When allied troops defeated Germany in 1945, and the magnitude of Nazi atrocities became clear, world opinion differed sharply as to what should be done to punish the perpetrators.

Winston Churchill favoured summary executions. Stalin, unsurprisingly, concurred. Others urged dismantling German industry and returning the country to an agrarian past.

Instead, the allied victors chose a very different course. They turned the Nazi leaders over to an international court for criminal prosecution, and helped the German people rebuild their country.

In his opening statement to the Nuremberg Trials, Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the American government, explained the magnitude of this decision:

&#0147The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated,&#0148 Jackson said. &#0147That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.&#0148

Calculated. Malignant. Devastating. Intolerable. All words that aptly describe the atrocities visited upon New York and Washington this month. But this time, in the bitter rage that swept over the United States, vengeance has the upper hand over reason. It was nearly so at Nuremberg.

&#0147The Nazi crimes,&#0148 wrote Hannah Arendt, the trials&#146 best known chronicler, &#0147explode the limits of the law … For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Goering, but it is totally inadequate.&#0148

History proved Arendt wrong. The trials were not inadequate. Together with the American strategy of rebuilding Germany&#146s civil institutions and restoring its industrial base, they succeeded brilliantly.

The criminals who conceived and executed the most notorious atrocities of the twentieth century were tried, convicted, and punished according to the rule of law. The victors extended a helping hand to the German people, enabling them to rebuild their economy. In the half century that has passed since, Germany has been an exemplary member of the world community.

Could we do the same with those who perpetrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

The Taliban leadership&#146s offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to an Islamic court if the U.S. produced evidence of his culpability was cynical and ill motivated. But a slightly different course, bin Laden&#146s capture and surrender to an international tribunal like the one operating at The Hague, could be a courageous and effective response to the events of September 11.

By arresting bin Laden and subjecting him to trial by an international court, the U.S. would retain the moral high ground Islamic extremists surrendered with the World Trade Center attacks.

The alternative, throwing enough bombers and cruise missiles at the hills of Afghanistan to kill bin Laden and some of his henchmen, would have the opposite effect. A country already ravaged by ten years of war and an estimated 1.5-million deaths will suffer more civilian casualties. Even now, the removal of international relief workers has sparked a mass flight of terrified citizens to the countryside, where years drought has already caused dreadful famine.

In their fury at this month&#146s sneak attacks, most Americans have been unwilling to look at the root causes of the hatred with which the U.S. is viewed in much of the Middle East. President George W. Bush and other U.S. leaders have spoken of the militant Islamics&#146 &#0147hatred of freedom,&#0148 but the problem goes much deeper than that.

To look at the causes of the despair that allows criminals like bin Laden to flourish – at American support for Israel in the Palestinian conflict, for example, or the estimated half million children who have died as a result of the West&#146s otherwise ineffective sanctions against Iraq, or the massive civilian deaths that resulted from indiscriminate American retaliation for earlier terrorist attacks – is dismissed as an attempt to excuse the September 11 atrocities.

When the fury subsides and America is able to look at its long-term interests more clearly, cooler heads may realize that bombing Afghanistan and Iraq will only perpetuate the resentment and desperation that breeds terrorism.

Like Franklin Roosevelt, George Bush faces a choice between satisfying an understandable desire for vengeance, and thereby escalating and perpetuating the violence, or taking the necessary steps to make the world a safer, more just place.