PARIS -- NATO WAS supposed to have been recast this week to meet the threat of terrorism, but no one has yet offered a clear explanation of what NATO can do to prevent new attacks on Western targets by highly motivated individuals or bands of Islamic militants, determined to punish Westerners for what history has done to the Muslim world.

I do not say ''history'' to imply fatalism. The situation of the Islamic states today has much to do with the world wars and Cold War, Zionism, imperialism, and American and British oil politics.

It has even more to do with the Islamic peoples themselves: the failure of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Islamic civilization to develop systems of effective self-government to replace the Ottoman Turkish system that collapsed in World War I.

What happened after 1918 did not have to happen. Turkey was not annexed by a European empire, as were the Arab societies. That fact has its political, military, and social explanations. But people are responsible for what happens to them: The Turks produced one outcome; the Iraqis produced another, with which they now have to live.

The NATO debate has included warnings disconnected from real threats and policy proposals irrelevant to their solution. America wants help in carrying out a policy fatefully influenced by the notion that conquering Iraq will permit Washington and Israel to take control of the Islamic Middle East and its peoples - and that this will have a happy ending.

Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently asked for someone to clearly explain to him how we got from the New York and Washington terrorist attacks to war against Iraq.

The answer is in part the tyranny of means. If a government's largest and bureaucratically most influential policy instrument is its armed forces, it turns to them in an emergency. But armed forces can't solve the terrorist problem.

What they were able to do was overturn the Taliban government that harbored the terrorists. They today offer to overturn Saddam Hussein.

Doing these things provides a distraction from the failure to solve the terrorist problem. It provides a virtual solution, so to speak. When the followers of Osama bin Laden strike again, the Bush administration will answer that it won a war against Afghanistan and expects soon to win one against Iraq. The widows and orphans of the 9/11 victims will have to be satisfied with that.

A Middle East resident was recently quoted as saying to an American that ''it's not you that we are afraid of. It's your fear that frightens us.''

Particularly in recent weeks there has been a running barrage of official statements warning the North American and European publics against supposedly impending terrorist attacks.

These warnings reflect what police and intelligence services have been discovering about the projects, ambitions, and wish lists of the militants who are members, followers, or would-be emulators of the Al Qaeda conspiracy.

Such threats are not connected with Iraq. The warnings, in the United States at least, nonetheless coincided with the Bush administration's campaigns to get congressional approval for an attack on Iraq and to win a UN Security Council resolution that might provide international approval for such an attack. It now has both.

The cumulative warnings seem, though, to have given a significant fraction of American public opinion an unreasonable conviction that the United States now is in danger of an attack, employing mass destruction weapons, either by Osama bin Laden or by Saddam Hussein.

There is to the best of specialist opinion no scenario by which the American public is plausibly threatened by rockets, nuclear weapons, gas attacks, or biological warfare of Iraqi origin. The mechanical means are not there, even if such an attack offered any rational advantage to Hussein.

Western countries undoubtedly are threatened by possible new attacks by individual or groups of Al Qaeda terrorists, but the risk to a given individual in any such attack is statistically infinitesimal - much lower than the risks everybody runs in the course of everyday life.

The implication of the policy statements coming from Washington has been that terrorism and Iraq's past or present possession of mass destruction weapons are linked phenomena, and that a war against Iraq will somehow lift fear from America.

This is not true. The threat to the United States and its allies comes from an Islamic radicalism that will be intensified by war with Iraq. It is necessary to understand that ''solving'' Iraq is overwhelmingly likely to worsen the terrorist threat to the Western countries.

William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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