For example, one day here during Malcolm Penn's International Electronics Forum, a genial German semiconductor engineer named Walter Roessger casually remarked that "the greatest pollution in the world is... poverty!"

Echoing numerous political scientists, Roessger challenged the American neoconservative faith that today's terrorism can be best fought with military conquest, followed by the force-feeding of "democratic values" to the natives. Roessger expressed the hardly original insight that most terrorists spring from a subculture of destitute outcasts who possess just enough education and media savvy to appreciate -- and resent -- the preening wealth and arrogant power of their heavily armed mentors.

The antidote to the resentment, among the poor, that fosters outrage and feeds terrorism, is a proven strategy inconceivable among the Wahhabi capitalists who currently dictate U.S. foreign policy -- sharing the wealth.

This hasn't always been so. America has a tradition of lending its enemies a helping hand. So, why not this time? Roessger suggested that America can't bring itself to respond constructively to the current threat because the trauma of September 11, 2001 was unique. It left behind a ravenous hunger for vengeance -- exacerbated by President George W. Bush's visceral resort to emotionally loaded (and indefinable) words like "evil."

To Europeans, there is dual irony in 9/11, an event frequently characterized as the "first ever" foreign attack on American soil. Europeans, by contrast, have vast experience with alien terror -- centuries of barbarian conquest, plagues and pogroms, the Inquisition, periodic genocide outbreaks, etc. Just in the past century, Europe has endured blitzkriegs, carpet bombings, massacres of entire villages and ghettos, and the industrialization of mass murder, an innovation that lent an entirely new meaning to the word "holocaust."

The other irony Europeans see is this: while foreigners traditionally tend not to export terror to the USA, Americans compensate by terrorizing one another willy-nilly. From 1861-65, for instance, Americans staged the bloodiest race war in world history. America was long the world leader in lynching, and continues to indulge a morbid affection for gas chambers, electric chairs and lethal injections. When it comes to inventing new terms for terrorist behavior, America has coined at least three that will live forever in infamy: "drive-by shooting," "going postal" and "high school killing spree."

So, Europeans wonder why one of history's bloodiest nations can't seem to get over the bloodshed of Sept. 11. The problem is not -- it seems -- the sheer, sickening number of deaths, nor even the tragic randomness and innocence of the victims, but a sense of violation, by intruders. "They can't do this to us!" comes the indignant cry. "Who do they think they are?" America is like the wife-beater who assaults a stranger for jostling his wife. We don't object to violence; we just prefer to keep it in the family.

Roessger's point, however, is that meeting violence with violence is the recipe for more violence. The real wellspring of terrorism is not ideology or religion, nor even the charisma of a fanatical leader. Terrorism incubates among poor people with no hope of overcoming their poverty, but who can see, smell and taste the prosperity of the privileged and mighty. They are close, and yet so far.

Roessger's insights made me think of his country between the wars, when the German economy fell victim to draconian reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany became a sort of Palestinian refugee camp in Europe's midst. From the sewers of national despair arose the harbingers of National Socialism, a vigilante brotherhood of convicts, sadists and assassins called the sturm abfellungen -- or SA. Under the Third Reich, the SA evolved into the SS.

After World War II, the danger of terrorism in a defeated Germany never repeated itself, because the victors eschewed economic revenge. The authors of the war were prosecuted, but the German people were encouraged to prosper.

American has parallels. For example, the most fearsome group to emerge from the civil rights struggle was the Black Panthers, who brandished guns and issued terrorist manifestos (although they tended to be mostly bark and no bite). But meanwhile, the civil rights laws enacted in the Sixties, especially affirmative action, moved African Americans just far enough up the economic scale to nurture a propertied black middle class. The urge to take violent vengeance on the white establishment quietly withered. Today, the closest thing we have to the Panthers are rap stars, who -- while barking revolution in doggerel rhyme -- travel in limousines, live in McMansions and shelter their income in Caribbean tax havens. Then, we had (and feared) Elijah Muhammad, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. Today? Snoop Dogg, Tiger Woods, and Clarence Thomas...

The United States, says Roessger, fails to appreciate the lessons of its own economic genius. It has co-opted terrorist threats everywhere on earth, including among its own seething minorities, by lending aid and fueling prosperity -- with measures that range from the Marshall Plan to Head Start.

As long as today's U.S. leaders define the enemy as a mythical "axis of evil" rather than the all too palpable yoke of poverty, Americans will live in impotent terror of what James Baldwin prophetically termed "the fire next time."

David Benjamin is a novelist and journalist, originally from Wisconsin, who now works in Paris. His latest book is The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked.