The extreme vigour with which the United States has responded to the events of September 11th, seeking to strike at the roots of international terrorism worldwide, has aroused widespread concern among its friends abroad.
There is a fear, deriving from the kind of rhetoric that has been emanating from Washington, that the US government may be tempted to overreact during the course of this year in a way that could prove dangerously destabilising in the Middle East.
The actual significance of this rhetoric is difficult to evaluate. At one level President Bush and members of his team have clearly been seeking by this kind of extreme language to respond to - and also, perhaps, to assuage - public anger in the US in the aftermath of the atrocity of six months ago. But this language has also clearly been designed to prepare global opinion for drastic military action that might be taken by the US in parts of the world which it has convinced itself are sources of threats to its security - principally Iraq.
Now, it may well be that the US government has already made up its mind to attack Iraq later this year and will not be deflected from this course - not even, perhaps, by an Iraqi decision to readmit the UN arms inspectors. If that be the case, then there is serious trouble ahead.
It is true that, contrary to predictions that a US attack on Afghanistan would provoke serious trouble in the Arab world, the US was proved correct in discounting that danger. But it would be most unwise for it to conclude from that experience that an attack on Iraq would be greeted with similar passivity by the Arab peoples and their states. Such an attack could create serious instability in the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, it could also create serious tensions between Europe and the US. At present only Tony Blair and perhaps Jacques Chirac seem prepared to support such a move, but in both their countries there would be strong opposition to the participation of their armed forces in such an enterprise - including opposition from within those two countries' governments. And there are few signs of support from other European states.
There are two factors, however, that could affect these Arab and European reactions - one intensifying and the other softening present stances.
On the one hand, if the present very belated US intervention in the Israeli-Arab dispute in support of the Saudi reciprocal recognition proposal were to succeed in bringing about a definitive resolution of that problem, Arab hostility to a US move against Iraq might be softened. On the other hand, if Iraq were to respond positively to pressures from other Arab states to readmit UN observers and if the US were to ignore this breakthrough and nevertheless persist in attacking Iraq, as some reports suggest might happen, the consequences could be explosive and not just in the Middle East.
Of course, an alternative benign scenario could be that the US policy is really based on what might be called a "strategy of menace" designed to achieve by threat of military action, rather than by actual action of that kind, the elimination of some of the dangers to which it has suddenly realised it is vulnerable.
Whatever it may portend, the present menacing US approach has alarmed the Arab world, which is fearful of its potential consequences for the stability of the Middle East region, although these fears have greatly increased the pressure emanating from other Arab states upon Iraq to reverse its policy of refusing to allow arms inspectors to return to that country. We must not ignore the possibility that this reaction of Arab states to US threats of military action may in due course produce results that could eventually be beneficial to the whole world, in the form of an Iraqi climbdown on the inspection issue.
If the US strategy has, in fact, involved a calculation that the menace of military action might thus prove sufficient to resolve the Iraq problem peacefully, we should not be surprised that this purpose has not been revealed as a prime aim of US policy - for any suggestion that the US may be hoping and working for such a non-military resolution of the problem would weaken, and probably undermine, that very strategy.
It is often the case that governments need to conceal the underlying purpose of their actions to achieve a desired objective. Thus, my primary aim in negotiating with Margaret Thatcher the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985 was to ameliorate British security policy in Northern Ireland so as to swing nationalist electoral support back from Sinn Féin to the SDLP, in this way putting pressure on the IRA to abandon its "armalite and ballot box" strategy in favour of exclusive reliance on the democratic process. But if at the time I had proclaimed this to be my objective, that would have fatally undermined the effectiveness of my strategy.
However, the trouble with an approach covertly designed to secure peace through threats of war is that it will not work unless the threat is credible, which means it must be real. And in this case the fact that if Iraq remains obdurate, the US, apparently with support from a deeply divided Britain, and perhaps France, but not from the rest of Europe, would then be likely to attack Iraq, carrying the danger of creating widespread chaos in the Middle East. This is a dangerous game, played for very high stakes.
That said, it has to be admitted that a heartening by-product of the present crisis has been the way in which the pursuit by the Republican administration in the US of its new anti-terrorism objective has forced it to abandon its earlier abdication of responsibility for peace between Israel and Palestine - and has also led its government to undertake an equally belated constructive intervention in the long-running Kashmir crisis. These are two positive consequences of the global terrorism crisis. The consequences of the inertia of the new Republican Administration during its first year in office in relation to the Palestinian issue have been grave. A hardline government in Israel has been encouraged by this passive US approach to adopt an increasingly repressive policy that has undone much earlier progress. However, the fact that the US now needs to secure Arab support for, or at least tolerance of, aspects of its anti-terrorism stance seems finally to have forced a rethink.
It remains to be seen what success will attend these belated US efforts to retrieve a situation in Palestine, but the fact that for the first time in several years a serious effort is being made to resolve this intractable problem is an uncovenanted benefit flowing from the post-September 11th crisis.