LOS ANGELES: The Bush administration has been waging the global war on terrorism as if terrorism is a movement, an ideology, a political coalition, with little differentiation from case to case. This has distorted our moral view of the world and enabled even Slobodan Milosevic to justify his horrific policies of death and ethnic cleansing.

Terrorism is an instrument, not a movement. It is an immoral means employed by groups, some of which have just causes, some of which do not. To reduce its occurrence, it must be internationally delegitimized and the conditions under which it thrives minimized.

By definition, legitimacy and illegitimacy cannot be unilaterally decided; when the United States goes against the rest of the world, it is US actions that appear illegitimate. The world supported the United States after the Sept 11 attacks not because of how we defined the global war on terrorism, but despite it.

The US was attacked in the cruelest way by a group that employs only terrorism and whose aim is nothing short of our pain and destruction. There was no possible compromise or political solution. The US was neither in conflict with Afghanistan nor did we occupy its territories.

There is a creeping and unfortunate tendency in US debates to compare Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians to the US war in Afghanistan. There is a reason why the US stands alone around the world in making this comparison.

Even if the US sympathizes with Israel’s security aims, its inability to see the illegitimacy of the scope and scale of Sharon’s actions in the West Bank undermines the international legitimacy that is essential for the success of the global struggle against terrorist means. And the narrow US focus on the means alone is blinding it to the potential consequences of escalation that the rest of the world deeply fears.

The “go it alone” view that informs the US debate today is a dangerous illusion. The US is very powerful but not powerful enough to confront the global threats alone. And it certainly cannot unilaterally determine what is internationally legitimate. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.