Vague explanation coming from U.S.

LONDON: The world's only superpower is setting off to war. Its allies, including Britain, are making common cause. After a week dominated by images that barely managed to convey the horror and grief of the suicide attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the world is awakening to the implications of an equally frightening set of images. They are pictures beamed from another era. Of convoys of warships setting sail, of bomber crews being scrambled, and of tens of thousands of America's young men and women being mobilized for a fight that will inevitably lead to even more American dead and casualties among its allies too.

They come as the full enormity of the Sept. 11 attack continues to reverberate through every aspect of American life and throughout the world; implications of an attack that continue to grow in awfulness and not diminish. The figure for those presumed to have died is now more than 6,000 -- the worst loss of human life on the soil of the United States on a single day in its history.

Equally shocking for ordinary Americans are the continuing shockwaves being experienced by the most powerful economy in the world from an attack whose cost has already ratcheted up to tens of billions of dollars. In barely a week, U.S. airlines have warned that they will be forced to cut more than 100,000 jobs. That is set beside the worst week of trading loses on Wall Street since 1933, beside the sense of loss of innocence that the attacks engendered, and the grim numbers of the dead. Though national economies are in a better position to cope with a short recession than in previous crises, a surge in the oil price could play havoc across the globe.

Threats that barely a fortnight ago seemed the stuff of fiction -- poisoned reservoirs and attacks using improvised weapons of mass destruction against the places where we live and work and travel -- have suddenly become frightening possibilities. And if the attacks on the U.S. have changed the world, as they most surely have, they have also made it a more complicated place that challenges the old political assumptions.

So far the Bush administration has acted with commendable restraint. In an administration better known for its unilateralist tendencies, Bush's willingness to focus his attention on building a remarkable international consensus for action should be applauded. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's role in that bridge-building should be applauded too.

For while America has called for help from friends in NATO, the European Union, the Pacific and South America, invoking military friendship treaties for the first time, it has also reached out to states usually regarded as its enemies including Iran, Sudan and Cuba.

Bush, too, has sought to reassure the Muslim world that his enemy is not the teachings of Islam, but a perversion of it.

All well and good. But there are dangers here as well. Former U.S. defense secretary Caspar Weinberger once set out a test for military action that still holds good today. It should, said Weinberger, have a clear goal, that was achievable but also -- crucially -- it should be explainable.

What is worrying about aspects of Bush's new offensive is that, so far, they fall short in every one of the Weinberger criteria. When, critics ask, will we know when the war on terrorism has finally been won? And who will tell us? If the criteria for the measurement of its goals are vague, then the language of explanation has been even vaguer still.

That a terrible crime has been committed goes without saying. We must accept, too, that a credible finger of suspicion points to Osama bin Laden. But suspicion and the burden of proof are very different issues.

Part of the virtue of the coalition against Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Yugoslavia, resided in a carefully prepared indictment of his crimes for the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Bin Laden is also the subject of a U.S. indictment, for his alleged involvement in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 in which hundreds died.

America has not declared war on terrorism on the basis of that indictment, but for the attacks of Sept. 11. The Bush administration is understandably wary of compromising its intelligence sources. But it is not enough for Bush to say simply: "It is bin Laden." Already there are others in his administration who believe, with much less proof, that Saddam Hussein of Iraq was also behind the hijackings.

If we attribute blame without being given compelling proof, what is to stop the settling of old scores on the flimsiest of claims? In stark contrast, when president John F. Kennedy presided over a crisis of equal scale -- over Cuban missiles -- he showed the world the photographic evidence.

The cloak of secrecy thrown around the military and intelligence offensive is another related cause for worry. While it would be naive to expect a running commentary on every sensitive aspect of the campaign, there is a genuine concern that any war in the name of liberty, democracy and freedom should be accountable and open to genuine democratic scrutiny.

Citizens of almost 60 nations are among the dead. As President Bush said in his well-scripted address to Congress on Thursday night, it is a catastrophe that touches us all. But one pressing question remains to be resolved: what kind of war will it be?

In describing the coming war as a contest between freedom and fear, in citing the name of justice, Bush and his administration has invoked the fight against global terrorism as a "just war". The test of that just war will lie in its prosecution. There is a danger in confronting an enemy as evasive and amorphous as that presented by bin Laden that America and its allies, including Britain, may become exactly what they condemn -- unaccountable, over- reaching and indiscriminate.

There should be no argument. Our civilized values demand that the perpetrators of this crime -- who used the innocent to kill the innocent in their hijacked planes -- must be stopped with all the means available. For it is clear they would do the same again, both in America and around the world.

There is no issue that the U.S. and its friends should respond decisively to these murderous assaults. But this decisive response must be careful and intelligent and proportionate. It must recognize and address the risk that any attacks will be seen by many in the Middle East and Asia as an attack on Islam itself, threatening a dangerous escalation of violence in Muslim countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that have lined up behind America.

Above all the response must be just. For it is a just cause.

-- Observer News Service