The wide earthly world

George W Bush’s war on terror got into full swing in 2002. A new regime got settled in Afghanistan. The earth shattered with the force of the bombs. Refugees began to return. Radios began to play music.

But seek him here or seek him there, nobody caught or killed Osama bin Laden, nor indeed Mullah Omar. Despite the rumours that he might have been powdered in some mountain cave, bin Laden verifiably re-surfaced in November, on tape at least, warning of all-out war.

Nobody and nowhere is safe, it seems. Some attempts were unsuccessful – remember Richard Reid, the shoe terrorist? But in October bombs exploded on Bali, and hundreds died, mostly Australian holidaymakers and backpackers. But people of other nationalities were killed too, including many Europeans, Irish among them.

At more or less the same time, Chechen guerrillas seized a Moscow theatre and again hundreds died. But this time it was the rescuers who killed them, apparently misjudging their use of an anaesthetic gas pumped into the theatre.

As with so much to do with terror, this exposed the ambiguities of every position. The Chechens regard themselves as involved in a war of liberation against Russia, which has bombed and brutalised them, reducing the capital Grozny literally to rubble. The boundary between bad and good isn’t quite as clear-cut as Bush would wish us to believe.

In parallel, the terrible fury that is Palestine and Israel continued. Many hundreds died, either from the relentless Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing or the equally ruthless and indiscriminate Israeli military response. To take just one example, on March 8 at least 35 Palestinians were killed and one Israeli. The Israelis occupied Gaza, and surrounded refugee camps. Armed men and innocents died alike...

What worries everyone there is that Israel has nuclear weapons and has the willingness to use them in the event of a final showdown. India and Pakistan also have such weapons and spent a lot of 2002 threatening war on each other.

Everyone else grew very nervous indeed, and not without reason. Not only are the two Asian giants in violent dispute over Kashmir, they also seem to have very little understanding of the actual consequences of nuclear war.

This is also said of Saddam Hussein. True, he doesn’t have nuclear capacity, though not for want of trying. But he is alleged to have other weapons of mass destruction, such as poison gas and the like.

Is this true? Only weapons inspection can tell. But the possibility that he might was exploited by George Bush and Tony Blair throughout 2002. Indeed, the campaign against Saddam gradually took over from the pursuit of bin Laden.

There is an irony here. Saddam has not attacked the West nor indeed, any of his neighbours since the end of the Gulf War. But Israel has – it has treated UN resolutions with an absolute disdain, disregarding them as a matter of course. Even though Bush demanded that Israeli troops be withdrawn from the West Bank, they weren’t.

Moreover, while Saddam is a thoroughly unpleasant person, and is responsible for great atrocities, for example against the Kurds, he is not a great deal worse than others with whom the West does business throughout the world.

Well, at the time of writing, weapons inspectors are due back in Iraq, after the UN Security Council passed a motion demanding that they be given access. Time will tell...