THE GRUESOME train bombings in Madrid and the stunning regime change which followed should be seized upon to rethink whether the “war on terrorism”, as conceived and conducted since Sept. 11, 2001, is really the most effective way to deal with a problem that shows no signs of going away.

If a patient is ill, a doctor who misdiagnoses the source and nature of the illness and prescribes a course of treatment for a different disease risks killing the patient. After two-and-a- half years of a “war on terrorism” which is widely perceived in the Middle East as an expansion of a long-running Western war against Muslims or, worse, as a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam, it is worth reconsidering whether the initial diagnosis and the subsequent treatment are more likely to kill the patient than to save him.

Americans are notoriously ignorant of, and uninterested in, history — even very recent history. Only in America could President George W. Bush say, after the conquest of Iraq and more than once, that he invaded Iraq because it would not let UN weapon inspectors back into the country, and not trigger any serious questions as to his fitness for office, even from his political opponents.

Accordingly, Americans have tended to view the Sept. 11 attacks as a bolt from the blue, inexplicable, based on pure malevolence and carried out by people willing to sacrifice their lives out of an incomprehensible, irrational and incurable fanaticism unconnected to any concrete grievances or goals. Few Americans have dared to suggest that, however awful the attacks were, they might have constituted a response or a reaction to policies which the United States (or Israel, widely viewed by Muslims — and, apparently, by most Americans — as indistinguishable from the United States) has pursued in the region.

The immediate American response to such appalling violence was to resort to superior violence, and the continuing American reaction to the fear instilled by the attacks has been to try to instill a still greater fear in potential adversaries. This has proved to be a “bleeding” cure for an anemic patient.

Viewed from the region, Muslims have been subjected to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation at the hands of Christians, Jews and the West. It started towards the end of World War I with the secret Sykes-Picot treaty, by which Britain and France carved up between themselves the most historic and sophisticated portion of the Arabian peninsula, which they had told their Arab allies they were “liberating” from the oppressive Ottomans, and the Balfour Declaration, by which Britain promised to give away Palestine, which did not belong to it. It has continued with the expulsion or flight into exile of most of the Palestinians in 1948, the catastrophic war of June 1967, the fall of Baghdad last spring and numerous other humiliations along the way.

The Muslims possess no “respectable” or “socially acceptable” way to fight back. They cannot invade, rocket or send their air forces to attack Western countries. The only tactic available is “terrorism”. If such “terrorism” were properly understood to be a brutal (but not irrational) reaction to a century of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation, and if the desire of Western politicians were really to diminish “terrorist” threats to the West, rather than simply to sustain and exploit them for personal political advantage or to facilitate the implementation of pre-existing agendas, then surely the worst possible approach would be (as it has been) to increase and intensify precisely these sources of frustration and fury through further conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation.

Wise and prudent people seek to assuage, not aggravate, legitimate grievances — even grievances whose legitimacy they may not accept. The instinctive Israeli and American attitude is that halting or reversing the policies of conquest, colonization, occupation and humiliation would be to “reward terrorism”. Perhaps, but if by assuaging grievances, both injustice and terrorism could be diminished and the world could be made more livable and less frightening, would this not be the preferable alternative? Under the current circumstances, doing the right thing, however belatedly and with whatever motivation, simply makes self-interested sense. The Spanish electorate seems to have grasped this.

In this context, the currently proclaimed American intention, potentially to be supported by the Europeans, to “remake the face of the Middle East” — explicitly to make the region less threatening to America and implicitly to make it less threatening to Israel — promises, if pursued, to be spectacularly counterproductive.

Viewed from the region, particularly by those with access to Western media, it is also easy to get the impression (not irrationally) that, in Western eyes, Jewish and Christian lives are of infinite value while Muslim lives are of no value whatsoever. It is worth recalling in this regard that in December 1996, while US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright stated publicly that she considered the premature sanctions-induced deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, as reported by UNICEF, a “price worth paying” for America's Iraq policy. This statement provoked no outrage in America. Indeed, a month later, she became secretary of state.

Needless to say, the deaths of somewhat fewer than 3,000 Americans were far too high a price to pay for America's entire Middle East policy — an event which “changed the world forever” and has been used to justify the killing of many more than 3,000 Afghans and many more than 3,000 additional Iraqis, the occupation of two more Muslim countries and the destruction of fundamental rules of international law painfully developed over more than a century. This is not a course of action likely to win hearts and minds.

If the West truly wishes to restrain the violent Muslim reaction to Western behavior, then it must change its behavior It must take seriously the principle for which the United States once purported to stand — that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights — and start treating Muslims (particularly the long abused Palestinians) like human beings entitled to basic human rights.

The problem of “terrorism” can be viewed as a moral issue, a scourge towards which no effort at understanding is conceivable and shock, awe and overwhelming force are the only possible response. This approach has been tried for two and a half years. It has failed, and there is no reason to believe that “more of the same” will succeed.

Alternatively, the problem could be viewed as a practical one. What is most likely to “work”, to reduce the violence, which can never be totally extinguished, to tolerable levels? The West could make a serious and sustained effort to reduce the injustices which feed the fury that produces the “terrorism”, starting with the cancerous 37-year-long occupation of Palestine. This approach has not yet been tried. It should be.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has been dragging the world in precisely the wrong direction, one guaranteed to make an already ugly and dangerous situation even worse. Realistically, particularly in an election year, one cannot expect America to take the lead in changing course. Might Europe, which is both more aware of history and closer to the Middle East, take inspiration from the Spanish elections and lead the world in the right direction?

The world is at a crossroads. This should be a moment to pause, to reflect seriously on the abyss which lies before us and to ask with open minds whether there is not a better way forward.

The writer is an international lawyer based in Saudi Arabia. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

© 2004 The Jordan Times

###