September 11, 2001 will long be remembered as the day that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent victims of a terrorist attack against the United States of America. The televised images of high jacked airliners with their crew and passengers crashing deliberately into huge skyscrapers that crumbled and fell, and the massive rescue operations that followed, left viewers stunned and unbelieving.

Such acts of violence cannot be condoned. Ways must be found to rid the world of terrorism and overcome the hatred that drives those who resort to such desperate, suicidal measures.

But U.S. President George Bush and the American state are planning a military response to the September 11 terrorist attack. That is the worst possible response for two reasons.

1. It won’t work. You can’t destroy terrorism by a military attack in which even more innocent men, women and children will be maimed, killed or left homeless, starving and even more embittered at their attackers;

2. By opting for retribution through a military response, the U.S. administration would be attacking the symptom rather than the cause of terrorism.

Some people argue that to examine the root cause of terrorism is tantamount to excusing it. They argue that to act quickly with a military retaliation is the only answer that terrorists will understand and the only way to deter further terrorism.

The fact is that terrorism has too often been fought militarily with no positive outcome. As a result more and more people are packed into refugee camps, where unemployment, hunger, misery and hopelessness create the fertile ground for recruiting more and more terrorists.

In the wake of the horrific September 11 events, Americans should realize that their chickens have come home to roost. They must stop to analyze what they have done to raise the antagonism against them to the point of suicidal terrorist attacks. They must demand accountability from their government, their President and the CIA. They must no longer tolerate a foreign policy which is supposed to protect them but in fact exposes them to danger.

The U.S.A., the wealthiest nation on earth has drawn wealth from everyone. Americans live in luxurious conditions while millions throughout the world are homeless. They engage in conspicuous consumption while people starve in countries whose resources have come under American ownership and control. People in those countries see American oil and mining companies exploit their resources, destroy their environment, ruin their farms, and shatter their economies.

Americans regularly interfere in the internal affairs of other nations to protect the financial empires of their trans-national corporations. They overthrow democracies, prop up dictatorships and send in the CIA to create surrogate armies to attack peoples’ movements and crush their attempts to build democracies. Examples of such American complicity in injustice are legion.

Here are a few examples:

• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the U.S. supports decade’s long Israeli defiance of United Nations resolutions, and human rights declarations, keeping millions from reclaiming their homeland.

• The decade long American-led sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children under five years of age.

• American strategic alliances with the military and monarchial dictatorships of Algeria, Turkey, Egypt and the oil rich Arab states.

• The CIA recruitment, financing, training and arming of Osama bin Laden and his band of terrorists, Al-Quida, to overturn the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So there is good reason why many people in Latin American, Africa, Asia and the Islamic world hate the U.S.A. It is not that they hate freedom, as President Bush pronounces. It is that their every attempt at freedom, democracy and self-determination has been ruthlessly quashed by an American foreign policy dictated, not by average American citizens and workers, but by U.S. Trans National Corporations.

The events of September 11 should be seen as a wake up call. Americans must awaken to the dangers that lie in the fact that a major portion of the wealth of the world is in the hands of a minority of the world’s population, most of whom are the wealthy American elite. Given that degree of disparity in the distribution of wealth in the world and considering how the U.S. Trans National Corporations have trampled on the rights of others in accumulating that wealth, the reason why hatred of America is boiling over in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America is no mystery.

The U.S. must share its wealth with the rest of the world. The best weapon against terrorism would be a "War on Poverty". That could involve foreign aid, a modern Marshal Plan to promote self-sufficiency in those countries whose resources have been co-opted and whose ecologies have been devastated by U.S. interests. It should include helping the have not countries to develop adequate housing, clean water, modern food production, and modern health and education systems.

That is the kind of help Prime Minister Chrétien should be offering to the U.S. President George Bush – help in eliminating the threat of terrorism, not by a military attack on the symptoms of terrorism, but by joining in attacking its cause.

Canadians must not be dragged into the muck and slime of a military response, doomed to failure and certain to exacerbate the problem of terrorism.

(Dave Werlin is a long-time labour activist and leader. He was president of the Alberta Federation of Labour and regional director of CUPE.)