Those who were taken aback at the lack of empathy in Britain or the Continent at Israel's predicament or America's reaction to 9/11 have often wondered what it would take to make them understand. Suicide bombings happened in Israel before Europe and when Israel responded by killing terrorists, Europeans responded angrily. But then suicide bombing came to London. Now they'll understand, people supposed. But the condemnations continued. Perhaps it will be different once we see the end of our enemy number one, they thought. But then bin Laden was killed, and it turned out that it was all rather worse than expected. It wasn't a matter of "one law for you and another for us", but rather "one crippling law for you and the same crippling law for us". To say this attitude is suicidal is to understate it. Suicides don't usually also demand suicide from their friends.

The enforcement of the principles of evolving international law is being adhered to and propagated in a way that suggests it is about more than law. Immediately after the death of bin Laden, prominent lawyers, commentators and even governments said that there should be an inquiry into the activities of the US Navy Seals who went into bin Laden's compound. If it was the case that the law had been broken, then a criminal investigation and prosecution should take place. This is not the language or behaviour of people concerned about the rule of law, it is the fixation and mania of the insanely religious. The idea that in response to state or non-state actors who declare war on your societies and kill your people, you should respond with legalisms is the response of people trying to put off the inevitabilities of reality a little while longer.

There are rules in war and there are laws in peace. Exactly where a non-state actor lies in the realm of these laws has been, and should be, a subject for wide debate. But the idea that America, indeed any society, should not have the right to pursue, punish and deter — in the name of justice — its most fevered enemies is a terrible mistake. The desire to cite the law in this is a fatal error. But it is one that the post-historical mind is particularly vulnerable to.

The reason that the law, and international law in particular, is being held on to so rigidly, so blindly and so damagingly, is that it has replaced traditional morality, personal judgment and any other hierarchies, as the sole manner in which to make sense of, and find order in, the world. Those who look to international law to solve the world's problems once and for all cling to it desperately, squeezing every last drop of ordinary sense from their heads, to pursue a principle to its ultimate conclusion. If we can only extend the latest concepts of international law even to bin Laden, they tell themselves, then the whole world will be ordered and the chaos we fear will no longer terrify us.

This feeling, this desire to extrapolate law to its imagined perfection has led well-meaning people into a new type of fundamentalism, with its new core texts and its new leading lights. But it has also led bad people, who desire to take what our civilisation has achieved in the way of law and security, to exploit our sense of justice and fair play.