The scale of the challenge posed by the 9/11 attacks is yet to be fully appreciated even now, writes editor-at-large Paul Kelly

September 09, 2006
FIVE years later the wounds of September 11 have not healed. The terrorist threat has escalated, the world is more aggravated and the US, the indispensable nation, has squandered the goodwill engendered by that morning's brutality. The new world crisis that continues to gather momentum is defined by its unpredictability. Devoid of any road map or leader of authority to light the way, the tragedy of 9/11 has been compounded by more tragedies in the five years since the attack.
That assault from the sky did more than kill 3000 people. It violated the US, destroyed its immunity, provoked its religious, cultural and political passions and unleashed an American strategic response under the leadership of George W. Bush whose wisdom has not matched its righteousness. The civil war within Islam that inspired 9/11's aggressive martyrdom has escalated rapidly. It invades the globe like a noxious gas as fanatics and recruits to jihad launch murderous attacks on civilians from Bali to Madrid, Baghdad to London.

The 9/11 assault created a unique opportunity for Bush. His response was fateful: to play down the US campaign against the al-Qa'ida terrorists who were responsible and to launch an invasion of Iraq, a country that was not responsible. It was a fatal misjudgment that undermined American legitimacy, confusing the strategic and moral meaning of September 11.

Former US counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke bumped into Bush on the evening of September 12 at the White House and was stunned when the President said: "I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." An incredulous Clarke could not stop himself: "But Mr President, al-Qa'ida did this." It was an omen; from the start Bush and his loyalists would ensure that 9/11 led to Iraq.

The inspiration for the attack was a Saudi Arabian fanatic, Osama bin Laden, who three years earlier issued a fatwa calling for the murder of any American anywhere on earth as the "individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it". This was an appeal to a war of civilisations. The frontline would be the civilian population and this became the meaning of 9/11. Bin Laden's strategy was to trap the West into his type of war.

The globalised, multicultural, hi-tech domain symbolised by New York was incinerated by messengers from the caves of the pre-modern world. September 11 displayed, in fact, the fragility of civilisation. This fragility has been on display since in even more grisly formats and with more lethal threats.

At 8.24am, American Airlines flight 11 from Boston sent the transmission: "We have some planes." Two of its unarmed flight attendants were stabbed. Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian Muslim, was flying the plane in a cloudless sky. Just after 8.42am on United Airlines flight 175, the hijackers stabbed the flight crew, killed both pilots and changed course for New York. Four planes were hijacked by a team of 19 men, of whom 15 were from a supposed ally of the US, Saudi Arabia.

They flew to redeem the prophecy of bin Laden, who ordained that the people being killed on 9/11 were symbols of a corrupt culture. "It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind," bin Laden said. Al-Qa'ida would prevail, its leaders boasted, because the US was fighting a nation "that desires death more than you desire life". For bin Laden, it was a "religious obligation" to acquire a weapons of mass destruction capability.

This is the new equation of global terrorism inaugurated at 9/11: the cult of death in the name of God. The West remains in a state of divided incomprehension about this enemy. Its weakness is palpable. The nature of the ideological fanaticism that inspired 9/11, because it is so alien to secular rationalism, defies the Western imagination. September 11 has changed the world in many ways and in ways that defy comprehension. There are, however, three epic transformations.

First, bin Laden insists that Muslims must chose between God and satan and, by denying a middle path, seeks to provoke military upheaval and political revolution within the Muslim world, a message whose appeal lies in the purity of its extremism but that dooms any accepting Muslim society into a pre-modern failed society. This crisis within Islam will take decades to resolve, but the critical nations are Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, the US and the West are entangled fatally in this struggle because the extremists insist the US is at war with Islam and is responsible for all conflicts involving Islam. This is the answer to the question: "Why do they hate us?" It is a propaganda device to radicalise Muslims worldwide. Yet it is far more: it signals a clash over power and territory, with the sweeping geostrategic aim of the Islamists (and many others) being to drive the US and Israel from the Middle East.

Third, these forces play out against a worldwide resurgence of Islam as a religion and identity, creating a potential conflict of loyalty within Western multicultural societies. This has triggered an internal debate about Western identity, values and culture. For the terrorists the twin towers were a symbolic target. The first attack on the towers was in February 1993 and the low toll of six dead was miraculous. Sunni extremist Ramzi Yousef, who planted the bomb, said he hoped to kill 250,000.

The meaning of 9/11 will be discussed for decades. The enemy has a dual identity: as al-Qa'ida, a stateless terrorist network; and, beyond this, as a radical ideological movement within the Islamic world that spawns its own political movements and terrorist units. Bush has enjoyed success against the former and failed against the latter. This is the best way to mark his balance sheet.

Perhaps September 11 is best understood as an event triggered by a crisis within Islam that has the potential to trigger a crisis within the West. This potential derives from two polarising sources.

On the one hand, it arises from the misjudgment and militaristic response from Bush, whose intervention in Afghanistan was half-hearted and inept (letting bin Laden escape) but whose main miscalculation has been the Iraq invasion. On the other hand, it derives from a denialist school of the West's progressive Left that pretends variously that nothing much is happening (and that terrorism is a familiar foe) or that the attacks on the West are its own fault (thereby repeating the Islamist propaganda) or that the problem lies in political leaders such as Bush and John Howard corrupting our values.

There are other messages from 9/11. As Harvard University's Joe Nye said, "the paradox of American power is that it is too great to be challenged by any other state yet not great enough to solve alone the problems such as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation". Bush enunciated a sweeping war on terrorism that was conceptually flawed because, as argued by National Intelligence Council former vice-chairman Graham Fuller, "The task was Sisyphean, the enemy generalised, the goals unclear, the scope open-ended."

Yet the 9/11 story also exposes the bankruptcy of the Islamist vision for the Muslim world, with its resort to violence, intolerance and repression. This cannot constitute a solution to the socioeconomic malaise that plagues Islamic nations and mocks claims to civilisational greatness.

There is, however, one message Bush has radiated: that Islam as a religion is not the enemy. It would be fatal for the West if this message were not heard. The task is difficult because it runs in parallel with a related message that violent Islamist ideology is the enemy. Selling these two separate yet related messages is a daunting global challenge beyond Bush's ability.

Five years later the strategic picture is uncertain. Neither Bush nor bin Laden is winning this strange war.

Bush and his allies have destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; demolished large parts of al-Qa'ida's structure; captured many terrorist leaders including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational leader behind the 9/11 attack, and Hambali, mastermind of the 2002 Bali attack; displayed a mettle that shocked al-Qa'ida; prevented any further attack on the US; and, critically, have won the support of many governments within the Islamic world. Although Bush's tactics for spreading democracy are flawed, the US remains, even for many of its opponents, the best model for a successful modern society. This ambivalence towards the US is entrenched in the Islamic world. It is an opportunity to be exploited by a future US leader with a better balance of soft and hard power skills.

Yet the list of negatives is long. Afghanistan's future is in doubt, the US intervention was too little and too brief, and the Taliban are recovering. Iraq has been converted into a jihadist recruitment field, exposing US arrogance and ineptitude. Egypt's leader Hosni Mubarak has warned that the Iraq war will produce "100 new bin Ladens". The war has energised the Islamists, shifted the regional power balance in favour of Iran, helped to radicalise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and encouraged rogue nations to pursue nuclear options.

Bush's campaign against Islamist terrorism is flawed. It relies too much on military means, overlooks the need to legitimise military options and fails to mount a strong political campaign within the Islamic world to counter radical ideology and seek a partnership to support genuine Islam.

One way 9/11 changed the world was the inauguration of the Bush Doctrine. He embraced the idea of preventative war, the removal of rogue regimes, the spread of democracy by military force and dismissed as outdated deterrence and containment, the techniques that won the Cold War. The irony is that the Bush Doctrine has failed. It won't be dismissed in its totality. But its failure in Iraq has prompted a substantial rethink within the Bush administration. It is a singular insight into Bush that his core strategic response to 9/11 is seen to be so flawed within five years of the attack.

The US has to redraft its strategy for what it calls the Long War. The immediate challenge flows from Iran's nuclear ambitions. Yet the weakness of the US position, with few military options and little diplomatic leverage, is almost embarrassing. The US struggles because 9/11 was the symbolic inauguration of an age of asymmetrical warfare. A bunch of terrorists trained by a non-state actor for a total operational cost of $US500,000 launched a more lethal attack on the US mainland than any action dared or not dared by the Soviet Union, Japan or Germany in the previous century. This was because technology empowers the terrorist and because deterrence works only against states (the Soviet Union or China or Iraq) that have to protect their national assets.

There will be many articles written this weekend suggesting that 9/11 was not a transforming event. You will need to be naive or a professional optimistic to believe them.

In these murderous times, let's stop protecting religion from criticism

MY parents were atheists, but whenever a school form required an answer about our religious denomination, my mother would tick "Presbyterian", because "that's what you're supposed to be". This aura of respectability around religion - oddly - still exists; and that is why whatever last week's census shows about the extent of religious belief in Australia, it is almost certain to be an overestimate.
Even so, the percentage claiming no religion is likely to be higher than it was in the 2001 census, when it was a little more than one-fourth, because the numbers of non-believers have been growing steadily since 1971. (I use the term non-believers for convenience; because people don't believe in God it doesn't mean they don't believe in anything.) Even better news is the finding of a new survey that only 48per cent of young Australians (those born between 1976 and 1990) believe in God, though the result is unlikely to be viewed as good news by the Catholic University and the Christian Research Association, which, together with Monash University, commissioned the survey.

Despite the general view that religious belief is on the rise everywhere, the picture around the world is that in nearly all prosperous liberal democracies, atheism is strong.

In Britain, about 44 per cent claim no religion; in France it is 48 per cent; in Canada, 30 per cent; in Sweden, surveys have put the proportion of those who describe themselves as agnostic or atheist at between 46 per cent and 85 per cent. Even in the most religious of Western countries, the US, a 2004 Pew Forum survey found 16 per cent of Americans had no religious affiliation.

It is likely that globally the proportion of people who believe in God is growing because of the simple demographic fact that countries with high rates of religious belief also have high fertility rates. In Lebanon, those claiming no religion made up less than 3per cent of the population. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq, they are less than 1 per cent. In Nigeria, according to a 2004 poll for the BBC, 100 per cent of the population believed in God or a higher being.

One reason the trend to non-belief can be welcomed is that those countries with high rates of voluntary non-belief (that is, where atheism is not forced by the regime) are also the healthiest and wealthiest countries in the world, as judged by the annual UN Human Development Reports. Cause and effect should not be confused here: it may be that people who are comfortable and secure have less need for religion, rather than that an absence of religion leads to greater happiness; but it does show that an absence of religion doesn't cause societies to break down. I don't think the Swedes are notable for their criminality.

The other reason is that the briefest study of world history will show that religion has been directly responsible for countless world conflicts, resulting in the loss of millions of human lives, whether it was Christians killing Jews in Europe, Muslims and Hindus killing each other in Kashmir, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or Muslims and Christians in Sudan. Meanwhile, a look at the nightly television news will show the extent to which religion is still tearing up the world.

At this point religious people will jump in to point out that more people have been killed by communism than religion. Leaving aside the fact that communist ideology is similar to a religious ideology, this is like saying there is no point in curing tuberculosis because malaria kills more people.

The truth is that it is now too dangerous for religion to be given the special status it has always had. When large numbers of people, some of them living among us, want to kill us and our innocent children (surely "innocent children" is a tautology) for no other reason than that we do not believe in their God, we can no longer afford to tiptoe around religious sensitivities. It is time to get rid of the taboo that says religious beliefs have to be quarantined from criticism. It is time to hold some religious beliefs up to ridicule.

God may or may not exist; I don't presume to know. But I am fairly certain that a god does not exist who wants everyone killed who does not believe in a certain book; or a god who takes an obsessive interest in what women wear; or a god who cares about whether we eat pork rather than lamb (though if I were god I'd be pretty annoyed at human beings eating any other animals); or a god who wants little bits of babies' genitals cut off.

The holy books on which Jews, Christians and Muslims rely were written at a time when ideas about human rights and the scope of scientific knowledge were very different from today. We are expected to respect religious texts that contain invitations to genocide, rape and slavery. We are supposed to respect all religions when the central tenet of every religion is that its holy book is the right one and all others are in error or at best incomplete. Unbelievers are those who declare, "God is the Messiah, the son of Mary," says the Koran. "Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people." We are supposed to respect beliefs that if they were held by one person, rather than millions of people, the person holding them would be judged insane. Catholics are enjoined to believe that during the mass a piece of wafer is transformed not into a symbol of the body of Christ, but into the actual body of Christ.

Millions of people also once believed that witches cause crops to fail, or that thunder is the noise made by the gods fighting. They stopped believing in such things either because scientific knowledge proved them wrong, or because they discovered that sensible and reasonable people found the beliefs ridiculous.

In Victoria, politicians are tying themselves in knots over whether to support or reject the state's racial and religious tolerance laws. Once I would have written in support of these laws; but as we have been reminded yet again in recent days, the world has changed. Millions of kindly Christians may be able to ignore the nasty bits in their holy books but, though most Muslims are not extremists, too many are unable to ignore what's in theirs.

Yes, let's have laws against racial vilification, because people don't have a choice about their race and in any case racial slurs are based on assumptions that are unfair and scientifically wrong. But unless we accept there is no such thing as free will, religious belief is a matter of choice.

As the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe. The best hope for a less religious and thus safer world is for religion - all religion - to be open to rational and stringent examination and criticism, and yes, to ridicule. Newspapers would be doing the world a favour if, as the "thought for the day", instead of printing the nice passages out of the holy books, they printed the most absurd and abhorrent texts, so that they can be seen as the dangerous nonsense they are.

Don't blame the unbelievers for the end of tolerance.

Blame the religious ideology that persuades young men that by strapping explosives to their bodies and killing as many infidels as possible, they are assured of glory in paradise, surrounded by dark-eyed virgins. That's where the wickedness lies.

Pamela Bone is a Melbourne writer.

Most conflicts simply defer the political solutions needed to underpin peace. The cost of delay can be counted in millions of civilian lives.
THE greater tragedy of the rising civilian death toll in the Middle East is that it is not the exception to the global rule. The conflict is not even the most deadly, although its wider consequences may be the most dangerous. The world's inability to agree on the need for a ceasefire, let alone on a credible plan, points to the reason Israel launched its offensive in southern Lebanon in the first place. A UN force has been there since 1978. It has proved irrelevant to the 2004 UN resolution 1559, which requires Hezbollah, a listed terrorist group, to be disarmed and for the Lebanese army to assume control of the south of the country. Hezbollah, aided by Syria and Iran, has acquired large numbers of rockets that can hit targets deep inside Israel. Hezbollah did fire the first shot and has launched about 100 rockets a day, so Israel has a right to defend itself. Even so, its tactics and judgements about what it hopes to achieve with aerial bombing that has claimed hundreds of Lebanese lives, most of them civilians, must be questioned. The killing of at least 54 civilians, including 37 children, in the village of Qana has caused international outrage and tested the understanding of the US — but still it blocks a Security Council call for a ceasefire.
In almost every conflict, one or another permanent Security Council member abuses its power of veto to serve its own agenda, leaving the UN marginalised until the killing has subsided. In Rwanda, the toll was a million lives. In Congo, a UN force of 17,600 is supervising the first multi-party elections in 40 years, but only after a war that killed millions, most of them civilians. In Sudan's Darfur province, the rising toll of civilian lives has exceeded 400,000 and millions more are caught in a humanitarian disaster. These human tragedies, as well as those in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, flow from the failure of world powers to reform the UN and make it work, instead of undermining its authority with unilateral actions. Repeated refusals to give the UN the powers and resources it needs to carry out its charter make a mockery of international commitments to peace and the rule of law. In its place, the law of the jungle prevails, which leaves every nation more vulnerable.
While the outpourings of anti-Semitism will reinforce Israel's belief that it is fighting for its existence, the hatred being sown across the Middle East will extend by several generations the threat to the Jewish state and Western nations that are seen as indifferent to civilian deaths (a civilian toll wasn't even recorded in Iraq). It is important to note that Israel, unlike Hezbollah, does not deliberately target civilians and has expressed regret at their deaths, which it blames on Hezbollah's use of civilians as a human shield. Israel has eased its bombardment to allow civilians to flee the conflict. But having opted for an aerial assault rather than more precise ground attacks, Israel still bears responsibility for civilian deaths under international law. Regard for law and human life should be defining points of difference between the actions of states and terrorists.
It is possible, indeed consistent, to be concerned for Israel, for the lives of all civilians and for international law and order all at once. Israel has agreed to a peacekeeping force in Lebanon, although regrettably not to an immediate ceasefire. The international community must seize this opportunity, however slight, by swiftly assembling a force that is able to end Hezbollah's threat in Lebanon. The war on terrorism cannot be won by unilateral military action — the evidence from Iraq and Lebanon, past and present, is of extremism feeding off human suffering.
The Orwellian satire of "peace through war" in 1984 is uncomfortably close to reality in 2006. Today's wars will be ended, rather than paused, only when world powers stop paying lip service to peace and consistently support multilateral diplomacy and observance of international law as the basis for security. World leaders' lamenting of human tragedy and calls for peace are empty unless they commit their energy and resources, including peacekeeping forces, to ending conflicts as they begin. It should never be forgotten that war represents political failure. Civilians invariably pay the highest price for that failure.

Can't we ever learn? There is always some mug convinced that if we can sell one sock to every Chinese a fortune is assured.

The Howard Government can't see beyond dollar signs and wedge politics as it rushes headlong into an agreement to open up Australian uranium mining, and sell uranium to China.

We can leave uranium to the market to sell it and foreign companies to dig it up. The dream is that the natural resources of the "lucky country" will save Australia from the incompetence of its political and business leadership by generating squillions in export revenue and arrest the slide into international bankruptcy.

But not everything is hunky-dory, even if the nuclear boosters blind everybody to the nuclear waste elephant. Can't the populace see that even on one of the biggest, most sparsely settled and geologically stable continents in the world, Australians still can't agree about where to store their own relatively small, low and medium-grade nuclear waste.

Amazingly, the Australian Government agreed to build a new nuclear reactor in Sydney's Lucas Heights without any plans about where to put the waste from the existing reactor, let alone the new reactor. Back-to-front planning on this scale is simply pathetic.

This farce could become a tragedy if Australia becomes one of the world's biggest uranium exporters. Does anyone doubt that within a few decades Australia will be asked nicely to take back our high-level waste? If we don't comply, pressure will be applied to ensure we take it whether we like it or not.

Promises will be made. But despite the optimism expressed by Pangea, which set up an office in Perth in 2001 to facilitate the importing of high-level waste (and was blocked by the Gallop state government) or Bob Hawke, who last year supported Australia setting up a world-class nuclear waste dump, I doubt a fortune is to be made from Australia becoming the world's nuclear waste dump, even though it might make the fortunes for a few and their families over time.

Even in the short term, there is no economic bonanza that will solve the balance of payments.
According to the industry lobby, even with a third of the Chinese market at the present high prices, exports would be worth only $300 million to $400 million a year by 2020 - a flea bite in terms of Australia's current account deficit, which is now running at $50 billion a year.

The Chinese know what they want. They want resource security. They want to own the mines that supply their market. They want leverage over prices, and I'm sure they are already thinking about decommissioning and waste disposal.

Nuclear power is no panacea. The Chinese recognise this. China plans to increase its production of electricity from nuclear power from 2 per cent now to 6 per cent of the total in 2020.

In October, China announced plans to increase its renewable electricity generation target from solar and wind energy from 12 per cent to 15 per cent of the total electricity generation in 2020 - three times the amount from nuclear power.

Why? The Chinese can't afford to be silly.
They would know that nuclear power is extremely expensive, even by comparison with renewable energy when decommissioning costs are taken into account. I am sure they would be aware that, at best, nuclear power is carbon-emissions neutral over the full birth, life and death cycle of a nuclear power station.

Yes, you say - in the long term we'll all be dead.
Too right. Greenhouse gas emissions build up in the atmosphere cumulatively. The greenhouse gases we generate this year don't conveniently disappear next year. Within a decade, most of us on spaceship Earth will face the prospect of choking, freezing, burning or drowning, and all of us are likely to be extremely uncomfortable unless measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gases now.

The climate tipping point will be passed before the first nuclear plants being planned get to the point of generating electricity or geo-sequestration has been attached to coal-fired power stations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

If Australia could free itself from its quarry mentality, it should be able to see that there are better economic, as well as environmental, prospects in focusing on the development of renewable and conservation infrastructure to exploit its scientific competitive edge in these areas.

The renewable sector already employs 6000 people - three times the number directly employed in uranium mining. Hydro Tasmania has just signed a $300 million contract with the Chinese to help build three wind farms.

Encouraging the industry is not rocket science. The mandatory renewable energy target should be lifted from the present 2 per cent to 5 to 10 per cent, to give the industry the platform to move with confidence into Asia.

And if the Government can't rise above its nuclear obsession, it might give some thought to the taxing regime suitable to a quarry - including a resource-rent tax so we can share some of the profits of the now largely foreign-owned mining industry.

THIRTY days. That's how long the UN Security Council gave Iran last week to stop trying to enrich uranium, which could be used for an atomic bomb. And if Iran doesn't politely withdraw its application to join the nuclear club by the time the clock runs out, well, the UN will just have to meet again. Doesn't sound like much of a threat, does it? Especially when you consider the original 30-day deadline was only approved by the Security Council's 15 members after China and Russia refused to sign off if punitive measures were included in the demand. Or that the day after the ultimatum was issued, talks over what to do next fell apart. Sanctions, one of the only options available to the UN, were reportedly rejected out-of-hand by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavarov as impractical. And as disingenuous as Mr Lavarov's statement may have been, he's also right: Iran exports 2.5 million barrels of oil a day and holds the world's second-largest natural gas reserves -- facts that make any sort of sanction or blockade economically unlikely. Furthermore, Iran's senior ministers have openly bragged about their ability to deceive the West about their nuclear program, while Iranian President Ahmadinejad has publicly declared his desire to wipe Israel off the map and is said to be obsessed with the Shi'ite "12th imam", whose coming will herald the end of the world. Can these people really be trusted with the most powerful weapons known to man?

Mr Ahmadinejad's rhetoric places him well outside the boundaries of what Westerners would describe as a "rational actor". But his quest for a nuclear weapon falls within the very rational Middle Eastern penchant for non-conventional warfare that has developed in recent decades. It has been centuries since conventional Muslim or Middle Eastern armies have achieved success on the battlefield; the prophet Mohammed and his succcessors may have been skilled generals able to rapidly spread their new faith over vast swaths of territory, but modern military success has eluded the Islamic world. Seeing the utter disaster -- from their point of view -- of the Six Day War, the bloody stalemate of the Iran-Iraq war and the routing of Saddam Hussein's armies in two Gulf Wars, it is not surprising Middle Eastern leaders are keen to develop non-conventional means of warfare. While often tactically disastrous, low-level non-traditional campaigns such as the use of suicide bombers by Palestinians or insurgency tactics by the terrorists in Iraq have been highly successful in gaining headlines (and even sympathy in some quarters) for some pretty evil people who are more than happy to massacre civilians in exchange for a news grab. Mr Ahmadinejad and his ilk see sophisticated non-traditional weapons as a way to get not just headlines, but strategic results.

The Australian noted recently that Iran's nuclear program was a chance for the UN and its enthusiasts to prove the power of multilateralism to solve an international crisis. So far that hasn't happened, and with each day that ticks by under the UN's phony deadline, Iran is that much closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Should that occur, it is anyone's guess what Mr Ahmadinejad will do next -- especially given his equally aggressive missile program, which puts Israel and even some European capitals within range. Military action against Iran has often been dismissed as impractical or impossible, but this defeatist rhetoric immediately gives the game away to the mullahs in Tehran who laugh at, rather than bow to, the moral authority of the UN. Never since the end of World War II have nuclear weapons been so close to the grasp of someone so likely to use them. The Iranians must not be allowed to acquire an atom bomb, and if the UN cannot stop them, someone else will have to.

(This is an edited extract from the British Prime Minister's address to the Australian Federal Parliament on 27.3.2006.)

The struggle in our world today is not just about security, it is a struggle about values and about modernity - whether to be at ease with it or in rage at it. To win, we have to win the battle of values, as much as arms. We have to show these are not Western, still less American or Anglo-Saxon values but values in the common ownership of humanity, universal values that should be the right of the global citizen.

This is the challenge. Ranged against us are the people who hate us; but beyond them are many more who don't hate us but question our motives, our good faith, our even-handedness, who could support our values but believe we support them selectively. These are the people we have to persuade. They have to know this is about justice and fairness as well as security and prosperity.

And in truth there is no prosperity without security; and no security without justice. That is the consequence of a connected world. That is why we cannot say we are an open society and close our markets to the trade justice the poorest of the world demand. Why we cannot easily bring peace to the Middle East unless we resolve the question of Israel and Palestine. Why we cannot say we favour freedom but sit by while millions in Africa die and millions more are denied the very basics of life.

If we want to secure our way of life, there is no alternative but to fight for it. That means standing up for our values not just in our own country but the world over. We need to construct a global alliance for these global values; and act through it. Inactivity is just as much a policy, with its own results. It's just the wrong one.

The immediate threat is from Islamist extremism. You mourn your victims from Bali as we do ours and those from July 7 last year in London. We can add to them victims from Madrid, or September 11 in the US. But, this terrorism did not begin on the streets of New York. It simply came to our notice then. Its victims are to be found in the recent history of many lands from Russia and India, but also Algeria, Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, Kenya and countless more. And though its active cadres of terrorists are relatively small, it is exploiting a far wider sense of alienation in the Arab and Muslim world.

We will not defeat this terror until we face up to the fact that its roots are deep, and that it is not a passing spasm of anger, but a global ideology at war with us and our way of life. Their case is that democracy is a Western concept we are forcing on an unwilling culture of Islam. The problem we have is that a part of opinion in our own countries agrees with them.

We are in danger of completely misunderstanding the importance of what is happening as we speak in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops, British and Australian, are alongside each other and I know whatever our views on either conflict, we are all deeply proud of the commitment, dedication and bravery of our armed forces.

But in each case, we have nations engaged in a titanic struggle to be free of a legacy of oppression, stagnation and servitude. In each case, its people have, for the first time, been offered a choice to vote. In each case, they have seized it, despite obstacles we can scarcely imagine.

But in each case also, the forces of reaction are at work, trying through the most evil of means, terrorism - the slaughter of the innocent because they are innocent - to destroy this hope.

I know the Iraq war split this nation as it did mine. And I have never disrespected those who disagreed with me over it. But for almost three years now we have been in Iraq with full UN support. From the outset, our forces in Afghanistan have been there with UN authority. In both cases, there is the full support of democratically elected governments.

Every reactionary element is lined up to fight us. They know if they lose, a message is sent out across the Muslim world, that strikes at the heart of their ideology. So they are fighting hard.

We must not hesitate in the face of a battle utterly decisive in whether the values we believe in, triumph or fail. Here are Iraqi and Afghan Muslims saying clearly: democracy is as much our right as yours; and in embracing it, showing that they too want a society in which people of different cultures and faith can live together in peace. This struggle is our struggle.

If the going is tough - we tough it out. This is not a time to walk away. This is a time for the courage to see it through. But though it is where military action has been taken that the battle is most fierce, it will not be won by victory there alone.

Wherever people live in fear, with no prospect of advance, we should be on their side; in solidarity with them, whether in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea; and where countries, and there are many in the Middle East today, are in the process of democratic development, we should extend a helping hand.

This requires, across the board, an active foreign policy of engagement not isolation. It cannot be achieved without a strong alliance. This alliance does not end with, but it does begin with, America. For us in Europe and for you, this alliance is central. And I want to speak plainly here. I do not always agree with the US. Sometimes they can be difficult friends to have. But the strain of, frankly, anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in. The danger with America today is not that they are too much involved. The danger is they decide to pull up the drawbridge and disengage. We need them involved. We want them engaged.

The reality is that none of the problems that press in on us can be resolved or even contemplated without them. Our task is to ensure that with them, we do not limit the agenda to security.

Once the Israeli election has taken place, we must redouble our efforts to find a way to the only solution that works: a secure state of Israel and a viable, independent Palestinian state. We must continue to mobilise the resources and will to turn the commitments of 2005 into action to combat the ravages of conflict, famine and disease in Africa where millions, literally millions, die every year preventably. We must focus on the threat of climate change, now made all the more acute by anxiety over energy supply.

This is a big agenda. It means action on all fronts.
There will be many insidious and persuasive voices that urge us to stay in our comfort zone, high in the stands and watch the field of play. It is tempting, and yet I don't believe our countries will ever truly prefer spectating to playing. We naturally get stuck in. It's our way. It's certainly always been yours.