he atrocity in Bali last Saturday is a grim reminder that we are in a long war. It is a war that pits a few thousand unidentified individuals against most of humankind, from the beaches of Bali to lower Manhattan. A year ago President Bush named this conflict the "war on terror" and committed the United States to fighting it. Today many people outside America believe that Washington has lost interest in this war, except as rhetorical cover for a retreat to more familiar territory: an old-fashioned battle against an old-fashioned kind of enemy — Iraq. We are seeking a fight we can win instead of concentrating on the war that we must win.
For former Sovietologists like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, Iraq is a ready substitute for the conventional foes (Russia, China, Cuba) of the cold war years. There is no clear link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (and certainly no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the Bali terrorism); so advocates of a war with Iraq have taken to claiming that such a link can't be excluded, and therefore it should be "pre-empted." Few would deny that Saddam Hussein is evil. And he surely has evil means at his disposal — as America well knows, since it supplied him with anthrax strains and much else when we backed him in the 1980's. But this is the wrong war at the wrong time.
The Bush administration's goals far exceed the internationally acknowledged need to dismantle Saddam Hussein's arsenal. The domino theory is back, this time in reverse. First we remake Iraq in our own image, then others will follow: Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh, perhaps even Cairo. An administration that came into office disdainful of "nation-building" is gearing up to refashion a whole region. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this that has solidified allied opposition to the administration's war plans.
The worst thing about Mr. Bush's pre-announced war with Iraq is that it is not just a substitute for the war against terrorism; it actively impedes it. Mr. Bush has scolded President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia for not cracking down on Islamic terrorists. But thanks to the war talk spilling out of Washington, heads of states with Islamic majorities are in an impossible position.
If they line up with the Bush administration against Saddam Hussein, they risk alienating a large and volatile domestic constituency, with unpredictable consequences. (Witness this month's elections in Pakistan, where two provinces adjacent to Afghanistan are now controlled by a coalition of religious parties sympathetic to Osama bin Laden.) But if they acknowledge popular opposition to a war with Iraq, they will incur Mr. Bush's wrath. Either way the war on terror suffers.
We need to return our attention to terrorism in all its many forms. Territorial terrorists like E.T.A., the Basque separatist group in Spain, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland or Hamas in the Middle East would desist if all their demands were met. Ideological terrorists, like the Baader-Meinhof group in West Germany in the 1970's or the Italian Red Brigades, have no specific demands. Their aim is to destabilize the state and make it "reveal" its true and oppressive nature. And then there are stateless terrorists like the operatives of Al Qaeda for whom high-profile, destabilizing acts of terror are as much the end as the means. They claim a doctrinal basis in Islam; but unlike the would-be revolutionaries of an earlier generation, they are indifferent to borders and governments.
In the 1970's, terrorist groups with very different goals, from Breton nationalists to Andean Maoists, liked to claim affiliation to a nebulous international radical network. Association with global causes boosted their significance and their access to weapons. Today's terrorists have a similar interest in inflating their transnational impact by hinting at connections with Osama bin Laden and the international "anti-imperialist" struggle with America. We should not be too quick to oblige them.
If we blame every terrorist attack on Al Qaeda, if we universalize what are often local animosities and assign every explosive charge and petrol bomb to America's particular enemies, we shall miss our target. Conversely, repressive regimes of every shade are today quick to identify with an international war on terror, hoping to get American support for local conflicts. Washington welcomes such recruits to its cause. But these allies of convenience are fueling widespread suspicion that the war on terror is being used as a new cover for old repression.
The difficulty in distinguishing among terrorists show how hard a war this is going to be. There are no historical precedents, no flattering parallels with Churchill or J. F. K. that can be readily appropriated now. We have to figure this one out for ourselves, and it is the very nature of the terrorist threat — sub-state, small-scale, informal, international — that makes it impossible for the United States to face it alone.
The Bush administration cannot combat terrorism without the cooperation and collaboration of the rest of the world. For this reason if no other it needs to start taking into account the fears and opinions of other nations. Yet its strategy toward recalcitrant allies resembles Lyndon Johnson's way of managing unruly members of Congress: "If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
But our international allies are not members of Congress, and their hearts and minds are decidedly elsewhere. The administration is now more distrusted abroad than any American government in the past half-century. By his words and his insistence on a unilateral approach toward Iraq, President Bush has squandered much of the post-Sept. 11 good will that is crucial for an effective global campaign against terrorism.
But all is not yet lost. In the eyes of America's European allies, who still yearn for American leadership and thus prefer to give Washington the benefit of the doubt, President Bush's curious obsession with Iraq illustrates not so much renascent American imperialism as Washington's chronic attention deficit disorder. An American-led war on terrorism, intelligently conceived and relentlessly pursued as part of a strategy of multilateral engagement, would have strong, widespread backing. That is because, though the causes of terrorism are many and varied, we are all potential victims. What happened in Bali could happen in many other places, and it surely will.
Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.