... Note that the film's stress is not on inflicting relentless pain; it is on passive, unresisting endurance of it. That is the sense in which I think the film is also a moment in the life of Mr. Bush's America. It is the companion film to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, in which he captures the deep tension, fear and anxiety in the lives of many Americans, especially since 9/11, but also before: their endless expectation of danger and the lash about to fall. You see it in myriad small ways: when people are on family holidays at theme parks, looking warily around for terrorists, or drawing too frequently on the hose from the water bottle strapped to mom's waist, lest they all dehydrate. Then it happened -- 9/11 -- everything they anticipated and more. It swiftly became The Passion of America. It had meaning. It was not a disaster akin to other disasters that strike humans all the time, and always will. Rather, as the authorities constantly intoned: The world has changed forever. Not just the United States, the world. You could say exactly that about the passion a la Gibson. In his film, one of the few things Jesus says, in contrast to the endless abuse he suffers, is, "I make all things new."

These are generalizations about America, and subject to the usual qualifications. But the people most likely to make such links, in a conscious or instinctual way, happen to also be the crucial nucleus of the Bush constituency: born-again, fundamentalist Christians. What many of us forget, whether we admire or abhor that regime, is its deep anchorage in fundamentalism. They are the voters he must keep onside, as shown in his proposal this week of a constitutional amendment on marriage. Their support is what he brings to the table. All the rest -- policies, strategy, money -- comes from others. But he brings those believers as the core of his vote, and they recognize him as one of them. Three days after 9/11, speaking basically to them, he said, "Our responsibility before history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

Christian fundamentalists are also the core audience for this movie. They focus on the rewards of the Rapture and Second Coming, which will only occur due to the awful grimness of the passion of Christ. Since, in this worldview, Christ took on the burden of your sin, i.e. your essence, by his death, there is little to do but wait, in unbearable tension, for his return, while gratefully recalling his sacrifice. A passion play embodies this state, and this film is a cinematic passion play.

Grief and rage mount during such a performance until they seek an outlet, which often, in the past, meant pogroms against Jews, villains of the drama. Similarly the passion of 9/11 was endlessly retold, and urgently needed an outlet. If you are the global superpower, outlets are many and prodigious. The deeper the sense as victim, the more justified and excessive the reaction. "God led me to strike at Saddam, which I did," George Bush told Palestinian premier Mahmoud Abbas.

Trollope said that, after money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing. His is an observation that is as true in international affairs as it is in personal life, and the United States is a striking example of it. America rarely overlooks an insult, and never closes the door entirely on a past defeat or humiliation unless the perpetrator has in the meantime been crushed. Thus the "axis of evil" made little sense in its grouping of three very different societies, and even less in its implication that they were somehow allies. But it made eminent sense as a grudge list.

The phrase was used in a speech focused on dangers ahead, but in truth it was as much about the past as it was about pre-emption and the future. All three countries had imposed notable defeats on the United States. North Korea, with the help of China, sent American forces reeling back from the Yalu half a century ago. Iran threw out the Shah, who had retained power in that country with the assistance of Britain and the United States, and brought in a regime that added to America's humility by taking its diplomats hostage. Iraq defied the United States over Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein, against what appeared to be the odds, then recovered control of most of his country, resisted American pressure to disarm and made the United States look ineffective and foolish.

These things rankled with many powerful Americans.

The American instinct for revenge, evident also in the treatment of Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and, for many years, China, is more marked than that of other powers. Perhaps America's lack of the experience of defeat on its own continent made reverses in the wider world especially difficult to swallow when they inevitably came.

Other nations have reconciled or compounded with those who had defeated them, as the British did with the Boers and the Irish, or the French with the Algerians. The United States, too, has been capable of magnanimity, as with Germany and Japan, but here a generosity of spirit arose only in the context of a total defeat of those two countries and the rapid transference of hostile feelings to the communist states.

America's historic reluctance to be satisfied with anything less than complete victory is now being tested in Iraq, where it seems inevitable that the full conservative program will not be pushed through, although how far it will fall short of the ambitions of men like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz has yet to be seen. If, for instance, America does not get the right to base substantial forces in that country indefinitely, and Iraq wobbles off on a more or less independent path, the scene may well be set for another of those "Who lost the war?" dramas that have punctuated American political life since the Chinese communists ousted their nationalist foes in the late 40s. That will be especially so if by that time President Kerry rather than President Bush is in charge.

These arguments have always circled around two propositions. On the right, which at times has included the Democratic right, the proposition has been that if only the United States had exerted its full strength, it would have prevailed. On the left, which has sometimes included Republican realists, the proposition has been that there are objectives that are not morally defensible and others that may be desirable but are not practically possible, and that it behooves a great power to recognize when either of these situations arises.

[The Bush administration] may be prepared to soften its line on disobedient allies such as France and Germany. But its reluctance to give Libya the benefit of the doubt, its closed views on Cuba, its distaste for unavoidable co-operation with Iran, its view of China as a future rival and its crablike approach to negotiations with North Korea, are all indications of how long-lived the American grudge can be.

Apart from the principle that American power should when necessary be exerted to maximum effect on enemies that the US clearly discerns as such, there is something else at work here. That is the idea that if a regime has stood in the way of the US and got away with it, it should sooner or later have to pay for its temerity.