Robert Fisk’s World: The wars come and go but the enemy remains the same

Is the Ministry of Fear about to be reopened? I thought – when Lord Blair finally departed from us and George Bush left the White House – that the institution had been closed down, that we might have been allowed a few hours in the broad sunlit uplands. Change? Hope? Renewal? Inspiration? But no, the semantics of our masters are reverting to type. There are no uplands, just another new dark age of fear and terror.
A few months ago, the following Bush-speak would be wearily familiar. "Let me be clear: al-Qa'ida and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qa'ida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan ... if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qa'ida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." Only, of course, this wasn't Bush-speak. It was a Bush-clone, called Obama-speak.
And now a reversion to Blair-speak: "Contemporary terrorist organisations aspire to use chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past..." Yup, that's the Home Office for you. Dirty bombs. Biological weapons, according to the Home Office intelligence girls and boys – the same crew, presumably, who helped to give us weapons of mass destruction and five-minute warnings six years ago but who now work for Lady Jacqui. I thought it was Churchill who warned us in 1940 of a new dark age "made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science".