Posted on: Wednesday, October 16, 2002

EDITORIAL
U.S. war on terrorism must not be simplistic

The bomb attack that killed more than 180 people on the Indonesian island of Bali has all the earmarks of an extension of the al-Qaida terrorism jihad.

So do the the shootings of two Marines in Kuwait a week ago and the bombing of a French supertanker in Yemen two weeks ago.

Yet so, too, did the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. No wonder the authorities were surprised that Oklahoma City was the work of a couple of maverick Americans and not well-organized Islamists.

The point here is that terrorism, even in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, remains a technique available to anyone with a burning resentment; it is not the monopoly of al-Qaida.

President Bush seems premature in suggesting all three of these recent attacks — Bali, Kuwait and Yemen — are a pattern that shows al-Qaida on the rise. Perhaps. But why not wait for facts?

One fact is that while majorities of people in Kuwait and Indonesia are friendly to the United States, small numbers sympathize with an anti-American jihad. Whether the the bombers in Bali were part of an international conspiracy or just local wannabes with local grievances, remains to be shown.

To be sure, it's clear that Indonesia has failed badly to heed warnings that it harbors dangerous radical Muslim elements. Suspicion for this bombing has fallen on Jemaah Islamiyah, a group that Singapore says is based in Indonesia and is linked to Osama bin Laden's terror network. Jakarta's problem with simply rounding up the group and its leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, is that it could provoke a backlash against the nascent democracy in the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Investigators say Bashir is linked both to al-Qaida and to frustrated plans for bombings in Singapore. We must hope Jakarta will follow up on that information with new intensity. But experts warn that the global terrorism threat, especially since the war in Afghanistan, increasingly consists of like-minded but independent groups without direct ties to al-Qaida.

So the war against terrorism is likely to be a complicated and dangerous probe into dark shadows. It continues to be hard to see how the coming war against Iraq is directly related or contributes to this probe. Bush's scolding of Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was unnecessarily harsh in view of the many Indonesians who died in the bombing and the blow it represents to that country's tourism industry.

Indeed, the Bali bombing, the worst terrorism incident since the 9/11 attacks, victimizing as it did Indonesians, Australians, Europeans and Americans, needs no embellishment to serve as an international rallying call in the war on terrorism.