(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.

Deeds, as ever, speak more eloquently than words. Al-Qaeda isn't finished. Its structure - devolved, barely organised by conventional standards - can survive any number of strikes at individual bases. There's no command and control system to disrupt: just loose groupings of the desperate and the deluded with trucks full of explosive or grenades strapped to their waists, ready to die from Casablanca to Riyadh. Blood brothers of the Israeli bus bombers.

You can't cut off the head, because the manic heart still beats on regardless.

Afghanistan, we may guess, gave the guys some pause. There was, at least, a brief pause once it was over. By contrast, Iraq seems to have had no impact whatsoever. Our boys are barely back from the Gulf before terror carries on its dismal way. It is killing business as usual - the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam business of yesteryear replicated from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.

Yet these deeds, in their brutal banality, also tell an interesting story. Nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, weapons of mass destruction? They may be part of the long-term planning, part of the dreaming. Scary sketches and formulas scribbled in pencil. But they are not, for the moment, part of the reality. That is relentlessly low-tech, as basic as a bad day on the West Bank, or an outrage in the Algeria of 30 years ago. Synchronise watches, light the blue touch paper and self-destruct immediately.

The targets, time after time, are relentlessly soft. A nightclub of young Aussies in Bali; sleepy Western compounds in Saudi; a Jewish centre and Spanish social club in Casablanca - where the man with the bomb arrived with a long knife. You can't defend yourself against threats like these. They're no-brainers, picked for no particularly cogent reason. They don't even single out the enemies of bin Laden for particular treatment. Most of those who were maimed or murdered in Casablanca were ordinary Moroccans.

So collect the clues. Will this agglomeration of terror come to central London or, again, to Manhattan? Perhaps. But it's rather likelier to visit downtown Cairo or Kuala Lumpur first. That, strategically, is the PR boon left over from September 11: you don't need to take big risks to garner big headlines any longer. More ordinary mayhem will serve just as well. One unspecified threat to Kenya blanks out East Africa for the duration.

Worse, there's no shortage of recruits, human fodder for annihilation. Western terrorist threats such as ETA or the IRA can mount continuing campaigns using very few active fighters; maybe a hundred or two max. If either had lost 20 men in a couple of attacks, that would have been disaster. But not for al-Qaeda. It, seemingly, has volunteers to spare. It can lose one to kill one. It doesn't need to husband resources. It thinks it has tens of thousands to spare.

Yet there is some frail reason for hope in such conclusions. Who will really suffer most after Casablanca, for instance? Moroccans. One lifeline of progress there - tourism - lies snapped for the moment. It is the same in Kenya, where a new democratic Government has to muster its resources.

Closed, claustrophobic societies such as Saudi Arabia are pressure-cookers when the heat comes on. Open or half-open societies are programmed to respond very differently. They know how much they have to lose. The message of bin Laden has scant relevance to their daily lives. It is a maverick howl, not a call to revolution. And here, for the West, is the essential dislocation.

We fight the threat of terror - real and imagined - by abandoning liberties, tightening the state's grip, cutting the corners of freedom. That's one story since September 11. It is replicated in Riyadh and Rabat. Authority under challenge cracks down automatically. But the ultimate defence in this campaign against terror is precisely the reverse. It is the rejection of suppression that casts the terrorist in the least kindly light. Morocco needs to be more free, not less. The princelings of the house of Saud are the problem, not the solution.

Is democracy, as we were told, on the way for Baghdad? Maybe. But the calls grow weaker as the complexities mount. The lacuna of a free Iraqi government that blithely supports George Bush becomes ever more evident. Nevertheless, for all the surrounding doubts and sorrows, Iraq needs to find a voice - just as Iran, lost for decades to a particular strain of Islam, is struggling to find one.

And these voices, right across the wider Muslim world, can only flourish in a setting of growing normality. The Arab "street" has to have something better than death and destruction to look forward to.

One of the best, but least rehearsed, lessons of the Afghan aftermath can be found in the "pure state of Islam" - Pakistan today. That doesn't mean that a general in braid is the best man to be president. But the press has regained a certain vibrancy - and the supposedly extremist religious parties that won power in Peshawar, amid great apprehension, have concentrated on decent governance rather than agitation.

You do not, in sum, have to walk on the wild side if there's a better way; and those who take a wilder route can gradually be isolated. That's how al-Qaeda and its 18,000 or so foot soldiers disperses in the end. Amid public derision. That - one distant day - is the promise of the Israel "road map" to peace. And that is the lesson we in the West need to learn, too.

Defeat these terrorists by building more walls around the gated society of the West? Humiliate the street by braggart wars? No: freedom, like realism, begins at home.

May 22 2003

A translation of the text of a purported audio tape by Osama bin Laden's top aide, Ayman al-Zawahri, aired by Qatar-based al-Jazeera television:

"Protests, demonstrations and conferences are of no use to you. The only thing that will benefit you is carrying arms and spiting your enemies, the Americans and Jews.

"Protests will not protect threatened sanctities, will not evict the occupying enemy and will not deter the stubborn tyrants. The crusaders and the Jews only understand the language of murder and bloodshed and are only convinced by coffins, destroyed interests, burning towers and a shattered economy.

"Be strong, O Muslims, and attack the missions of the United States, the UK, Australia and Norway and their interests, companies and employees. Turn the ground beneath their feet into an inferno and kick them out of your countries. Do not allow the United States, the UK, Australia, Norway and other crusaders - the murderers of your Iraqi brothers - to live in your countries and enjoy their wealth and spread corruption.

"Consider your 19 brothers who attacked America with their aeroplanes in New York and Washington and who spited them in an unprecedented manner. It (America) is still suffering from its wounds until today.

"O Iraqi people, we have defeated those crusaders several times before and kicked them out of our countries and sanctities. Know that you are not alone in this battle. Your brother mujahideen (holy fighters) are following the enemies as well and are lying in wait for them.

"The mujahideen in Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya and even in the heart of America and the West are making the crusaders taste all forms of death. The next few days will reveal to you news that will gladden your hearts, God willing.

"After the division of Iraq will come the turn of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Pakistan ... so that nothing will be left around Israel except torn fragments of so-called countries which follow and are subjects of America and Israel.

"These are the truths becoming clear before you, O Muslims, and all the masks have fallen ... For here are the Muslim rulers with their airports, bases and facilities who allow ships to use their waters and provide them with fuel, food and supplies. They allow planes to use their airspace, and to actually fly from their airports, and welcome the criminal troops to attack Iraq from their land.

"For here is Saudi Arabia with planes flying from its Rafha airport, and Kuwait where the criminal troops advance from its land, and Qatar where the command for the campaign is, and Bahrain with the US Fifth Fleet, and Egypt with warships using its canal, and Yemen supplying crusader vessels at its ports, and Jordan where crusader troops have deployed and where Patriot batteries protect Israel.

"And after all this, they scream with all hypocrisy and treachery that they oppose the war on Iraq."

From New York and Washington, to Bali and Mombasa and Riyadh and, now Casablanca. It seems likely that probably all, and certainly most, of the recent suicide-homicide attacks on civilian targets are linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

In her study of al-Qaeda titled The Base (Simon & Schuster, 2002), British journalist Jane Corbin quotes bin Laden as having declared in 1998: "Our duty is to arouse the Muslim nation for jihad against the United States, Israel and their supporters, for the sake of God."

No doubt that is how he sees his particular calling. It's just that the past four suicide-homicide attacks have taken place in Indonesia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. On each occasion, many more local inhabitants were murdered than the combined total of Americans and Israelis.

The evidence suggests that the decision by US authorities to clamp down on terrorism after the events of September 11 has led to a situation where terrorists have decided to choose softer, non-American, targets. Both decisions are rational.

Al-Qaeda's apparent change of tactics has been an unintended consequence. Now bin Laden targets not only Westerners, but non-Westerners; not only Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Buddhists, and more besides. This provides some opportunities for the counter-terrorist cause.

Before the Bali murders, the US had been highly critical of what it regarded as the Indonesian Government's slack attitude to terrorism. Not any more. Last February, the US ambassador in Jakarta, Ralph Boyce, commented that progress on "every one" of America's anti-terrorist benchmarks had been "extraordinary" since the murders of October 12 last year. This change of attitude is recognised in the US State Department publication Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002, released last month.

Co-operation between Indonesia and Australia has been excellent since the Bali bombings. President Megawati's government has overseen the arrest and prosecution of at least some of the alleged killers and the matter has proceeded quickly to trial.

In addition, the previous attitude of denial has dissipated. Last week I Made Mangku Pastika, the police chief of Bali, said publicly that up to 30 terrorists who had trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan remain undetected in Indonesia.

Certainly terrorism remains a serious problem in Indonesia. But the Indonesian authorities have moved decisively against those accused of the Bali bombings. What's more, individuals thought to be associated with the radical Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah are being tracked down and Abu Bakar Bashir, JI's spiritual leader, has been charged with treason concerning alleged crimes not associated with the Bali murders. It is difficult to imagine that such an action would have been taken if the tragic events of October 12 had not occurred.

It remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia will experience a similar awakening after last week's attacks in Riyadh. To some extent, Saudi Arabia is al-Qaeda's base. Bin Laden was born there, as were most of those involved in the September 11 attacks on the US. Officially, the Saudi royal family are allies of the US. Unofficially, Saudi Arabia's dictatorial rulers have allowed bin Laden's followers to operate in the country and to be essentially financed by fellow Saudis.

This may, just may, change following the Riyadh murders. In Washington last Friday, Adel Jubeir (chief foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah) conceded that the terrorist attacks were a "massive jolt" that had already led to a substantial reassessment of Saudi security. He added: "We will do whatever we need to do, unilaterally or with the support of our friends, to ensure this does not happen again."

Maybe. It's just that, up to now, the Saudi regime has effectively tolerated terrorism. This has posed particular problems for the US since Saudi Arabia is, formally, a US ally. American political analyst Michael Ledeen sets out the problem in his book The War Against the Terror Masters (St Martin's Press, 2002). He describes Saudi Arabia as a "country that is simultaneously our major oil supplier and the main financier of our terrorist enemies".

Now it's possible, just possible, that the regime in Riyadh will come to realise that even tolerating al-Qaeda's existence on Saudi soil will have deleterious consequences. Followers of game theory, and others besides, will not have been surprised that al-Qaeda and similar organisations appear to have changed tactics after September 11.

The immediate targets are no longer the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon but, rather, Western residential compounds, hotels and religious entities. It is likely that further attacks will follow, possibly including some within Western societies.

Yet progress has been made since September 11. The war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan - in which Australian special forces played an important role, most notably in the battle of Anaconda - has been successful in that it has denied bin Laden's forces a base to train and launch operations. This is likely to diminish the capability of al-Qaeda and its followers to launch big hits against high-profile targets.

What's more, due particularly to Pakistan's decision to support the West in the war against terrorism, a number of important arrests have been made, most notably that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpinda last March. He was the third in the al-Qaeda hierarchy and is believed to have been the military planner of the September 11 attacks.

Then there is the change of attitude in Indonesia, which is of particular benefit to Australia and other nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

However, small successes aside, the war against terrorism is likely to be a long one, possibly one of the longest in history. This is the first conflict in which civilians have been a prime target. So - in this sense at least - it is a total war. And, as the recent tragedies reveal, all men and women of all faiths and nationalities are potential targets.