You have to hand it to the PM. The closer he gets to retirement the more he looks like a statesman. Last week he addressed an international anti-terrorism conference in New York and told them that to defeat terrorism, “we must identify the elements that create the conditions of terrorism.” No one country can do this alone, he said, and called for an effective response that respects international law. This view is a far cry from that of the United States which thinks it can do it alone if it has to, though of course they would like help as long as they don’t have to share leadership.

The U.S. is a nation which, despite the findings of its own intelligence agencies, thinks that the causes of terrorism are simplistic and can be solved with military power. It is a country that is afraid of international law and has refused to sign on to the International Criminal Court.

As much as many Canadians may make fun of Jean Chrétien, he is certainly a more intelligent and sensible world leader than the draft dodging Texas yahoo currently making a terrible mess of things south of the border. I would not be surprised if Jean moves on to a role with the UN or another international organization after turning the country over to Paul Martin.

Speaking of the causes of terrorism, the simpletons would have us believe that the roots lie in religion and somekind of hatred for the good things of western society. This despite reports from the CIA and other sources to the contrary. It is easy to understand the reluctance on the part of the U.S. government and a number of people to consider the root causes of terrorism. Such a consideration would demand a change in lifestyles anddistribution of resources, a change many would find uncomfortable as it deals with how wealth is distributed throughout the world.

Globally, 20 per cent of the world’s people account for 86 per cent of consumption, leaving 14 per cent for the other 80 per cent. The United States with about five per cent of the global population is a major consumer of the world’s wealth. It is also the driving force in world economic policy that even the World Bank is warning is sucking the wealth out of poor countries into the wealthy ones. As a result over a third of the world’s population do not have access to proper sanitation. 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 1.2 billion also live on less than $1 per day. Almost a billion people are malnourished, and millions die from hunger.

A common retort to the claim that poverty and wretched conditions lie at the base of terrorism is that the 9/11 terrorists were mostly from well-to-do families and Osama is a wealthy man. Ergo, they say, it isn’t a lack of wealth, it is religion that gives rise to terrorists. Robert A. Pape at The New York Times disagrees. He spent a year compiling a database of suicide bombing attacks between 1980 and 2001, 188 of them. Rather than religion, what he found to be the motivation factor was a secular strategic goal to force out foreign forces from what they consider to be their home territory. Religion, he says, is an organizing tool, not a cause.

What Pape does not deal with is the role of poverty, the underlying factor that creates vast numbers of people with little hope and nothing to lose. People who are a ready pool of recruits for those who offer a better life, either here or in some future world. People who provide the sea of support and concealment through which the terrorists swim. Granted, many terrorists and theirleadership may be persons well off, but that is notunusual for any social or political movement. However,where would any of them be if they did not have a friendly population to hide them and support them?

Jean Chrétien is right when he says we must identify the conditions that create terrorism. The real question is,do we have the will to change them?