Sadly  but would the response to them also be universal, commensurate with the generality of their moral impact, or instead specific, narrow and parochial?

The test here was of the capacity and readiness of the US for leadership in and of a world that, uncontested, it now dominates. It is a test that, fatefully, the US has already arguably failed.

The answer is clear; not that there was ever going to be much question about how the US under the leadership of Bush and his tight-knit gaggle of stark-minded Strangeloves (or "crackpot realists", as the great sociologist C Wright Mills used to describe such eager riskers of geopolitical doomsday scenarios) would see and respond to the challenge before them.

Rather than aspiring to be commensurate with the moral universality and human inclusiveness of the impact of those events, their response to Sept 11 has been narrow, shrunken, parochialising.

The US response to such events was always likely, under any of its recent presidents, to be so; but under Bush, the "shrub" or "bonsai president" with his embarrassingly limited outlook and severely "challenged" cosmopolitanism, it was unlikely to have been otherwise.

Alienating mantra

We all know the problem. The rest of the world uses 'international A4'-sized paper, but not the US with its own idiosyncratic 'letter-size' sheets; we all use metric measures, except the US; and, when abbreviating the date, we all put the day first and the month second (so that September the eleventh is 11/9), but not the US.

The detail may seem trivial but is significant. If the leadership of the US genuinely wishes to speak both to and for the entire world about those events-to articulate their broad and general significance for all humankind, as the basis for asserting their world leadership in addressing those events  but, McDonald's and KFC notwithstanding, we are not all small-town Mid-Westerners in taste and outlook, not yet anyway.

So, how does Bush's US imagine it might provide world leadership: by recognising us all, and addressing us as, who we are? Or by addressing us as, and somehow coercing us all to become, clones of them and their peculiar heart-of-empire parochialisms?

Must we be, do we have no choice, even in our own inner subjectivity, but to become characters of inane simplicity in a US comic strip war, that of Captain Bushy and the Hard Men (plus Condi) against the Evil Beards? 911 or 11/9? It's not only Porsche but all of humankind who has a stake in whether the US succeeds in imposing its own shorthand on us all.

Am I reading too much into this piece of shorthand compression, the 911 phrase? Perhaps, but I think not. Let me offer another brief example of, and insight into, this same parochialisation.

Strategic ownership

When challenged recently on Australian television about the urgency of an attack on Iraq, the former Republican Congressional strongman Newt Gingrich replied, with considerable heat and irritation, that it was necessary because "3,000 of our people" had been brutally wiped out in the attack on the World Trade Centre.

Well, yes, that attack was in the US and directed against it and what, for some, it supposedly stands for; so the event occurred in, and was intended and made to speak with reference to, the US.

But those victims were not 3,000 of its people. They were 3,000 people, working on that day in New York City, who had been drawn there, and many of whom still retained their continuing connections to their origins, from across the large parts of this world.

Drawn from all its continents and from all of humankind, they provided not a perfect random sample but nonetheless a microcosm of a worldwide humanity: a category that, Newt Gingrich notwithstanding, is both broader and greater than that of "our people, US citizens".

What Gingrich's rhetoric of "our people" sought, as the entire US effort of which it is part seeks, to do is to assert US "ownership"  we hold the keys to its meaning, we in the US have the right to decide how to respond. The rest of you will follow our lead, and will consent to act with us in our terms.

So you may as well habituate yourselves, even at the level of these trivial details, to act and think in our quaint terms. You may as well make them your own. Globalisation by parochialisation, by the diffusion of regnant, dominant or "hegemonic" parochialisms. Our limits, our circumscribed horizons, shall be yours too ...

Inclusive plan of action

So, reverting now to the recent events in Bali, from 11/9 to 10/12, if any good may come of the appalling events of the twelfth of October, it may lie in the fact of the identities of the majority of the victims. They were not, this time, primarily citizens of the US; they were mainly Australians, as well as Indonesians, especially Balinese whose lives have been violated and whose world has been horrendously despoiled.

So if this too is part of the onslaught of the new global terror, and if the response to it is necessarily an integral part of the worldwide war against terrorism, then, perhaps now, the symbolics of this worldwide human drama may now become something wider too; not just, like the idiosyncratic 911 shorthand coinage, a matter of and for the US.

What is needed now is not just an old-fashioned sheriff (how ironic, indeed, that, via Spain/Andalus, the origins of this 'all-American' expression, so well known to us from all those cowboy movies we watched on Saturday afternoons during our 1950s childhoods, lie, so widely unacknowledged throughout the US, in the Arabic language).

What is needed is not a mid-Western sheriff or Texas 'posse' bent upon delivering punishment or even vengeance, against the wrongdoer or some available surrogate, but concerted, inclusive human action, in a form appropriate to a globalising world, a world of advancing universal human interdependence.

Whether the 'war against terror' and the war on Iraq are two different things or two faces of the same thing may be arguable. What is not arguable is that success in the war against terror will need to be broadly based.

It will have to be grounded in and reflect broad human concerns, not just those of the narrow and strategically autistic leadership groups of a single dominant world power. It will have to unite, widely from all of humankind, the many against the few.

Success will require the mobilisation of a wide coalition of support from people of all religions and faith communities, including those with no conventional religious faith other than a human faith in humanity itself.

It will have to be securely grounded among followers of all the major religious faiths, including and especially including the moderate, modern, cosmopolitan, inclusive and democratic Muslims.

It will have to be a plan of action that enables and encourages them to declare what they stand for, as members of the universal human community under an Almighty power (one which is not the US), in distinction to the historically myopic and morally exclusive extremes of politically regressive 'Islamism'.

It will not succeed if it alienates them, makes their support impossible to enlist, and even drives them, reluctantly and against their own ethical preferences, into a defence of a beleaguered and humiliated Islamic civilisation, including its most benighted members and components.

Broader engagement

Nor can the war against terror be won by military means alone. Success will require a broader, deeper, more comprehensive cultural engagement, a struggle based upon principles of the moral equality and equal human worth of the strong and the weak: in other words, just the kind of struggle that a great power, so long as it remains confined by its self-regarding moral autism and limited by the horizons of vengeful militaristic vainglory, is singularly ill-equipped to inspire, co-ordinate and lead.

The war against terror, this means, cannot and will not be won as a struggle, either a purely military response or even a more comprehensive cultural struggle, of Westerners (led by the US, on narrow US-based terms) against the world and peoples of Islam.

Perhaps the one ray of light here in this bleak scene is that some significant opinion leaders and commentators in the US itself are now beginning to realise this and reiterate this message.

Daniel Pipes, for example, the hitherto ridiculed Cassandra who is popularly seen as having been vindicated by the events of Sept 11, argues forcefully that the enemy is not Islam but politically regressive 'Islamism', and that the support of modern, moderate, democratic and inclusive Muslims must be enlisted, really engaged and not simply voicelessly co-opted, into this struggle.

But even if the US strategic directorate recognises the importance of this point, the question will be whether they are capable of imagining, willing and actually doing what is necessary to give effect to it.

The test of the sincerity of those directing the US 'war against terror' will be their readiness to give priority to this kind of inclusive struggle: not just in principle or as a matter of lip-service, but whether Bush and his Team of Hard Men and Gal are capable of understanding the terms and creating a basis of concerted action that exceeds the all too familiar 'America first' simplicities of all recent presidencies, but especially this present one.

Historical watershed

For a long time the US leadership and people have thought that to have a foreign policy means to act in and upon the external world. That was supposedly the privilege, first of continental isolation, then of world pre-eminence: a kind of immunity, the ability to act in the world but not to be acted upon or affected by it.

Foreign policy was largely thought to have consequences only in the outside world, beyond the nation's continental borders. (The attack upon Pearl Harbor strangely had the effect of reinforcing this view: the US might be vulnerable in Hawaii, or later perhaps in Cuba, but the continent itself was something else.)

Like all great civilisations and powers that have enjoyed success from early in their history, the US and its leaders have believed that they might live in the world on their own terms, influencing but generally uninfluenced and unaffected by what people elsewhere thought and did.

This was why the shock of Sept 11 was so great, so traumatic, and why the event has proved such a historical watershed to the US.

By the extreme, appalling and morally unconscionable nature of the actions taken against the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US was made to recognise that its actions in and upon the rest of the world may yield, even in the most perverse forms, actions back upon the US that are unsought, unwelcome, undesirable and also quite unexpected by it.

Committed to the notion of US 'exceptionalism' in world history, the leaders and citizens of the world's only superpower have been painfully, brutally and violently instructed that their claimed 'exceptionalism' is not synonymous with, and does not afford them, exemption or immunity from world history, and certainly not from wider reactions to their own role and part in it.

This is the lesson of 11 September for the US. Meanwhile, for the nations and peoples of Southeast Asia, the book being launched today, from even before they occurred, shows that the events of 12 October 2002 were long in the making and helps explain why they happened.

It also demonstrates why a narrow, imperial and vainglorious '911-ism' needs to be broadened into a genuinely inclusive and democratic war on terrorism: a battle not just of arms and military might but of cultural and moral engagement of humanity, of humankind generally, against brutalised and brutalising inhumanity.

Professor of Sociology at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, CLIVE S KESSLER has been researching and writing about Malaysian subjects since the 1960s. Some of his recent work in general social theory has been concerned with globalisation, especially the tensions between its universal potential and the compromised and even distorted or 'bastardised' forms that it may take under the aegis of neo-liberal market imperatives and powerful cultural hegemonies.

These comments comprise his remarks at a seminar and public forum held at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia on Oct 17 in conjunction with the launching of September 11 and Political Freedom: Asian Perspectives edited by Uwe Johannen, Alan Smith & James Gomez, Select Books Singapore for Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, Bangkok, 2002.