How can anyone be that angry at us, the good people of America?

We hear repeatedly that our attackers were just crazed fanatics, lashing out at America because they hate our freedoms and envy our success. That makes our response simple—“Us” against “Them”—a confrontation in which American strength and resolve will sooner or later destroy those who attacked us. But it's not that simple. The U.S. will not defeat terrorism unless and until we understand these new, elusive enemies and the reasons so many people support them.

Terrorist cells cannot exist without many people who shelter them, give them information, resources and recruits, or just cheer them on. It won’t be enough just to hunt down the terrorists; as long as their support network exists, others will take their places. To end the attacks, our government needs to eliminate the basis for that support.

 I have some practical experience in the Third World that can be useful. I offer it as a patriot who has repeatedly faced danger for his country, including revolutionary mobs in Libya, bullets and car bombs in Vietnam, and hit-men in Havana.

In the late 70’s, I was assigned by the Carter Administration to be the U.S. Government’s liaison to the Nonaligned Movement—a loose association of Third World states. I was a junior Foreign Service Officer, but I was the sole American diplomat assigned full-time to deal with the only official body representing two-thirds of the world’s people. That tells you how low a priority the Third World was for our government—even under a President who expressed concern about conditions there.

I stepped into a political environment that was pure battery acid. Diplomats from some Third World countries wouldn’t even shake my hand. Others barely made it past the pleasantries before tearing into a grievance against the U.S. One after another ranted about U. S. policies toward apartheid, world hunger, foreign aid and investment, Latin America and Palestine. My government, by their assessment, was arrogant and unjust. Policy changes had been promised by President Carter, but most of them had not happened and never would, blocked within the Executive Branch and in Congress.

I’d served in Africa and Asia and had no illusions about the corruption, thuggery and hypocrisy of many leaders there. I also knew how many times in its history America had acted with great generosity and far-sightedness. But as I struggled with my assignment to defend then current U.S. policies in the Third World, I realized that most of them were indefensible. America was supporting the Khmer Rouge-genocidal maniacs in Cambodia—solely because the North Vietnamese opposed them. We offered token opposition to apartheid in South Africa while American arms merchants sold the tools of death to the white South African Government, through an embargo that was a sham. We gave paltry sums to help fight hunger and disease in the Third World, often as barely disguised bribes for UN votes. We supported death squads in Latin America and brutal dictators in Africa and Asia in the name of anti-Communism or to advance important U.S. economic interests, such as the flow of oil. There were good reasons why Third World diplomats wouldn't shake the hand of an American.

What disturbed me most was the disconnect I saw between the basic goodness and sense of justice of the American people and the policies enacted in our name. I couldn’t bridge that disconnect, so I walked away from a hotshot diplomatic career.

In the twenty years since, not much has changed. The Cold War rationale for U.S. positions in the Third World is gone, but replaced by responses just as short-sighted.

Our government ignored the genocide in Rwanda because it saw no important U.S. interests there. It supported the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, throwing gasoline on a fire.

It works to build a global structure for trade and investment controlled by multinational corporations whose only professed interest has been maximizing profits, with little regard for labor and environmental safeguards.

Our government continues to pay lip service to global problems of hunger and disease, while every day, 24,000 lives are lost quietly to hunger all over the earth, unseen and unnoted here. An estimated $13 billion dollars a year would feed the hungry, worldwide. To give some perspective to that number, $13 billion is 1% of the tax cut just passed by Congress. The gap between the worlds rich and poor grows; television and the Internet make even the most squalid camps and villages aware of it.

And the anger against us grows, including among many people who are not Islamic zealots and who themselves are not violent. All that people like Osama bin Laden have to do is manipulate this anger, turning it into support for a focused instrument of mass murder.

Now we grieve, and our government moves, as it must, to increase domestic security, and to find and destroy the terrorist cells.

But if we are to truly end the threat of terrorism against us, we must also eliminate the reasons why so many people support it. We must convince our government to implement policies toward the Third World that reflect our basic fairness and compassion as a people. That should include three things:

First—taking the lead in helping Third World nations feed their people and eliminate preventable diseases like dysentery and cholera.

Second—promoting global trade, aid and investment policies that help Third World countries strengthen and diversify their economies and improve education. Corporations must understand that they exist to serve not only the providers of capital, but also the providers of labor and the communities in which those laborers live.

Third—re-assess our global strategies. We are not the world's policeman, but our government can still create and sustain policies toward the Third World that better reflect our senses of caring and fair play-supporting no government that represses or impoverishes its own people.

These are ways we can end support for terrorism.

It will not be easy to convince our government to go down this path-even generating the difficult reappraisals needed now in Congress and the White House will be very hard. The same political and corporate pressures that made our Third World policy what it is are acting to keep it that way, while drum-beating rhetoric builds fear, xenophobia and simplistic assessments of the task ahead.

If our leaders offer only a military response to the September 11 attacks and do not also change long-standing policies toward the Third World, they will feed a downward spiral of violence. That is exactly what the terrorists want-their agenda is to provoke Armageddon.

It will take enormous courage from our leaders to add a second front to this new war-to not only seek out and punish terrorists but also to create government policies toward the Third World that are as compassionate as our people are, as respectful of human life, and as eager to do what we know is right. We, the people of these United States, deserve a government that brave.

Now is a moment when history balances on an edge. A decade after the end of the Cold war, facing a new war, decisions are being made. A post-9/11 world is being shaped. Make your voice heard. Tell the President, tell your Senators and Representatives, to seize this moment to create a world in which there is no support for terrorism.