In a 2009 video, a prominent Egyptian denounced the venality of rulers in the Islamic world. “Popular awareness,” he said, “is more convinced, now, that these corrupt and rotten regimes are the reason behind economic injustice and corruption, the political oppression and social detachment.”

This was not one of the secular idealists who would ignite revolt across the Middle East. It was Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, now its leader. His words go to the heart of Sarah Chayes’ argument in Thieves of State : that graft begets insecurity. A former adviser to the US military in Afghanistan and Washington, Chayes skewers US readiness to support kleptocrats in exchange for “counterterrorism co-operation”. Rarely has my enemy’s enemy been cut so much slack for so dubious a return.

Anyone who has suffered the indignities it yields — the roadblocks impassable without a bribe, the sight of the fine villas beside slums — knows the sheer hair-pulling rage corruption can produce. I have heard a Jamaican spit that his country’s politicians were “so corrupt they corrode”, and Nigerian militiamen threaten to resume armed campaigns because payments promised under an amnesty were being creamed off.