URL copied to clipboard In 1993, President Clinton’s newly appointed CIA director, James Woolsey, described the post-Cold War security environment and the collapse of the Soviet bloc as the United States slaying the dragon and being left in a jungle inhabited by poisonous snakes. Throughout the 1990s, the United States duly reconfigured its huge military power away from heavy armour, anti-submarine forces and other Cold War elements and towards expeditionary warfare, special forces, stand-off weapons and rapid deployment, all useful for fighting small wars in far-off places. What was not expected was that those “snakes” could hit both the metropolis and the centre of military power, which partly explains the rush to large-scale war after 9/11.