LOS ANGELES: Although tough talk from the president may seem reassuring, the Bush administration’s confrontational posture is likely to exacerbate the threat of terrorist attacks.

The diplomatic ultimatum - “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” - is alienating existing and potential allies, and feeding into resentment of American unilateralism.

Since the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and the Kosovo war, Europeans have complained about the United States’ cowboy diplomacy - with the French inventing the term ‘hyperpower” to describe America’s disquieting role in the world. In the Mideast, resentment of US policy has grown steadily since the Gulf War.

Despite the Defence Department’s dumping of the name ‘Infinite Justice” and Bush’s apology for use of the term ‘crusade,” there is an air of Christian fundamentalism in the enterprise. This makes life even harder for governments in the Islamic world - already caught in a difficult position between increasingly militant populations with substantive grievances against US policy and the US steamroller on the other.

Bush’s declaration that the US will target not only Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network but all terrorist organizations of ‘global reach,’ their ‘support networks,’ the Taliban - and all others who do not submit to US demands - is already creating new enemies. If large-scale military operations start and civilians are killed, those enemies will multiply tenfold.

Meanwhile there is talk about ‘freeing’ the CIA to do more ‘human intelligence’ work, which seems to forget that Osama and other Afghan extremists are products of CIA operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s to thwart the Soviet occupation there.

Instead, the US must say to other countries, “We will work with you to find out who is guilty. We will reconsider controversial policies of ours and submit them to the judgment of international bodies. But you must help us to find these people who want to kill American civilians.”

The ‘war on terrorism’ the Bush administration plans to wage will increase the chances of reprisal attacks against the US. A criminal investigation, with genuine international cooperation, would dramatically decrease the threat, especially if accompanied by a change in overall US foreign policy. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.