It is also the country which in 1927 executed the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, which without compunction imprisoned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and which was mesmerised by the anti-Communist witch-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy.As the present clamour for capital punishment testifies, the public mood is for vengeance; swift, sure and absolute. If a Middle Eastern connection emerges, the consequences will be far uglier. Should an Arab government be shown to have been involved, military retaliation is all but certain.Let it not be forgotten that America is not only the land of baseball and apple pie, where the Oklahoma corn grows as high as an elephant’s eye. Should it prove that the Oklahoma City attack was carried out by Americans for American purposes, pressure on Congress to pass yet more severe “law and order” measures will only grow. When President Clinton appeared in the White House press room to denounce the deed, there was a hard, cold glint in his eye, quite unknown for this most affable and emollient of presidents. The Attorney General, Janet Reno, was glacial as she announced that the federal government, which has not executed anyone since 1963, would seek the death penalty against those responsible.And she had little choice. Even before this unprecedented barbarism, crime has been the obsession of the American public.

As many civilians died on Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988 – but aeroplanes are always vulnerable. But not Oklahoma City, a quiet, unchallenged citadel of the American way of life.Once the shock subsides, however, America’s reaction will be savage. How could something so senseless, so utterly evil, happen in a place like Oklahoma? Nothing in the American experience compares with it: not the massacre of the marines in Beirut in 1983: they were, after all, military personnel on service in a dangerous foreign country. Instead, fiendishly, they chose an ordinary city, in the American equivalent of nowhere.Thus the shock, tangible and all-pervasive, across the entire country.

That a federal building was chosen indicates that the bombers’ target was the US government itself. But not a building in Washington, the seat of that government, or a showcase city such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago – great metropolises where such outrages, however regrettably, are bound occasionally to occur. But deliberate random terror for political ends has always belonged somewhere else – Belfast, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Algeria – not in a humdrum, windswept cowtown bang in the middle of the continental USA, about as far as it is possible to get from the great forces of world history.
Whoever planted the bomb that tore apart the Alfred P Murrah federal building struck at a reality beyond the fractured myth: the reality of middle America, with its unchanging rhythms, eternal certainties and bedrock optimism These are now fractured, possibly for ever. But what happened there at 9.04 am on 19 April does not merely add another obscure city to the global roll-call of terror. It may well change the very way a country perceives itself, and its place in the world. Put most bluntly, an American age of innocence ended this week. True, that innocence has always been something of a fiction in a country which needs no reminding of its history of racial tensions, appalling crimes and presidential assassinations, and which boasts a murder rate 15 times that of Britain.

To this wretched list must now be added Oklahoma City, a town where, until a couple of days ago, the locals would say, nothing very much ever happened. “We are pursuing a number of good solid leads,” Carl Stern, the Justice Department spokesman said.. Bhopal, Lockerbie, Waco. All of them once little-known places, their names now indelibly identified with a horrific, alien event beyond their capacity to understand. US Justice Department sources said investigators are focusing on Middle Eastern or extreme Islamic groups and hinted that a breakthrough could come quickly. No one is sure how many people were in the building, which held more than a dozen US federal branch offices, including the Secret Service. Authorities estimated that there could have been 800 people, but said that some 700 had telephoned to say they were safe.

But dozens of families were still waiting for news of relatives listed as missing.Hamas, Hizbollah and other fundamental Islamic organisations disclaimed any responsibility for the attack but informed sources in the Middle East said the bombing bore all the hallmarks of an act of Middle Eastern terrorism. No one had been found alive since a 15-year-old girl was brought out at 10.15pm on Wednesday.According to several reports from the scene, which was sealed off from the media, rescuers have ceased hearing any sounds of life. More than 400 people were treated in hospital for injuries.As rescuers continued to pick their way painstakingly through the debris, structural engineers were drafted in to pinpoint pockets in the rubble in which survivors could still be sheltering.But, according to Oklahoma’s fire chief, Gary Marrs, it could take as much as six days to find all the bodies beneath the mound of glass, concrete and twisted metal. All I’ve found in here are a baby’s finger and an American flag.”Hope was fading last night for an unknown number of people buried beneath the rubble of the Alfred Murrah building.The official death toll stood at 36, including 12 children, but officials were certain the figure would rise At least 100 people are believed to be unaccounted for. Mr Clinton said the Oklahoma car-bomb – the worst terrorist incident in US history – was “an attack on the US, our way of life and everything we believe in”.As the shock of the tragedy sank in, Oklahoma’s mood turned from sorrow to anger. The state’s governor, Frank Keating, told reporters that he stopping a firefighter to thank him for all he was doing The firefighter replied: “You find out whoever did this. But he left open the possibility of retaliatory action by the US itself – along the lines of the 1986 bombing of Libya – if any foreign government was proved to have been involved.