CAIRO, 16 March 2004 — Many of us in the West, glibly referred to as “baby boomers” are in the process of coming to terms with a new and ugly reality. Too young to experience the horrors of World War II, we reacted to the far away conflict in Vietnam by humming the strains of Joan Baez. That was until we were outraged by images of a tiny victim of American napalm fleeing in terror, her skin peeling off.

It was this, more than anything else, which prompted a devastating backlash against that war. When the conflict duly ended, we swapped flower power for business suits believing that our misguided leaders had learned their lessons, suitably chastised and repentant after lurid accounts of Mai Lai when 300 Vietnamese civilians were massacred in the name of halting the Red scourge.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we lived a rather charmed existence. Hitler had long ago died in his bunker, the Japanese empire had been crushed and the spread of Communism had been contained. All we had to mildly concern ourselves with — between hedonistic pursuits — were conflicts in the far away Middle East and internecine strife in Africa although our military involvement in the former Yugoslavia was rather too close for comfort.

Unlike so many countries in the Third World, our democracies were bastions of human rights and civil liberties. The rule of law was etched in stone and we were free to concentrate on la belle vie, important things like the stock market, computers, mobile phones, football and liposuction, in the hope we would end up the happiest, wealthiest and most beautiful people in the graveyard.

Sure, the millions who died in Rwanda, after we had declined Kofi Annan’s urgings to come to their aid, pricked our consciences, but when it came to the interminable reports of tit-for-tat killings in Palestine, we psychologically switched off. After all, that kind of thing wouldn’t happen in our, oh so perfect, societies and it really wasn’t our problem — until Sept. 11, 2001.

That was the event, which shook our sense of personal security to the core. As we watched transfixed as the twin towers imploded, little did we know that this day above all others would shake our carefully constructed illusion of safety, along with our comfort level, in our best of all possible societies.

As the terrorist attacks stripped off facades of buildings, our polished veneer peeled off too, leaving exposed raw emotions, such as fear and anger, accompanied by the desire for revenge. Why would they do this to us? Ah! Yes. They hate our freedoms; they hate our way of life; they hate democracy.

And once again the sleeping giant awoke bringing in its wake the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, an erosion of civil liberties, and a scar on civilization called Guantanamo, where Muslim men, rubberstamped as “evildoers” without charge or trial, are regularly trussed up, subjected to beatings and psychological torture, asking not for human rights but “animal rights.”

As the recently freed British detainee, Muslim convert, Jamal Al-Harith said: “After a while, we stopped asking for human rights — we wanted animal rights. In Camp X-Ray my cage was right next to a kennel housing an Alsation dog. He had a wooden house with air-conditioning and green grass to exercise on. I said to the guards, ‘I want his rights’ and they replied, ‘that dog is a member of the US Army.’”

Al Harith’s reports of being trussed up for up to 15 hours at a time, regular beatings and being forced to submit to unspecified injections, having to quench his thirst with yellow brown water could, of course, be figments of an overheated imagination. Except for one thing. The other four freed Britons support Al-Harith’s allegations and have made quite a few of their own. They don’t make pleasant reading. But although these men have been presumed innocent, their psychological scars will remain throughout their lives. Still, they are alive and free, which is more than you can say for the 200 victims of the Madrid bombing last week.

Here again, we witnessed yet another example of man’s inhumanity to man. What fault did those men, women and children have, making that morning train journey to their places of work and schools? What kind of monsters would coldly and calculatedly set-off bombs using mobile phones, bombs designed to kill and maim, leaving families, friends and an entire nation to mourn?

These are the dregs of humanity whose cause, whether valid or invalid, can only be harmed by their despicable crimes. The Spanish have since spoken. By voting for the opposition party on Sunday, they have said a firm “no” to Bush’s endless wars and the terrorist backlash they may well incite.

If we want to prevent our planet degenerating into a blood bath with human rights and civil liberties becoming old-fashioned concepts, then our leaders must find another way. Bush’s “war on terror” isn’t working. The longer it continues and the more savvy, sophisticated and scattered the terrorists become, the more vulnerable we will be.

Like Hans Brinkler, the young Dutch boy, who put his finger in a dyke to stem the flood, are the proponents of the war on terror. We must put aside our macho cries of “Bring ‘em on” and instead study terrorism’s root causes. As Britain eventually did with the IRA, we must hold our noses to discover their gripes, decide whether they are based on genuine grievances, and if so put fundamental wrongs to right. The alternative may eventually bring down the terrorists but after how many years or decades and at what cost to us? What is more to the point, what kind of creatures will we have become once the dust has finally settled?

— Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs and can be contacted at [email protected]