Dialogue: George W. better put his war comics away

By JOHN ROUGHAN

When George W. Bush goes gimlet-eyed and talks tough, my heart sinks. Not for the man he wants dead or alive. If it turns out Osama bin Laden was not to blame this time, I do not expect to grieve.

And if the United States removes the Taleban on its way through, so much the better. A tide of refugees has attested to Afghanistan's gross misgovernment. The destruction of those ancient Buddhist monuments said there are particularly sick people in power there.

It's not for the misbegotten targets of American vengeance that I shudder, it is for the prospects of making free, prosperous countries a little safer.

War councils in the White House acknowledge that half-cocked retaliation is no solution this time. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, was striking the right notes of caution and steel.

The President, in scripted performances such as yesterday's speech to the joint Houses of Congress, plays the same tune.

Off the script, though, he has been talking at times like a punk. The effect was worse than pathetic: it risked forcing him to fulfil his bravado with the kind of retaliation that will do nothing except squander the opportunity to do something better.

Somehow, in the evolution of American justice and national values the country has never realised the cost of vengeance.

That is the reason, I think, that Americans believe wholeheartedly, across the political spectrum, in capital punishment. There appears to be almost no sense that a life for a life diminishes the moral advantage of the injured party, and that effective justice depends on a degree of restraint.

It is possibly hopeful that the military campaign, whatever shape it takes, is to be called "infinite justice".

Moral advantage, the glory of restraint, may be too much to ask of a country that has suffered, for the first time in its history, an aerial attack on its mainland, a calculated blow, moreover, at its most populous point.

But the nature of the attack makes it particularly important that the civilised world maintains the rage. Serious security improvements need to be made in countries like ours. Some of the civil rights and privacy protections we have pretended to hold dear suddenly seem much less important.

When I turned on television and saw what was happening that morning, my first thought was not Islamic jihad. I was thinking anti-globalisation. For a few minutes I was not thinking of suicide pilots but of someone programming aeroplanes to fly into buildings.

Crazy maybe, but it was 1.30 am. Crazy things were happening. It was an eerie, soundless nightmare. King Kong without a plot.

Until that morning it never occurred to most of us that airliners were ready-made missiles, awaiting only hijackers prepared to die in a cause. Today it seems the most obvious thing in the world.

Now, we will see competent baggage screening for American domestic flights, an end to kerbside check-ins, air marshals, maybe even secure cockpits, disabling cabin gas, who knows?

There will be many and varied precautions and the danger now is that the authorities will rest content, satisfied they have secured air travel against a repetition. As usual, they will have refought the last war and left us vulnerable to the next.

What next? After the events of last Wednesday anything seems possible. Anthrax, poisoned water supplies, plutonium from the former Soviet Union - there has never been a shortage of nightmare material.

The difference now is that we can no longer comfort ourselves that common humanity imposes limits. The World Trade Center held the population of a small city. It was in no sense a military target. Somebody decided that thousands of office workers and tourists were his rightful enemies.

Why? Because they were Americans? Because they probably sympathised with Israel? (Though lately less so, until last week.) Because they are rich? Because they vote?

Because they are infidels, or capitalists or consumers, agents of multinational corporations? Islamic fundamentalism has no monopoly on fanaticism.

Witness Seattle, London, Stockholm, Davos, Melbourne, Genoa. What went through those people's minds when they saw the World Trade Center fall on Wall St? How far would anti-globalisation go?

Preposterous? I hope so. But it is always disturbing to see the contortions of some people where the US is concerned. An editorial in Britain's New Statesman evidently implies that the people in the Trade Center rather had it coming because they did not vote for Ralph Nader.

In this country, too, we are being urged to think about the conduct of American policy towards Israel and the Middle East that prompts people to act in this way.

Well, I have thought about it. Try as I might, I can think of no errors of American foreign or military policy in the Middle East with a moral equivalence to the slaughter of 6400 American office workers last week.

The first target of likely American reprisals, al Qaeda, the organisation of Osama bin Laden, consists of cells in at least 35 countries, possibly as many as 60. It does not sound like a network that can be destroyed in a spectacular military display. But the battlegroup is gathering and the injunction to the Taleban, if ignored, will be followed by some sort of invasion.

Let's hope we hear evidence to link the target to the crime. Let's hope it is not happening simply because, too often, the President took his statecraft from war comics.