The deluded Mr. Howard

In Australian Prime Minister John Howard's address to Parliament, he effusively praised the United States, declaring that if Washington played a lesser role in world affairs, "It would leave a world more exposed to terrorism ...."

Mr. Howard exercises a peculiar logic. If by terrorism, he means attacks by Islamist extremists, the United States is in fact the major cause of terrorism. The extremists are not irrational. They attack those they see as enemies of Islam, and the Americans have presented themselves as such for a long time. From the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government of Iran, through massive support of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, to persistent intimacy with the Sauds of Arabia, they have severely provoked Muslim anger. They have made themselves a lightning rod for terrorist attacks.

If they had not aided in the overthrow of Mossadegh, if they did not exercise a powerful bias in favour of Israel, if they did not support oppressive Arab dictators, in other words if they played "a lesser role in world affairs," there would almost certainly have been no 9/11 and we wouldn't be obsessed with terrorism today.

More recently, the United States has created in Iraq a recruiting and training ground for extremists they could hardly have hoped for. Tactics honed there are now being used against Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

As Americans have suffered for their government's provocation of Islam, Australians have suffered for their government's fealty to the U.S. The bombings of Australian tourists in Bali were almost certainly a reprisal for Australia's killing of Muslims in Iraq. This is the price innocent Australians paid for John Howard's subservient foreign policy.

Others have paid similar prices. The bombings in Madrid and London were reprisals by angry Muslim youth for their countries' participation in the Iraq adventure. And Canadians died in the 9/11 attacks for no other reason than they happened to be in the United States. Collateral damage, you might say, in the Islamist-American war.

Howard couldn't be more wrong: American imperialism is a major cause of Islamic terrorism, not the shield against it.