It is not hate that drives them to kill us

The destruction of civilians to draw attention to a cause is almost as old as history itself

One thing that yesterday's "revelation" that North Korea has been pursuing a nuclear weapons programme on the sly should have done is cast a few doubts on all the talk we've been hearing this week from Bush and Blair about fighting the war on terror on all fronts. Are we really to believe the US is now going to take on Kim Jong Il as another Saddam Hussein?

The other thing that this latest bombshell might be expected to do – whatever the real truth of it – is put some balance to the anti-Muslim chorus that has been growing since the explosion in Bali. North Korea may be a rogue regime but there's no evidence that it is involved in al-Qa'ida.

The chorus that would have the war on terror conducted as a clash of civilisations and would have al-Qa'ida wrapped up in the same package as regime change in Iraq won't stop, of course. When it comes to the so-called war on terror these days, everyone talks their own book.

The Indonesian authorities say the Bali bomb blast was the work of al-Qa'ida because that absolves them of the blame for failing to control their local Muslim fanatics. Washington proclaims the same because it wishes the struggle to be seen in global terms, not specific regional discontents which would be harder to address. The pro-Israeli lobby wants to put the Bali bomb down to worldwide Islamic fundamentalism because that puts the fight on to a cultural basis which has no connection with the Palestinian issue.

What the actual truth is about who planted the bomb outside the Bali night club or what the North Koreans are up to, and why they have admitted to it now, we do not know and will not know until more detailed evidence is gathered. By which time everyone but the poor benighted ordinary citizen will have made up their mind anyhow.

That we should end up a full year after 11 September with this degree of confusion and deliberate ignorance is a pretty depressing comment on our times, and our ability to learn from history. There is nothing in the Bali bombing, the attack on the twin towers, the blowing up of the tanker in the Gulf, the shooting of an American soldier in Kuwait or the bomb in the shopping mall in the Philippines yesterday that demands novel interpretation or grand new visions of global clashes.

The destruction of civilians as a means of drawing attention to your cause or undermining your perceived enemy is almost as old as history itself. The anarchists practised it to devastating effect at the end of the 19th century, so did the Indians in British India and the Hungarians in the Austrian Empire, and no one said that they planted bombs because they "hated" every middle-class white person and wanted to kill them. They intended to make a political protest and draw attention to it.

Exactly the same is likely to be true of the Bali massacre. There have been local Muslim extremist forces in Indonesia for a generation or more. The provision of finances, explosives and expertise may or may not have come from al-Qa'ida. We don't know. But there is no particular reason to believe that the explosion was particularly aimed at the Australians or the young. It was more likely to have been chosen as a target because it was soft and because it was bound to hit the international headlines. There is nothing peculiarly fundamentalist about it. ETA has done the same by attacking tourists in Spain.

That does not make today's terrorism justifiable or any easier to deal with. But it does suggest the weakness of viewing terrorism as a war against a global enemy, rather than as an accumulation of regional resentments made the more deadly by globalisation. Most of the Islamic world has nothing against the West. Indeed the majority of Muslims are all too eager to join it. But, far from being neo-fascists afraid of democracy (as President Bush for example argues), most feel their populist desires have been suppressed by authoritarian regimes who could not have managed without Western support.

That is true of Indonesia – as it is true of Algeria, Egypt and Uzbekistan. When America and Australia demand a clamp down on Islamic fundamentalists in Indonesia they are asking for the re-assertion of the very forces of military authoritarianism which the West has spent the past few years trying to undo.

The problem in Iraq is not religious fundamentalism. Far from it. The Ba'athist regime there is defiantly and brutally secular. Which is why President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are not just wrong in seeing Iraq and terror as parallel tracks of a single problem. They are actually being self-defeating, because they serve to confirm the popular feeling in the Arab world (the feeling in most of the developing world in fact) that Washington's motivations are hypocritical and that the real aim of the West is not justice but oil and America's commitment to Israel.

Maybe that is unfair. But it is a difficult argument to refute on the evidence so far. Take the latest situation. I would guess that we will hear nothing of isolation and sanctions, let alone invasion, of North Korea, unlike Iraq. Nor will Washington support enforcement of the UN resolutions against Israel, for all that it demands regime change among the Palestinians.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk