To understand the thinking of the Bush administration, there is no better source than the important speech President George W. Bush delivered on June 1 at West Point, America’s most prestigious military academy, at a graduation ceremony for 958 young officers.

A vast crowd gathered in the academy’s stadium to hear him explain the philosophy underlying the foreign and defense policies of his administration.

First, a word of background. The president was speaking as the acclaimed leader of the most powerful country on earth, a country conscious of its unmatched military strength, of its global reach, of its worldwide responsibilities. The latest poll published in Time Magazine on 3 June showed 72 percent of Americans approve of the way Bush is running the country. Hail to the chief!

But the United States is also a country still living in the aftershock of Sept. 11. Only last week was the site of the World Trade Center finally cleared of rubble from the soaring twin towers, which once dominated the lower Manhattan skyline. In the American perception, the enemy that brought them down is still out there ­ invisible, secret, fanatical, “evil,” steeped in hate of the “good” United States and, no doubt, preparing to strike again.

The attack, nine months ago, has captured the American mind to the exclusion of almost everything else. Unprecedented in its surprise and destructive power, it has shaken American certainties and forced a reordering of American national priorities. Never before had anyone dared strike at the American heartland. The devastating effect spread like a tidal wave through the US economy, causing losses of billions of dollars. It also produced an earthquake in international politics. It seemed that the target was not just New York and the Pentagon but the West’s open society itself.

As everyone knows, the Sept. 11 attack was a low-tech suicide mission in which hijacked civilian aircraft were used as missiles. But, America is now asking, what if a terrorist organization were to acquire nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, perhaps passed on to it by a “rogue state?” This is the new conundrum facing the Bush administration, providing a new dimension to its “war on terror.” How can such a deadly threat be countered?

Since that fateful day of Sept. 11 when America lost its innocence, Pentagon planners, intelligence and security officials, congressional committees, strategic thinkers at scores of research institutes, and a legion of armchair strategists have grappled with the problem of how to make America safe again.

President Bush’s speech last week was intended to provide an answer. It was a classic statement of the “neo-conservative” thinking now in the ascendant in the Bush administration. No doubt it was also intended to reassure and mobilize American opinion ahead of the first anniversary of Sept. 11 and the mid-term elections in November.

Bush’s message was simple, but disturbing. It can be summarized as follows:

l- Deterrence ­ that is to say neutralizing a potential enemy with the fear of overwhelming retaliation, no longer works. Although it kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, deterrence was ineffective on Sept. 11. Al-Qaeda was not deterred by America’s retaliatory power. In Bush’s words, deterrence “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizen to defend.”

2- Containment ­ boxing in a potential enemy like the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to prevent him from engaging in external aggression, no longer works either. In Bush’s words, containment “is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”

3- So, if deterrence and containment, traditional instruments for keeping the peace between nations, are no longer effective, what then? Bush’s answer is pre-emption: “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.” The United States, he said, “must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries” and “confront regimes that sponsor terror.”

In other words, Bush has proclaimed a unilateral first strike policy against terrorists when and where the United States chooses.

The president did not limit himself to threatening the usual three members of his “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq and North Korea). “Other nations,” he declared, “oppose terror, but tolerate the hatred that leads to terror. And that must change.”

Carrying his moral crusade further, he invoked “the peoples of Islamic nations who want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.” White House aides, quoted by The Washington Post, said his criticism was directed at Saudi Arabia, a country which pro-Israel lobbyists and right-wing intellectuals have been keen to smear as the key source of anti-American, radical Islamic terror.

Bush seemed to be saying that, as the world’s strongest power, the United States had the means and the right to impose its will on others and shape the world in its image.

Will these policies bring the world peace and security or will they, on the contrary, contribute to global disorder? There are, in my view, several things that are radically wrong with the current American analysis of the state of the world.

Painful as Sept. 11 was for the United States, it was not an act of unique, unsurpassed evil. There have been several other terrible crimes in recent history, some of them perpetrated by the United States itself. Almost always state violence surpasses terrorist violence, as may be seen in the casualty figures of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While few in the West would want to justify or excuse Osama bin Laden’s terrorist crimes, many in the East see his violence as a response to the violence inflicted on Arabs and Muslims by the West and its allies over the past several decades. I would suggest that the United States needs to understand bin Laden rather than dismiss him as the evil incarnation of fundamentalist Islam.

Bush needs to ask what the “terrorists” want and what makes them so angry. He might discover that they are less interested in “destroying Western civilization” than in justice for their own peoples and nations.

Better intelligence, tightened physical security, military muscle-flexing and preemptive strikes against “terror cells,” such as Bush advocates, will not prevent further attacks. That can only be achieved by recognizing local grievances and adopting policies to address them.

The United States needs to be told again and again that the “roots of terror” do not lie in Islamic societies or in the failure of Arab states to adopt a Western model of democracy.

They lie in America’s policies: in its support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, in the continued punishment of Iraq 12 years after the Gulf War, and in America’s obtrusive military presence in Arabia in support of its regional hegemonic designs. The “roots of terror” lie also in the way the United States mobilized a whole generation of Muslim radicals against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan only to walk away disgracefully once the Soviets withdrew, leaving the country in ruins and prey to warlords and drug barons.

Today, George Bush needs to grasp that his “war on terror” will be won or lost in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. He looked the other way when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hijacked his anti-terrorist agenda.

He seems unable to comprehend that the aim of Sharon’s wholesale destruction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is not to prevent terrorist attacks ­ indeed Sharon seems deliberately to provoke them ­ but to rule out any negotiation which might lead to a Palestinian state.

Violence will only end once Israel ends its occupation. Only the United States can bring that about. If it does not, it must expect to pay the price.

Patrick Seale is the author of Asad (1988), the biography of the late Syrian President Hafez Assad. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star

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