parts make up one large whole sooner or later. Averting that was the job of us Ashcroft women and men.
    Ironically enough, it was John Ashcroft’s ideas of preventative crime-fighting that, in their own time, were to lead indirectly to the downfall of the US as a world power. For the 9/11 assassins did not come from Los Angeles or Louisville, and their potential successors were not planning further terrorist attacks from some base in New Orleans. So if they were to be crushed first, the US had to invade foreign countries to get at them. First was Afghanistan (now part of the Greater South-Eastern Area), where the operation went relatively smoothly and successfully, if we leave aside the fact that the man behind the assassins, Osama bin Laden, the most important of the radical Muslim leaders, was not captured despite the best efforts of the ultra-modern US army and any number of special task forces. (Incidentally, we still feel the after-effects of this failure today: bin Laden’s body was never found either, and so he became a sort of immortal prophet in the religious fantasies of the terrorist groups that we regularly confronted. Only last month I had brought a sympathizer with the potential for providing a terrorist hide-out before the Examining Committee, after noticing from my balcony that he had hung a poster of bin Laden in his living-room.)
    But what, as everyone knows, really broke the US was the subsequent war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, now part of the Greater Middle-Eastern Area. Ashcroft’s ideas were especially prominent in providing the theoretical and moral framework for the war, since up to that point Iraq posed no threat to the United States. However, of course there were Islamist leaders and groups in Iraq who could have become a threat at some point, and if you looked at it that way, it was quite right in the Ashcroftian sense to bring the country under control as a preventative measure.
    But a consequence of the American victory over Saddam’s army that had not been foreseen – and in my view it couldn’t logically have been foreseen – was the massive influx into Iraq of opponents of the US from all over the world, flooding in to raise hell for the occupying forces with their sniping and suicide bombings. The rest is history. The mightiest army in the world was worn down over the years in bloody skirmishes, the duties of occupation, and a vain attempt to get the Iraqis to recognize them as saviours who had brought democracy to the country. All the same, the US government stuck to its plan to usher in a new order and thus a lasting peace in Iraq and the entire Middle East of the time, while the two other great powers, China and Europe, concentrated entirely on economic progress. The Franco-Chinese Treaty of Hong Kong followed, and a little later the Euro-Chinese Confederation, which started by cancelling all loans to the exhausted and deeply indebted US and soon afterwards was in a position, as it were, to buy up the whole of North America.
    Still feeling the force of the American failure in the Middle East, the Confederation undertook the construction of a fence around the world as the logical implementation of Ashcroftian ideas, excluding most potential enemies of our liberal and democratic society once and for all. Where US governments had gone on working, as one might say, to resocialize the problem zones of the world by waging war, hunting down dictators, holding elections and hoping for values to change in favour of democracy and the free market economy, the Confederation really did ‘crush