There's a helluva difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I've been travelling on a gloomy spaceship - or maybe a time machine - with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common.

The politics department at Cairo's vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei - yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency - and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. "Why did you invade Iraq?" was one. I didn't like the "you" bit, but the answer was "oil". "What do you think of the Egyptian government?" At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak's intelligence lads heard of my reply.

Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department's list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn't see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak's American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt's steady march to democracy, its stability - versus the disaster of Iraq - and its supposedly roaring success. No one doubts that Mubarak's boys keep a close eye on his country's students.

But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn't "we" leave Iraq? Are "we" going to attack Iran? Did "we" really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact "our" shadow clearly hung over these young people.

Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if "we" left Iraq, the "jihadists" would come after us. "They want a Caliphate that will take over the world," she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim "jihadists" had been doing this "since the 1970s in Lebanon". It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut - and there weren't any "jihadists" around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about the US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America.

Up in the town of Tiger, Georgia, Kathy Barnes is reported to be looking for omens as she fears for the life of her son, Captain Edward Berg of the 4th Brigade, US 3rd Infantry Division, off to Iraq for a second tour of duty, this time in George Bush's infamous "surge". Last time he was there, Mrs Barnes saw a dead snake and took it as a bad sign. Then she saw two Canadian geese, soaring over the treetops. That was a good sign. "A rational mind plays this game in war time," as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eloquently pointed out. "A thunderclap becomes a herald, a bird's song a prophecy."

Dr Michael Noll's students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei's in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman seemed to break down in anger. If "we" left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the "terrorists", could come here to America. They would attack us right here.

I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, "they", the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same "fear" transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs - God, how I'd love that byline - announces in his local paper: "I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans ... howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm." He calls Guantanamo's inmates "hardcore jihadists".

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll's seminar isn't spouting this stuff about "jihadists" travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the "terror" warnings, the supposed "jihadists" threats, the red "terror" alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden's job for him: he has crushed this young woman's spirit and courage.

But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta's warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or "jihadists" stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America's social fabric.

Off campus, I meet a gentle, sensitive man, a Vietnam veteran with two doctor sons. One is a lieutenant colonel, an army medical officer heading back to Baghdad this week for Bush's "surge", bravely doing his duty in the face of great danger. The other is a civilian doctor who hates the war. And now the two boys - divided by Iraq - can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other.

The soldier son called this week from his transit camp in Kuwait. "I think he is frightened," his father told me. A middle-aged lady asked me to sign a copy of my book, which she intends to send to her Marine Corps son in Baghdad. She palpably shakes with concern as she speaks of him. "Take the greatest care," I find myself writing on the flyleaf to her marine son. "And come safe home."

The spring rain beat down like ball-bearings on the flat roof of General Claudio Graziano's office. Much of southern Lebanon looked like a sea of mud this week but all was optimism and light for the Italian commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, now 11,000 strong and still expecting South Korea to add to his remarkable 29-nation international army. He didn't recall how the French battalion almost shot down an Israeli jet last year - it was before his time - and he dismissed last month's border shoot-out between Israeli and Lebanese troops.

No specific threats had been directed at Unifil, the UN's man in southern Lebanon insisted - though I noticed he paused for several seconds before replying to my question - and his own force was now augmented by around 9,000 Lebanese troops patrolling on the Lebanese-Israeli frontier. There was some vague talk of "terrorist threats ... associated with al-Qa'ida" - UN generals rarely use the word 'terrorism', but then again Graziano is also a Nato general -- yet nothing hard. Yes, Lebanese army intelligence was keeping him up to date. So it must have come as a shock to the good general when the Lebanese Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh last week announced that a Lebanese Internal Security Force unit had arrested four Syrian members of a Palestinian "terrorist group" linked to al-Qa'ida and working for the Syrian intelligence services who were said to be responsible for leaving bombs in two Lebanese minibuses on 13 February, killing three civilians and wounding another 20.

Now it has to be said that there's a lot of scepticism about this story. Not because Syria has, inevitably, denied any connection to Lebanese bombings but because in a country that has never in 30 years solved a political murder, it's pretty remarkable that the local Lebanese constabulary can solve this one - and very conveniently so since Mr Sabeh's pro-American government continues to accuse Syria of all things bestial in the state of Lebanon. According to the Lebanese government - one of those anonymous sources so beloved of the press - the arrested men were also planning attacks on Unifil and had maps of the UN's military patrol routes in the south of the country. And a drive along the frontier with Israel shows that the UN is taking no chances. Miles of razor wire and 20ft concrete walls protect many of its units.

The Italians, like their French counterparts, have created little "green zones" - we Westerners seem to be doing that all over the Middle East - where carabinieri police officers want photo identity cards for even the humblest of reporters. These are combat units complete with their own armour and tanks although no-one could explain to me this week in what circumstances the tanks could possibly be used and I rather suspect they don't know. Surely they won't fire at the Israelis and - unless they want to go to war with the Hizbollah - I cannot imagine French Leclerc tanks are going to be shooting at the Middle East's most disciplined guerrilla fighters.

But Unifil, like it or not, is on only one side of the border, the Lebanese side, and despite their improving relations with the local Shia population -- the UN boys are going in for cash handouts to improve water supplies and roads, "quick impact projects" as they are called in the awful UN-speak of southern Lebanon - there are few Lebanese who do not see them as a buffer force to protect Israel. Last year's UN Resolution 1701 doesn't say this, but it does call for "the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon". This was a clause, of course, which met with the enthusiastic approval of the United States. For "armed groups", read Hizbollah.

The reality is that Washington is now much more deeply involved in Lebanon's affairs than most people, even the Lebanese, realise. Indeed there is a danger that - confronted by its disastrous "democratic" experiment in Iraq - the US government is now turning to Lebanon to prove its ability to spread democracy in the Middle East. Needless to say, the Americans and the British have been generous in supplying the Lebanese army with new equipment, jeeps and Humvees and anti-riot gear (to be used against who, I wonder?) and there was even a hastily denied report that Defence Minister Michel Murr would be picking up some missile-firing helicopters after his recent visit to Washington. Who, one also asks oneself, were these mythical missiles supposed to be fired at?

Every Lebanese potentate, it now seems, is heading for Washington. Walid Jumblatt, the wittiest, most nihilistic and in many ways the most intelligent, is also among the most infamous. He was deprived of his US visa until 2005 for uncharitably saying that he wished a mortar shell fired by Iraqi insurgents into the Baghdad "green zone" had killed then- Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But fear not. Now that poor old Lebanon is to become the latest star of US foreign policy, Jumblatt sailed into Washington for a 35-minute meeting with President George Bush - that's only 10 minutes less than Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert got - and has also met with Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Gates and the somewhat more disturbing Stephen Hadley, America's National Security Adviser. There are Lebanese admirers of Jumblatt who have been asking themselves if his recent tirades against Syria and the Lebanese government's Hizbollah opponents - not to mention his meetings in Washington - aren't risking another fresh grave in Lebanon's expanding cemeteries. Brave man Jumblatt is. Whether he's a wise man will be left to history.

But it is America's support for Fouad Siniora's government - Jumblatt is a foundation stone of this - that is worrying many Lebanese. With Shia out of the government of their own volition, Siniora's administration may well be, as the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud says, unconstitutional; and the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics came violently to life in January with stonings and shooting battles on the streets of Beirut.

Because Iraq and Afghanistan have captured the West's obsessive attention since then, however, there is a tendency to ignore the continuing, dangerous signs of confessionalism in Lebanon. In the largely Sunni Beirut suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, several Shia families have left for unscheduled "holidays". Many Sunnis will no longer shop in the cheaper department stores in the largely Shia southern suburb of Dahiya. More seriously, the Lebanese security forces have been sent into the Armenian Christian town of Aanjar in the Bekaa Valley after a clump of leaflets was found at one end of the town calling on its inhabitants to "leave Muslim land". Needless to say, there have been no reports of this frightening development in the Lebanese press.

Aanjar was in fact given by the French to the Armenians after they were forced to leave the city of Alexandretta in 1939 - the French allowed a phoney referendum there to let the Turks take over in the vain hope that Ankara would fight Hitler - and Aanjar's citizens hold their title deeds. But receiving threats that they are going to be ethnically cleansed from their homes is - for Armenians - a terrible reminder of their genocide at the hands of the Turks in 1915. Lebanon likes its industrious, highly educated Armenians who are also represented in parliament. But that such hatred could now touch them is a distressing witness to the fragility of the Lebanese state.

True, Saad Hariri, the Sunni son of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, has been holding talks with the Shia speaker of parliament, Nabi Berri - the Malvolio of Lebanese politics - and the Saudis have been talking to the Iranians and the Syrians about a "solution" to the Lebanese crisis. Siniora - who was appointed to his job, not elected - seems quite prepared to broaden Shia representation in his cabinet but not at the cost of providing them with a veto over his decisions. One of these decisions is Siniora's insistence that the UN goes ahead with its international tribunal into Hariri's murder which the government - and the United States - believe was Syria's work.

Yet cracks are appearing. France now has no objections to direct talks with Damascus and Javier Solana has been to plead with President Bashar Assad for Syria's help in reaching "peace, stability and independence" for Lebanon. What price the UN tribunal if Syria agrees to help? Already Assad's ministers are saying that if Syrian citizens are found to be implicated in Hariri's murder, then they will have to be tried by a Syrian court - something which would not commend itself to the Lebanese or to the Americans.

Siniora, meanwhile, can now bask in the fact that after the US administration asked Congress to approve $770m for the Beirut government to meet its Paris III donor conference pledges, Lebanon will be the third largest recipient of US aid per capita of population. How much of this will have to be spent on the Lebanese military, we still don't know. Siniora, by the way, was also banned from the United States for giving a small sum to an Islamic charity during a visit several years ago to a Beirut gathering hosted by Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, whom the CIA tried to murder in 1985 for his supposed links to the Hizbollah. Now he is an American hero.

Which is all to Hizbollah's liking. However faithful its leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, may be to Iran (or Syria), the more Siniora's majority government is seen to be propped up by America, the deeper the social and political divisions in Lebanon become. The "tink thank" lads, as I call them, can fantasise about America's opportunities. "International support for the Lebanese government will do a great deal for advancing the cause of democracy and helping avoid civil war," David Shenker of the "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" pronounced last week. "... the Bush administration has wisely determined not to abandon the Lebanese to the tender mercies of Iran and Syria, which represents an important development towards ensuring the government's success," he said.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Wherever Washington has supported Middle East "democracy" recently - although it swiftly ditched Lebanon during its blood-soaked war last summer on the ridiculous assumption that by postponing a ceasefire the Israelis could crush the Hizbollah - its efforts have turned into a nightmare. Now we know that Israeli prime minister Olmert had already pre-planned a war with Lebanon if his soldiers were captured by the Hizbollah, Nasrallah is able to hold up his guerrilla army as defenders of Lebanon, rather than provokers of a conflict which cost at least 1,300 Lebanese civilian lives. And going all the way to Washington to save Lebanon is an odd way of behaving. The answers lie here, not in the United States. As a friend put it to me, "If I have a bad toothache, I don't book myself into a Boston clinic and fly across the Atlantic - I go to my Beirut dentist!"

Scorched is the right title for Wajdi Mouawad's play about Lebanon. The word "Lebanon" doesn't occur in the script and "the army invading from the south" - the Israeli army, of course - remains preposterously anonymous. But any playwright who calls a town "Nabatiyeh: or refers to a prominent Shia figure called "Shamseddin" - the late Mehdi Shamseddin was the leader of the Shia clergy in Lebanon - hasn't tried very hard to hide the country in which his powerful, murderous scenario takes place. Suitably bloody, Scorched is a story of love, family honour, civil war and barbarity.

Wajdi Mouawad, who is of Lebanese Christian Maronite origin but is now a French Canadian - his play was written in French and translated into English for its latest performance at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto - has written a programme note in which he acknowledges his own background, even the devastating Israeli-Hizbollah war last summer. But his play, he says, is "anchored above all else by poetry, detached from its political context and instead anchored in the politic of human suffering, the poetry which unites us all".

The plot is simple. Nawal, an old lady, dies in Canada, and her son and daughter try to discover - from two sealed envelopes left to them by their mother - why she had remained silent for years before her death. In her youth in Lebanon, it transpires, Nawal's lover made her pregnant and the child was taken from her to preserve her family's honour. So she sets off, amid the massacres of the Lebanese civil war - there is a terrifying moment when blood from the victims of a bus massacre sprays over the young Nawal's clothes - to find her missing child.

During the civil war, she poses as a schoolteacher to educate the children of a local militia commander - so that she can assassinate him once she has gained his trust. The militia leader is killed, but Nawal is caught and taken to a prison where she is regularly raped by the jail's chief torturer. An old man later recalls for Nawal's daughter - who has gone to Lebanon to find out why her mother endured years of silence - that he was ordered by the jail authorities to throw two new-born babies into a nearby river. Instead, he takes the babies, covered in a cloth, to a local family who save their lives.

Nawal's secret - which turns her from being "the woman who sings songs" into a silent old lady - is that the original child for whom she is searching, the child of her long-dead lover, is her torturer and rapist. The torturer is the father of the son and daughter in Canada. He is also their brother. It is a secret revealed to the daughter by the militia leader called "Shamseddin" and it breaks the mind of her brother/father. He, too, lapses into eternal silence. An Oedipal drama if ever there was one.

And I can accept the play on that level. The duty of an artist, I have always thought, is to place imagination on a higher level than history, to frame real events - if her or she must - to fit the interpretation that an author or playwright chooses to reveal about life. But as a witness to the Lebanese civil war - and the author of Pity the Nation, my own testimony of that terrible conflict (the title is from a poem by Lebanon's greatest poet, Kahlil Gibran) - I find Mouawad's work much more difficult to accept on the level of mere art.

Shamseddin, as head of the country's Shia, was the first to call on the Lebanese to fight the Israeli occupation army in 1982. And there really was a girl who posed as a schoolteacher to murder a militia leader. Her name was Soad Bshara and she was a Christian leftist, not a Shia - I've even met the man who gave her the gun to kill the militia leader - and she did indeed attempt to assassinate him.

But General Antoine Lahd did not die. He showed me his wounds - two bullet holes - not long after his return to Lebanon from hospital in Israel. He was one of Israel's ruthless proxy warlords in Lebanon and he was in charge of the same brutal Israeli-controlled prison in which Bshara was subsequently locked up. She was not raped, but she was beaten and endured years of custody until the French government organised her release; she lives today in Paris while Lahd, after the collapse of his cruel "South Lebanon Army" in 2000, now lives in Tel Aviv where he runs - wait for it - a nightclub.

However, there certainly were well-trained torturers in Lahd's jail - its real name was Khiam prison and it was turned by the Hizbollah into a museum until being largely destroyed in last summer's war. The sadists of Khiam used to electrocute the penises of their prisoners and throw water over their bodies before plunging electrodes into their chests and kept them in pitch-black, solitary confinement for months. For many years, the Israelis even banned the Red Cross from visiting their foul prison. All the torturers fled across the border into Israel when the Israeli army retreated under fire from Lebanon almost seven years ago.

After watching Scorched, I went backstage to meet the actors and actresses - one of them gives a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a jazz-crazed sniper - only to find they had no idea that they were, in some cases, playing real people. They didn't even know that Israel had farmed out Khiam's torturers to western countries as "refugees" who would be killed if they returned to Lebanon.

The Israelis, of course, didn't mention their role in Khiam's horrors - which is why, several years ago, two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up at my home to ask if I could identify any torturers who might have been given asylum in Canada. I told them that their names were now written on the gates of Khiam prison.

But I do know that one of the torturers - who, of course, appears in Scorched as Nawal's rapist - is believed to have found guilty sanctuary in Toronto where he has set up in business. In other words, he probably lives less than three miles from the Tarragon Theatre in Bridgman Avenue. And who knows, maybe he will drop by for a ticket this month, just to enjoy the suffering he caused in a faraway land to which he will never dare to return. Would that be history? Tragedy? Or art?

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It's from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust", which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London.

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, from their message to my London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman's otherwise excellent English.

"We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007... Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk's book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is] ... held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations."

Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) - even Turkey's bid to join the EU, for heaven's sake - is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akcam's magnificent A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish - it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact - the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey - and without a single book review.

Now I'm not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink's foul murder, I'm in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to the racism that killed Dink. While I'm sipping my morning coffee on the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former capital of the Ottoman empire. But there's a problem nonetheless.

Some months earlier, my Turkish publishers said that their lawyers thought that the notorious Law 301 would be brought against them - it is used to punish writers for being "unTurkish" - in which case they wanted to know if I, as a foreigner (who cannot be charged under 301), would apply to the court to stand trial with them. I wrote that I would be honoured to stand in a Turkish court and talk about the genocide. Now, it seems, my Turkish publishers want to bring my book out like illicit pornography - but still have me standing with them in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under 301!

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not want to have to take political sides in the "nonsensical collision between nationalists and neo-liberals", but I fear that the roots of this problem go deeper than this. The sinister photograph of the Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink's alleged murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet still our own Western reporters won't come clean about the Ottoman empire's foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon - where Dink's supposed killer lived - he quoted the city's governor as saying that Dink's murder was related to "social problems linked to fast urbanisation". A "strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people" might be to blame.

Ho hum. I wonder why Reuters didn't mention a much more direct and terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women and children on to boats, set off into the Black Sea - the details are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akcam - "and thrown off to drown". Historians may like to know that the man in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt he had a "fiery character".

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selcan Hacaoglu, repeated the same old mantra about there being a "bitter dispute" between Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey "vehemently denies that the killings were genocide". When will the Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its reports? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally real and horrific murder of six million European Jews that right-wing Holocaust negationists "vehemently deny" that there was a genocide? No, they would not.

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the skulls and bones of around 40 people - almost certainly the remains of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on 14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing books "quietly" will not save us.

Why are we trying to divide up the peoples of the Middle East? Why are we trying to chop them up, make them different, remind them - constantly, insidiously, viciously, cruelly - of their divisions, of their suspicions, of their capacity for mutual hatred? Is this just our casual racism? Or is there something darker in our Western souls?

Take the maps. Am I the only one sickened by our journalistic propensity to publish sectarian maps of the Middle East? You know what I mean. We are now all familiar with the colour-coded map of Iraq. Shias at the bottom (of course), Sunnis in their middle "triangle" - actually, it's more like an octagon (even a pentagon) - and the Kurds in the north.

Or the map of Lebanon, where I live. Shias at the bottom (of course), Druze further north, Sunnis in Sidon and on the coastal strip south of Beirut, Shias in the southern suburbs of the capital, Sunnis and Christians in the city, Christian Maronites further north, Sunnis in Tripoli, more Shias to the east. How we love these maps. Hatred made easy.

Of course, it's not that simple. I live in a small Druze enclave in the west of Beirut. But my local grocer and my driver are Sunnis. I suppose they have no business to be in the wrong bit of our map. So do I tell my driver Abed that our map shows he can no longer park outside my home? Or that the Muslim publisher of the Arabic edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation can no longer meet me at our favourite rendezvous, Paul's restaurant in east Beirut, for lunch because our map shows this to be a Maronite Christian area of Beirut?

In Tarek al-Jdeidi (Sunni), some Shia families have moved out of their homes - temporarily, you understand, a brief holiday, keys left with the neighbours, it's always that way - which means that our Beirut maps are now cleaner, easier to understand. The same is happening on a far larger scale in Baghdad. Now our colour-coding can be bolder. No more use for that confusing word "mixed".

We did the same in the Balkans. The Drina Valley of Bosnia was Muslim until the Serbs "cleansed" it. Srebrenica? Delete "safe area" and logo it "Serb". Krajina? Serb until the Croats took it. Did we call them "Croats"? Or "Catholics"? Or both on our maps?

Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide the "other", "them", our potential enemies, from each other, while we - we civilised Westerners with our refined, unified, multicultural values - are unassailable. I could draw you a sectarian map of Birmingham, for example - marked "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" (there not being many Christians left in England - but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line streets between "black" and "white" communities but The Washington Post would never publish such a map.

Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with Brooklyn, Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian, Catholic, Jew, Wasp. Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French and non-French Canadian Montreal (the front line at one point follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where "Little Italy" is now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim, of course. But we don't draw these Hitlerian maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste, something "we" don't do in our precious, carefully guarded civilisation.

Passing a book stall in New York this week, I spotted the iniquitous Time magazine and there on the cover - and this might truly have been a 1930s Nazi cover - were two cowled men, one in black, the other largely hidden by a chequered scarf. "Sunnis vs Shi'ites," the headline read. "Why they hate each other." This, naturally, was a "take-out" on Iraq's civil war - a civil war by the way, that America's spokesmen in Baghdad were talking about in August 2003 when not a single Iraqi in his worst nightmares dreamt of what has now come to pass.

Buy Time magazine, dear reader, turn to page 30, and what will you find? "How to Tell Sunnis and Shi'ites Apart." Helpful, uh? And after this, are columns of useful, divisive information. "Names," for example. "Some names carry sectarian markers... Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman ... men with these names are almost certainly Sunni. Those called Abdel-Hussein and Abdel-Zahra," (I have never in met an "Abdel-Zahra" by the way) "are most likely Shi'ite." Then there are columns headed "Prayer", "Mosques", "Homes", "Accents" and "Dialects", even - heaven spare us - "cars". The last, for those readers not already reeling in disbelief, tells us which car stickers to look out for (spot a picture of Imam Ali and you know the driver is Shia) or which licence plate (Anbar province registrations, for instance) means a probable Sunni driver.

Thanks again. I don't know why the American military doesn't just buy up this week's edition of Time and drop the lot over Baghdad to help any still ignorant local murderers with easy-to-identify targets. But will Time be helping us to identify America's deeply divided society (who has most rubbish in their gardens in Washington, which bumper stickers to look for in Dearborn, Michigan)? Will they hell.

I, too, am guilty of playing these little sectarian games in the Middle East. I ask a Lebanese where he or she comes from, not to remember the mountains or rivers near their home but to code them into my map. But I easily come unstuck. The man who tells me he comes from the Lebanese south (Shia) turns out to live in the southern Druze town of Hasbaya. The woman who tells me she's from Jbeil (Christian) turns out to be from the town's Shia minority. Oh, if only these pesky minorities would go and live in the right bit of our imperial, sectarian maps.

And we go on talking to our Sunni monarchs in the Middle East - we listen to their raving about the "Shia crescent" - no wonder we hate Shia Iran so much. And we go on dividing and scissoring up the lands, and printing more and more of our racial maps and I do wonder most seriously if we wish to promote civil war across this part of the world, and you know what? I rather think we do.