In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, some commentators, including the New Statesman, suggested that the attacks represented a cry of rage from the wretched of the earth; that the policies of US government and US capital must bear some responsibility for creating a climate in which terrorism flourished; and that (without making any presumptions as to the hijackers' motives) the best response was not overwhelming military force but a determination to remove the grievances that make the west in general and America in particular so widely hated. These views were widely denounced as tasteless, untimely and defeatist; we were, it was said, blaming the victims, indulging our visceral anti-Americanism and appeasing the terrorists. Three weeks later, however, it is clear that brute force, whatever its original purpose, has wreaked a transformation. As the Guardian's Polly Toynbee put it on Wednesday, in the wake of Tony Blair's Labour Party conference speech, "only sheer terrorism brought the poor world from the do-gooding margins to the centre of politics".
Who would have thought, before the outrages, that the US president would talk of "a Palestinian state" as part of his vision for the Middle East? That the centrepiece of the British Prime Minister's address to his party conference would be the need for "a humanitarian coalition" to assist starving Afghans? That Mr Blair would, in admirably direct language, promise developing nations "access to our markets so that we practise the free trade that we are so fond of preaching". That such countries as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - hitherto, not just desperately poor, but also desperately invisible - would be wooed with promises of aid and investment? That the US would suddenly start to pay some of its United Nations dues?
We should not get carried away. Much of Mr Blair's speech was rhetoric, designed to reassure a Labour conference; as often with him, he was short on detail. Nobody proposes to rethink the western sanctions and bombing that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Nobody acknowledges that the flood of Afghan refugees prompted by American threats of bombing and the suspension of aid that followed 11 September has already killed thousands more than were killed in New York and Washington, and that further threats of military action (to say nothing of military action itself) can only add to the possibility of mass starvation. Mr Blair's idea that a humanitarian coalition can easily coexist with a military coalition is naive, to put it mildly, since the latter, once in action, tends to dominate air and road space.
Other things remain unchanged. American double standards flourish; while critics are excoriated for giving comfort to the odious Taliban regime, the US continues to pour military aid into Colombia, assisting a government that has a dreadful human rights record (see Mark Thomas, page 13). Mr Blair had nothing to say about the role of western arms sales in feeding the conflicts in Africa that he so deplores. Indeed, his speech had a strong whiff of liberal imperialism, suggesting that he envisages British troops installing new Labour governments from Kinshasa to Kabul. What western leaders find difficult to grasp is that developing nations do not benefit from a dependency relationship, with outsiders forever brokering and policing "peace deals" and sorting out "good governance" for them. They need better access to world markets, better education and health, better protection from the rapacities of western-owned multi-nationals, fewer guns and less US manipulation. The Middle East does not need US involvement in a peace process so much as US recognition that its enormous military and financial aid to Israel completely distorts the regional balance of power.
Most important of all, the threat of a large-scale military response to 11 September has not gone away. There is the danger that western actions seem arbitrary and illegal. If Mr Blair's world vision is to mean anything, we must strengthen the institutions of global governance and law in a way that makes them seem more than instruments of western interests.
Yet Mr Blair's speech scarcely mentioned the UN, and said nothing about a legal framework for his schemes of liberal interventionism. Why, we should ask, are western leaders not doing more to seek legitimacy for whatever actions they eventually take against Bin Laden? To describe 11 September simply as an act of war, to which any response is covered by a state's right to self-defence, is to accord the hijackers a dignity and stature they do not deserve. War implies a suspension of law, and a descent into anarchy. We should seek the opposite. The hijackings were the work of criminals and thugs, and should be treated as such. Yet there is no indication as to how Bin Laden and his gang might be treated if captured. William Pepper, an American human rights lawyer linked to Wolfson College, Oxford, has circulated a proposal for a UN resolution setting up an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for "crimes against humanity" on 11 September, including anybody, such as the head of a state or government, who "planned, instigated, ordered, committed, conspired, facilitated or otherwise aided and abetted" them. Mr Blair should put his weight behind this proposal or something like it. Fears that terrorism would continue to flourish while legal processes grind away are understandable. But the idea that terrorism can ever be finally "defeated" is false. It can only be contained or diminished, and one way of doing that is to create credible legal mechanisms for dealing with it.
If Mr Blair's talk of "the world community" is to be more than a soundbite, we must try to develop some system of world justice in which we and other nations have confidence. Some western leaders fear that it might be used against them - over, say, the bombing of Iraq. But if the west truly believes that it has right and virtue on its side, it must be willing to put its actions to the test. Otherwise, it may as well put aside all the fine words, proclaim that it will impose itself simply by crushing force, and accept that the future comprises an unending series of terrorist attacks and western military responses.
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