Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a littleshuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the DesMoines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BINLADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that thestate waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and USdemocracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a NewYork environment group... 'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,' Kennedysaid..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.