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Following policy developed in South East Asia in the 1970s and Latin America in the mid 1980s, the US also funded the war through drugs. By the end of the war in 1990, Afghanistan and Pakistan had become the world’s largest producers of opium and heroin, a trade controlled with the utmost brutality in the fight for regional supremacy.

Thus, it was the Afghan war that gave right wing Islamists the organization, numbers, skills, reach, and confidence to mobilize and organize in an unprecedented way. Fundamentalist political Islam, argues Mamdani, “is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture.”

In the final chapters, Mamdani argues that it was the events of September 11 that created the opportunity the US administration needed to shift from covert to overt war in the pursuit of its interests in the Middle East. With a massive groundswell of sympathy behind them, the US government was able to present the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 as a war against terror.

Yet, within the US’s apparent volte-face, ironies abound, perhaps the most obvious of which is that the enemy that turned on the US on September 11, 2001 was an enemy the US had trained and funded for many years. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see how convenient the events of September 11 were for an administration on record as wishing to invade Iraq, since it gave them the perfect excuse to do so.

As Mamdani makes clear, Iraq had been softened up for invasion by a decade of a new and utterly devastating weapon of proxy war: UN sanctions. Sanctions appear to have led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children under the age of five, and they put severe stress on Iraqi state infrastructure. Thus, the threats cited by the US as an excuse to invade Iraq were bogeymen. The “Muslim terrorists” were in fact US creations, while the specter of militant nationalism in Iraq had been broken by a decade of extreme punishment by the sanctions regime. Thus, American boys are fighting in Iraq today because the occupation of Iraq is in fact an overt form of imperialism, reflecting US interests in the region, rather than the interests of the Iraqi people.

But it is also in Iraq that Mamdani suggests we may finally see the unraveling of US ambitions to dominate the globe. In taking the fight against nationalist and militant Islamic terror into a state that still retains some sense of national identity and infrastructure – however beleaguered and battered - the US has chosen to shed the veil of covert brutality and opted for overt conflict with the nationals of another state.

Just as the US failed to defeat nationalism in Vietnam, Mamdani argues, so they will fail to defeat it in Iraq. Dividing Muslims into “good” and “bad” is an increasingly hollow effort as such propaganda is played out on the ground in Iraq. This is partly because to be Muslim and anti-American is no longer a right wing Islamist opinion, but a popular sentiment in the face of military occupation. It is also partly because, however hard it tries, the US cannot wipe out nationalist aspiration across the world and replace it with privatized, globalized and militarized alternatives.

Just as the US had to accept it could not defeat nationalism militarily in Vietnam, so it has to accept that it cannot defeat it now – either through covert or overt military means. In Mamdani’s words: “To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.” Let’s hope that Mamdani’s gifts of prophecy are as abundant as his gifts of analysis, and that the invasion of Iraq does indeed represent the dying throes of the American imperial project