The old fellow, incredibly, is as movie-star handsome as ever; even the lateral cleft that opens in his right cheek when he smiles or (more commonly) winces at the foulness of the world, only seems to enhance his glamour. The baritone voice remains robust and musical. Gore Vidal is not growing slack or fat or even particularly wrinkled in his old age, but instead seems to be taking on the quality of granite; taking up his place on Mount Rushmore even while still alive.

I meet him at the Casa della Letteratura just off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele in central Rome, where he has been holding court for most of the morning. He is in Rome to appear at the city's famous festival of literature, under the arches of the semi-ruined Basilica di Massenzio which dates from 4th century AD and stands next to the Colosseum. He is billed to give a pre-reading press conference here, but he has turned it into a series of interviews instead: with a keen awareness of what journalists want from him. He is parked at one side of the desk in his wheelchair, immensely dapper in a tawny suit and matching tie.

As everyone knows, Vidal for many years spent much of the time in Italy - then two years ago he moved out after losing both his long-time companion, Howard Austen, and the ability to walk. He moved back to southern California on a permanent basis. I asked him if he saw things in his homeland differently now that he no longer lived abroad.

"I was never an expatriate," he replies. "I was never considered to be that by anyone except for the far right. I had a house in southern Italy and another house in southern California - but in right-wing circles, that's enough to be considered an expat. America was what I always wrote about."

How is it, then, to live full-time in the United States?

"If you care about America it's dreadful," he said. "If you are making money you don't care.

"Benjamin Franklin was shown the new American constitution, and he said, 'I don't like it, but I will vote for it because we need something right now. But this constitution in time will fail, as all such efforts do. And it will fail because of the corruption of the people, in a general sense.' And that is what it has come to now, exactly as Franklin predicted."

We have arrived in short order at Vidal's core message. As he points out, he has "lived for three-quarters of the 20th century and a third of the history of the United States", and listening to him talk one feels in the presence of history as with few Americans.

Companion to his blind grandfather Thomas Gore, a prominent Democratic senator, when he was still a young boy, backgammon partner of John F Kennedy (to whom he was related), friend and screenplay writer to Fellini, brave pioneer in putting homosexuality at the centre of his fiction ... Even now, aged 80 and though confined to his wheelchair, he refuses to give up his place centre stage.

He remains the Bush administration's most pugnacious and learned and contemptuous enemy. Nobody has put the case against the neocons with more passion or precision.

Why is it so dreadful to live in America, I asked.

"We have been deprived of our franchise," he says. "The election was stolen in both 2000 and 2004, because of electronic voting machinery which can be easily fixed. We've had two illegitimate elections in a row ...

"Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarised, everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of the government are in the hands of this junta.

"Whatever you are," he goes on, "they say you are the reverse. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam - but they spent millions of dollars proving that John Kerry, who was a genuine war hero whatever you think of his politics, was a coward.

"This is what happens when you have control of the media, and I have never known the media more vicious, stupid and corrupt than they are now."

Gore Vidal has been lured back to Italy by Maria Ida Gaeta, the director of the Massenzio festival, who has a genius for attracting big names. He told her that the semi-ruined Basilica of Massenzio was the first place he saw in Rome on his first visit to the city at the age of 12. So this return would appear to have the character of a sentimental visit - except that Mr Vidal does not do sentiment.

I asked him if there was anything he missed about Italy since moving permanently to California two years ago. "It's just a place," he says, the disdainful cleft opening in his cheek. "I'm not very sentimental about places."

Come, Mr Vidal, try pulling the other one. For most of the year, for the best part of 40 years, he shared with Howard Austen a villa called La Rondinaia, the Swallow's Nest, rising from the steep cliffs to give infinite views of the hazy Tyrrhenian Sea and the next rocky, serpentine twist of the famously beautiful coast south of Naples; the sort of placewhich spells heaven to anybody who has ever yearned to get out of the rain and the smog.

Vidal's life in La Rondinaia was the long culmination of his Italian period, which began in 1959 when the Hollywood director William Wyler hired him, along with the British playwright Christopher Fry, to work on the script of Ben-Hur. He moved to Rome to do the job.

"Further down the corridor from my office," he recalls in an extract from a new and so far unpublished volume of memoirs which he read to the audience at Massenzio, "Federico Fellini was preparing what would become La Dolce Vita. He was fascinated by our huge Hollywood production... Soon he was calling me Gorino (little Gore) and I was calling him Fred.

"Neither Willy Wyler nor Sam (Zimbalist, Ben-Hur's producer) wanted to meet him because both were aware of a bad Italian habit which was to take over the expensive sets of a completed American film and then use them to make a new film. I think this had happened with Quo Vadis. To prevent the theft of Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down. But before that I had sneaked Fred on to the set of 1st century Jerusalem. He was ecstatic..."

Vidal played a cameo role as himself in Fellini's Roma and for the same director wrote a screenplay on the life of Casanova, later filmed. He and Austen first lived in Rome then snapped up the 5,000 sq ft Swallow's Nest, built by the daughter of Lord Grim-thorpe, a 19th-century British lawyer and politician who owned the far more pompous Villa Cimbrone a few steps away.

"I end up with big houses because I have so many books," Vidal says. "If I didn't have the 8,000 volumes, I'd be in a one-room flat somewhere."

"Despite the terraced acres," wrote one visitor shortly before Vidal's departure, "La Rondinaia seems all house and no land, rising abruptly from the narrow end of the property, where the last ledge tapers into a cliff. The house is aerial, not stately, relating to the sky and the view more than to the earth. It is the rare European villa with virtually no façades announcing an elevated social status."

No article about Vidal is complete without a mention of his stellar friends, and it is true that the Swallow's Nest welcomed many fancy guests during its 30 years in the hands of Vidal and Austen, including Rudolf Nureyev, Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman, Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams and many others. Yet one old friend saw loneliness - productive loneliness - in Vidal's Italian perch, rather than society.

"Gore is always working, but with the door to the big study wide open," says Barbara Epstein, editor of the New York Review of Books, remembering her visits. "At night, after you have this wonderful pasta-infested dinner in the small but beautiful dining room - Howard was a wonderful cook - you listen to music in the salone and have a little of the very good local wine. It's very relaxed, even cosy...

"He's such a fabulous host because he loves company. It's really a house where he works - and he works hard - through the winter, and imagine he longs for company, as though he were saving up for you to come and be entertained..."

He was working in Italy, but, as he told me, it was always America that was on his mind. Inducted into politics so young - thanks to the senator grandfather who had an obsession with the United States constitution - America and its ills is a subject that has never given him any peace; one suspects that, climate and food and views apart, Italy's chief merit was in keeping him at arm's length from his homeland and its problems.

Fellini, Vidal says, explained that he had picked "Gorino" to play himself in Roma "because he is typical of a certain Anglo type who comes to Rome and goes native." But that was nonsense. "As I never spoke Italian properly, much less Roman dialect, and my days were spent in a library researching the fourth century AD, I was about as little 'gone native' as it was possible to be."

"I'm not sentimental about places," Gore Vidal says - yet what seems more likely is that, behind his granite face and those dry, beautifully enunciated judgements, sentiment too painful to expose is festering. "I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my work room in Ravello," he tells the audience in Rome, and quotes a passage from Palimpsest, his earlier memoir: "A white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic grey sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever-more hostile sun.

"As I quote these lines, I will myself back to then, when Howard was still alive and our world had not yet cracked open."

The following are the six key points contained in the unclassified overview:

• Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

• Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.

• Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.

• The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.

• The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.

• It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons.

Either Senator Santorum is an idiot or he thinks the American public are idiots - or both. After his stunning revelations it made some sense to go back and review three crucial reports on the subject of Iraq’s WMD. These are:

• The Final Report of the Iraq Survey Group (also known as the Duelfer Report) released on September 30, 2004.
• The Addendums to the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD released in March 2005.
• The Report to the President from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (also known as the Silberman-Robb Commission) released on March 31, 2005.

Senator Santorum claims that the discovery of pre-1991 chemical weapons munitions proves Iraq had WMD. Here is what Volume III of the Duelfer Report, entitled Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program, had to say about these munitions in its key findings:

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

• The scale of the Iraqi conventional munitions stockpile, among other factors, precluded an examination of the entire stockpile; however, ISG inspected sites judged most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.

The Duelfer Report goes on to state:

Disposition of CW Munitions Post-1991

ISG expended considerable time and effort investigating longstanding Iraqi assertions about the fate of CW munitions known to have been in Baghdad’s possession during the Gulf war. We believe the vast majority of these munitions were destroyed, but questions remain concerning hundreds of CW munitions.

Since May 2004, ISG has recovered dozens of additional chemical munitions, including artillery rounds, rockets and a binary Sarin artillery projectile (see Figure 5). In each case, the recovered munitions appear to have been part of the pre-1991 Gulf war stocks, but we can neither determine if the munitions were declared to the UN or if, as required by the UN SCR 687, Iraq attempted to destroy them. (See Annex F.)

• The most significant recovered munitions was a 152mm binary Sarin artillery projectile which insurgents had attempted to use as an improvised explosive device.
• ISG has also recovered 155mm chemical rounds and 122mm artillery rockets which we judge came from abandoned Regime stocks.

…

Iraq Unilateral Weapons Destruction in 1991

Iraq completed the destruction of its pre-1991 stockpile of CW by the end of 1991, with most items destroyed in July of that year. ISG judges that Iraq destroyed almost all prohibited weapons at that time.

• ISG has obtained no evidence that contradicts our assessment that the Iraqis destroyed most of their hidden stockpile, although we recovered a small number of pre-1991 chemical munitions in early to mid 2004.

These remaining pre-1991 weapons either escaped destruction in 1991 or suffered only partial damage. More may be found in the months and years ahead. [Emphasis added by me.]

The March 2005 Addendum to the Duelfer Report lays the findings out even more clearly:

ISG assesses that Iraq and Coalition Forces will continue to discover small numbers of degraded chemical weapons, which the former Regime mislaid or improperly destroyed prior to 1991. ISG believes the bulk of these weapons were likely abandoned, forgotten and lost during the Iran-Iraq war because tens of thousands of CW munitions were forward deployed along frequently and rapidly shifting battlefronts.

• All but two of the chemical weapons discovered since OIF were found in southern Iraq where the majority of CW munitions were used against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.
• As the Coalition destroys the thousands of conventional munitions at depots around the country the possibility exists that pre-1991 vintage chemical rounds could be found mixed in with conventional munitions at these locations.
  • ISG identified 43 bunkers and depots where the Coalition is in the process of destroying conventional munitions and that were suspected of being associated with the pre-1991 WMD programs.

However, ISG believes that any remaining chemical munitions in Iraq do not pose a militarily significant threat to Coalition Forces because the agent and munitions are degraded and there are not enough extant weapons to cause mass casualties.

Finally, the Silberman-Robb Commission concluded that Iraq had no chemical weapons capability and what remained were discarded pre-1991 munitions:

The Iraq Survey Group’s findings undermined both the Intelligence Community’s assessments about Iraq’s pre-war CW program and, indeed, the very fundamental assumptions upon which those assessments were based. The ISG concluded–contrary to the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments–that Iraq had actually unilaterally destroyed its undeclared CW stockpile in 1991 and that there were no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of CW thereafter. Iraq had not regained its pre-1991 CW technical sophistication or production capabilities prior to the war. Further, pre-war concerns of Iraqi plans to use CW if Coalition forces crossed certain defensive "red lines" were groundless; the "red lines" referred to conventional military planning only. Finally, the only CW the Iraq Survey Group recovered were weapons manufactured before the first Gulf War; the ISG concluded that, after 1991, Iraq maintained only small, covert labs to research chemicals and poisons, primarily for intelligence operations.

…

Overall, although the vast majority of CW munitions had been destroyed, the Iraq Survey Group recognized that questions remained relating to the disposition of hundreds of pre-1991 CW munitions. Still, given that, of the dozens of CW munitions that the ISG discovered, all had been manufactured before 1991, the Intelligence Community’s 2002 assessments that Iraq had restarted its CW program turned out to have been seriously off the mark.

Senator Santorum, it seems, failed to read either the ISG reports or the Silberman-Robb Commission reports. If he had, he would have realized that the "chemical weapons" he is touting are old, ineffective munitions manufactured before 1991 that had been discarded or partially destroyed. Furthermore, these munitions pose no proliferation threat. It should however surprise no one that the Senator would leap to such conclusions. This is exactly the mentality that got us into the Iraq war in the first place. Senator Santorum and the Bush Administration claimed that Iraq had WMD and used any scrap of intelligence to try to justify the case for war. It appears that Senator Santorum has not yet learned the lessons of the Iraq war - that fixing the intelligence around the policy is a dangerous path to follow.

We as a country are being ill served by such ignorant behavior from our Senators and our Congressmen. The only question really is whether Senator Santorum is willfully misleading the public or whether he really is this stupid.

The prime minister's office did not immediately give more details about the state of emergency, but it was announced after police said gunmen opened fire on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol in the Shwaka district of central Baghdad.

The patrolling forces returned fire and sealed off the area as they clashed with the gunmen, Iraqi army Maj. Ihssan Abdul Hamza said.

Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab population and a tradition of bad blood. The Kurds, who are largely Sunni Muslim but not Arab, have formed a prosperous autonomous region nearby after decades of oppression and mass killings under the Sunni Arab minority that ran Iraq until Saddam Hussein was ousted three years ago.

Police said they were not sure if the attacks were carried out by the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, common criminals or sectarian death squads. Increasing numbers of Iraqi deaths over the past months have been attributed to revenge killings carried out by Shiite-backed militia organizations or Sunni Arabs who have banded together in retribution.

The outburst of killings was first reported Tuesday morning when police found the bodies of a husband and wife - both Kurds - shot to death in eastern Mosul, according to police Capt. Ahmed Khalil. Before the day was out, 10 people were either killed in shootings or found dead.

The killings persisted Wednesday, with eight people - including a child and a college student - shot to death by nightfall. The violence continued Thursday, said police Brig. Abdel-Hamid Khalf, with a policeman killed in a firefight with gunmen early in the day and six civilians shot to death before sunset.

The police raid north of Baghdad that freed the 17 captives came a day after the mass kidnapping, believed to have been organized by Sunni extremists at the close of a factory shift.

Initial reports said as many as 85 people, including women who had taken their children to work, were initially taken.

But Industry Minister Fowzi Hariri told state-run Iraqiya TV on Thursday that 64 people were abducted, two of whom were killed trying to escape. Thirty people, mainly women and children, were freed shortly after the kidnapping, leaving 15 still believed in captivity.

A National Security Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters, told The Associated Press that several insurgents holding the kidnap victims were captured during the raid.

Police raided the farm on a tip from a kidnap victim who said he was freed after showing his captors a fake ID with a Sunni tribal family name.

"As we were leaving the factory we were stopped by gunmen. They got on our buses and told us to put our heads down. Then they took us to a poultry farm," said the man who was released. He refused to allow use of his name, fearing retribution.

"One of the gunmen told us to stand in one line and then asked the Sunnis to get out of the line. That's what I did. They asked me to prove that I am a Sunni, so I showed the forged ID and three others did the same. They released us," the man said.

The workers were grabbed as they boarded company buses for the trip home after work at the al-Nasr General Complex, a former military plant that now makes metal doors, windows and pipes. The plant is about 20 miles north of the capital.

There has been rampant sectarian violence in the region, where tit-for-tat kidnappings and revenge killings are common, but nothing on the scale of Wednesday's abduction. The al-Nasr plant is between Baghdad and Taji, a predominantly Sunni Arab area.

The military said the four Marines were killed Tuesday in Anbar province, three of them in a roadside bombing and a fourth in a separate operation. A soldier died Wednesday south of the capital, the military said, giving no further details.

At least 2,512 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

In other parts of the country Thursday, police reported 13 other deaths tied to insurgent or death squad attacks, including six bodies that floated to the surface of the Tigris River in Kut, a city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Nine days into the security crackdown on Baghdad that includes hundreds of checkpoints and an expanded curfew, the capital was relatively quiet. Police reported only two deaths related to insurgent or sectarian attacks.

The victims died when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle exploded in a market. At least 25 people were wounded, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Earlier this week, the Mujahedeen Shura Council claimed responsibility for the abductions. The militant organization reportedly linked to al-Qaeda said in a statement posted on the internet that four Russian embassy workers taken hostage on 3 June would be killed after Moscow failed to meet the group's demand to pull troops out of Chechnya. The council said it would give Moscow 48 hours to pull its troops out of the province.

The council, led by al-Qaeda in Iraq, is an umbrella organization of seven militant groups in the country. It declared that Moscow "put no value on the lives of its citizens".

Despite the online statement, the speaker of the Russian parliament's upper house insisted Thursday that negotiations were ongoing. Sergei Mironov, the Federation Council speaker, said: "Negotiations are being conducted; they are being conducted in search of a solution to the problem. Certain positions have been found in the negotiations, and they are now being realized."

The Russian Foreign Ministry earlier urged the insurgents "not to take an irreparable step and preserve the lives of our men." A Russian Foreign Ministry statement said the diplomats "are representatives of the Russian people, which has never and nowhere waged a war against Islam.

The diplomats were abducted on June 3 when gunmen attacked their vehicle in the upmarket west Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour. One diplomat was killed during the attack.

A video camera and Dictaphone accompany them to every interview these days, a precaution against being misquoted. Interviewers are also asked to sign a film-release form, as they may end up in a documentary that's being made about the Chicks' everyday lives, which have got a lot more complicated since March 10 2003.

It was the eve of the Iraq war, and Maines's comment that night echoed the opinions of many other musicians. It wasn't even reported in most newspaper reviews of the gig but the Guardian mentioned it, and when middle America got wind of what Maines had said, the reaction was extraordinary. The golden girls of country, who'd sold more than 28m albums and won eight Grammys, were ostracised. Radio stations banned their records, some urging listeners to purge their homes of Chicks albums. Maines received death threats, rattling her enough that she moved from Austin to Los Angeles with her husband and kids. Perhaps most hurtfully of all, almost none of their country peers spoke up in their defence.

In London on a hot June afternoon, Martie Maguire - violinist, oldest Chick and sister of banjo player Emily Robison - is still bewildered by the rage they unbottled. "Nobody I know understands how this happened. If people had just had a few protests and not bought our albums, I could understand it, but it just snowballed. If people think you can't have a voice, and keep our political leaders in check ..." She tucks her feet beneath her. "It brought out the ugly side of people."

And it brought out a side of Dixie Chicks the band themselves hadn't known existed. Although the three were brought up in liberal Texas households in Dallas and Lubbock - in high school, Maines protested against the racism dished out to Mexican pupils - as a band they were supremely uncontroversial. Two months before Shepherd's Bush, they were even asked to sing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Superbowl. Which was why, says Maines - a dead ringer for Charlene Tilton, who played Lucy Ewing in Dallas - her comment roused such wrath. "It was unexpected from us, so we were the perfect group to use as an example."

Prior to Shepherd's Bush, even the most conservative American would have had to dig deep to uncover anything offensive about the Chicks. Admittedly, they had a naughty streak - they once surprised fans by announcing their love of "mattress dancing" on a tune called Sin Wagon. But they weren't applecart-upsetting types.

Robison elaborates: "Here comes this band, who are marching along with the same thought processes [as the largely Republican country audience], supposedly." Maguire cuts in: "We were people breaking rank from inside. Radio turned against us in a day. We had a song [Travelin' Soldier, about a Vietnam-era romance] that was No 1, and the next day, it was, like, No 70." The others nod. Robison adds: "It was disheartening to me when country music became such a cliche of what people think it is."

Shortly after Shepherd's Bush, Maines, unnerved by what they had unleashed, offered a half-hearted apology for "disrespecting the office of the President". But having had a taste of rebellion, the Chicks found they liked it. Soon they appeared naked on the cover of the US magazine Entertainment Weekly, their bodies covered with redneck-baiting slogans: "Saddam's Angels" and "Dixie Sluts". In 2004, they played alongside the likes of REM and Pearl Jam on the Vote For Change tour. Robison, though, believes Vote For Change was hampered from the start, given that American politics "puts the wrong [candidates] out. Last time, it was like voting between a turd sandwich and, I don't know, something else."

Maguire believes the experience has changed them in positive ways. "I'm way more informed now. I used to think I didn't have to read the papers every day and have opinions about politics." Then I ask a question that provokes contemptuous chortles: do they have any fellow Texas feeling at all for Bush? "I don't want the president to be a good ol' boy. I want him to be someone I'm in awe of, not my nextdoor neighbour," Robison says. Maines is characteristically blunt. "You want him to score higher than you in the SATs."

With Bush's stature nowhere near what it was before the war started, the Chicks have now released Taking the Long Way, their first album since the furore. "Someone at Time magazine said was it a marketing ploy to put out the album when his approval ratings were so low," Maines smiles. It wasn't - releases are planned months in advance, but it hasn't hurt them. Nor has it hurt that some of America's rock royalty have taken the same stance - Pearl Jam's anti-Bush song Worldwide Suicide was No 1 on radio playlists, for example. Nevertheless, they have again roused the ire of the right.

The first single, Not Ready to Make Nice, has Maines singing that she's "not ready to back down/ I'm still mad as hell," and she sounds it. Despite being one of iTunes's most downloaded songs the week it came out in America, the single received a frigid welcome on the radio. A vice-president at the huge Clear Channel network accused the Chicks of "arrogance and disrespect", to Maguire's disgust. "What's arrogant about [responding to] a death threat? I couldn't sing it for the first hundred times without crying."

"They can't see past their own anger to listen to what the song's about. For us, it's very sad and emotional. It's not a big F-U," Maines says.

With some radio programmers suggesting the band have "burned their bridges" with the song, do they feel as if they are putting their career on the line for the sake of their principles? "Who burned the bridges?" Maines asks. "They dropped our songs and had CD-smashing parties." Maguire adds: "And we don't want that kind of fan anyway. We don't want to cater to that mentality."

Vengeance, at any rate, seems to be theirs. Taking the Long Way went into the American chart at No 1, selling half a million copies in seven days. By the end of week two, sales had reached 800,000 - most of them, according to the sales-tracking service Soundscan, in the Chicks' traditional heartland of the south and midwest. The trio are "pleasantly surprised", given that stations such as KFKF in Kansas City, Missouri, have reported that their popularity is "still through the floor" as a result of "continued negative feedback".

After years as America's sweethearts, Dixie Chicks are probably rather thrilled by their notoriety. That much is apparent from their website's braggardly description of them: "Superstars, renegades, innovators, heroes, villains, and moms."

"I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young told the Los Angeles Times. "I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the 1960s generation." The songs will be played live for the first time next month, by original longhairs Crosby, Stills Nash and Young.

The first names on the sheet for any American peace concert would be - with the possible exception of pop-punks Green Day - musicians whose worldview was shaped by the Vietnam war. Bruce Springsteen (who has commented on Bush and the war to the fiftysomething audiences coming to watch him play Pete Seeger songs on his current tour), Wayne Kramer of the MC5, country singer Steve Earle, Chuck D of Public Enemy and former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra are all old enough to have been affected by the conflict, if mostly too young to have been drafted. When Michael Stipe headlined the Bring Them Home Now gig in New York in March, he told the crowd how his father served in Korea and Vietnam when he was a child, and spoke of registering for the draft while Jimmy Carter was president. But it's been a while since any of these artists spoke directly to young people, as opposed to long-term fans.

And the majority of the bands with a young audience taking an active stance against the war lack true mass appeal. Avowed socialists such as System of a Down and Anti-Flag are so virulent in their opposition to the Bush government that they stand little chance of getting their message across to middle America. While Green Day have topped charts and won awards for their avowedly anti-war American Idiot album, they have been a commercial force for more than a decade - the punk band it's safe to like - and the title song probably won more fans for its exhilarating guitars than its lyrical attacks on a "redneck agenda". Other anti-war artists, such as the "freak folk" singer Devendra Banhart, are too obscure to harness the media's mobilising power. Banhart sings his protest song Heard Somebody Say at every opportunity, but admits the refrain: "It's simple, we don't want to kill" is preaching to the converted.

"Neil Young doesn't count," he says of rock's anti-war camp. "He's a singular poet, one of the greats. He has a very secure fanbase, but they're people who grew up listening to Ohio and know what he's referencing in that song. There aren't a lot of young musicians involved from the mainstream machine, and those who have opposed the murder of innocent people have done it in a casual way, a nonchalant way, in a whispered way, and that doesn't mean shit. It's just a strategy to appease the larger and larger amount of people who are beginning to oppose this. They're not prepared to write a blatant song, so I don't feel like it's coming from a genuine place. People hint that they're against it but I don't hear it in their songs."

The exception to this rule, among artists capable of inspiring thousands of young people to activism, is When the President Talks to God, by Bright Eyes, in which Conor Oberst wonders, "Does he ask to rape our women's rights and send poor farm kids off to die?" But Oberst himself is a reluctant spokesman, perhaps mindful of the "new Dylan" tag he has unwillingly laboured under. He rarely makes any kind of statement in public and at the Bring Them Home Now event actually ran away from journalists requesting an interview. His set at the Hammerstein Ballroom that night, powerful though it was, contained nothing more rousing than "We all know why we're here" by way of spoken affirmation.

Adam Eidinger organised last September's Operation Ceasefire free concert in Washington. "One of the weaknesses of the anti-war movement is that the youth are not leading the charge," he says. "The main groups are still made up of people who opposed the Vietnam war, and the music reflects that. The fact is that folk music just isn't popular any more." His co-organiser, Scott Goodstein, agrees: "A lot of the leaders of the anti-war movement are the same age as my grandparents. They want to return to the music that motivated them, but that's not going to encourage kids to take to the streets."

So Operation Ceasefire's lineup balanced veteran campaigners Joan Baez, Steve Earle and Wayne Kramer with contemporary radicals such as the hip-hop group the Coup and leftist punks such as Ant-Flag and Ted Leo and Pharmacists. By the time the headliners Thievery Corporation performed, 150,000 people had gathered by the Washington Monument, making it the largest event of its kind since the invasion of Iraq.

It sounds a roaring success, but to put that number in perspective, in April more than two million people marched against proposed new immigration laws, including 500,000 in Los Angeles alone. But Jello Biafra, who hosted Operation Ceasefire, rejects the accusation that the anti-war movement is failing to mobilise its supporters. "People with long memories like Noam Chomsky point out that it's a lot larger and a lot stronger and a lot more organised than it was in the same time period after Lyndon Johnson went crazy with the Vietnam war," he says. "It has a way to go in bringing the troops home, but every bit of hammering against the war helps."

Any comparison with the mass protests of the mid-1960s must allow for two key differences. The first is the level of pre-war opposition: there was virtually no protest against the US military presence in Vietnam while John F Kennedy was president, or in the early years of Johnson's presidency. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, millions of people took part in demonstrations worldwide and scores of musicians spoke out, including rappers P Diddy and Jay-Z, rock legends Lou Reed, David Bowie and David Byrne and a younger British contingent led by Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke. Three years on, that energy has dissipated.

"There's definitely been a numbing," says Banhart. "Without a doubt there's been a feeling of being reduced to a tick - a tick that's being flicked off by what we feel is this gargantuan beast that we stand no chance against. If that's the mentality then there won't be any change."

The last significant burst of political energy in US rock occurred in the autumn of 2004, when tens of thousands of people in swing states came to hear REM, Springsteen and Pearl Jam on the Vote For Change tour in the run-up to the presidential election. That the shows merely demonstrated the political impotence of those American idols was a major setback.

Earle, who angered rightwing Americans with his 2002 song John Walker's Blues, about the so-called "American Taliban", says: "So many people were involved in the Vote For Change movement and we're trying to keep them, because we're experienced, we've had our hearts broken already. But it's hard to keep them when they've put in so much effort and taken so much shit and failed." Kramer agrees: "I think there's a hardness and a cynicism in the air," he says. "And anyway, this guy's only got two more years. His time is over, so everyone's just staying at home and licking their wounds."

The second crucial distinction to be made between the anti-war movements of 1966 and 2006 is, of course, the draft itself, something that Kramer experienced first-hand. "I don't think most people really care that much about the war," he argues. "This war does not touch people in their hearts, in their stomachs. Vietnam did touch people where they lived, because it touched every young man in America. It was mandatory, it was the law of the land, and it touched you."

The Bush administration's response to its critics in the entertainment industry has been to portray them as pampered liberals out of touch with ordinary Americans. "The idea that artists are not qualified to comment is a new one," observes Earle. "I think Dick Cheney made it up. They've tried really hard to discredit the idea of artists commenting, the archetype being the Hollywood liberal. Richard Gere was absolutely ridiculed by Republicans when he opposed the war."

None the less, despite its setbacks, music's coalition of dissenters is growing. In the three years since Dixie Chicks were mauled at home for telling a British audience they were ashamed Bush is a Texan, public opinion has shifted enough to suggest performers can safely criticise the government without fear of harming their careers. Dolly Parton's live show now features a medley of protest songs, Jessica Simpson came back from her trip to Iraq a confirmed pacifist, and Pink's latest album contains a broadside called Dear Mr President. The death threats and radio bans of 2003 have been conspicuous by their absence.

Much of this showbiz dissent has been of the cryptic, non-committal variety that Devendra Banhart derides, but Jello Biafra welcomes every new pop convert. He says: "There's been criticism that some of the people now taking stands against the war are just hopping on a bandwagon and I say 'why not?'. I'd rather have Sheryl Crow protesting the war than have to listen to her music, but I'd even put up with her music if it would help stop the war. If it would help stop the war and bring down the Bush dictatorship I'd go on tour with Britney Spears tomorrow."