During his last television interview Osama Bin Laden indicated that the campaign against the West by his al-Qaeda organization is being renewed and it is already clear that countries traditionally soft on Moslem terrorism will not be spared. A recently published list of 22 potential targets in Canada (including the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and the CN tower in Toronto) and the French Defense Minister's warning "France is one of the first targets" amply illustrate this point. So it is more widely understood than in the past that the attacks on an Israeli plane carrying a large number of returning holiday-makers from Mombasa to Lydda, on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa and on Likud members choosing their candidate for Prime Minister in the Jordan Valley town of Beth She'an serve Osama Bin Laden and fundamentalist or radical Moslem groups sympathizing with his aims, and should be considered together with the attacks carried out or planned against the US, Canada, Western Europe or Russia. President Bush has already moved in this direction by informing Prime Minister Sharon immediately after the terrorist outrages mentioned that no pressure would be exerted on Israel to accept the "road map" prepared by the "Quartet". It is to be hoped that the West will also cease to bother President Putin of Russia about the human rights of the Chechens. The Chechens have shown no concern for the human rights of anyone else.

Active cooperation between all parties attacked or likely to be attacked by Moslem terrorists may well be the key to winning the war against such terrorism, which in any case may turn out to be costly and long drawn-out. Such cooperation is still inhibited by fears of arousing more hostility in Moslem states... and to some extent by the United Nations, because the bloc of Moslem states (and African states cooperating with Moslems because they fear them) still wields great influence there. However, the tough posture of President George W. Bush vis-à-vis Iraq has already caused Saudi Arabia and Yemen to take some reluctant and unpopular steps to help the US against al-Qaeda (see sections dealing with these two states below), indicating that toughness is a better means of gaining cooperation than undue concern with local susceptibilities. One candidate for such treatment should be Syria, which still refuses to take measures against terrorist bodies such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, which operate from headquarters on territory it controls.