I doubt if I have come across a more pithy statement exposing the hypocrisy of America's war against terrorism; but this is what I read, well before September 11, 2001, on a car-sticker in the commuter parking lot in Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA.

States are founded on a monopoly over violence, which has nearly always included the right to kill. In fact, that is the very essence of the state. States seek to enforce this monopoly by amassing instruments of violence; but that is scarcely enough. They also use religion, ideology and laws to deligitimize and root out violence stemming from non-state agents.

This monopoly over violence creates its own problem. Unchallenged, the state can turn the instruments of violence against its own population. This leads to state tyranny. The state can also wage wars to enrich one or more sectional interests. This defines the dual challenge before all organized societies: restraining state tyranny and limiting its war-making powers.

Often, there has existed a tradeoff between tyranny and wars. Arguably, such a tradeoff was at work during the period of European expansion since the sixteenth century, when Europeans slowly secured political rights even as they engaged in growing, even genocidal, violence, especially against non-Europeans. As Western states gradually conceded rights to their own populations, they intensified the murder and enslavement of Americans and Africans, founding white colonies on lands stolen from them. Few Westerners were troubled by this inverse connection: this was the essence of racism.

The United States is only the most successful of the colonial creations, a fact that has left its indelible mark on American thinking. It is a country that was founded on violence against its native inhabitants; this led, over three centuries of expansion, to the near extermination of Indians, with the few survivors relocated to inhospitable reservations. Its history also includes the violence - on a nearly equal scale - perpetrated against the Africans who were torn from their continent to create wealth for the new Republic. Such a genesis, steeped in violence against others races, convinced most Americans that they had the divine right - like the ancient Israelites - to build their prosperity on the ruin of other, 'inferior' races.

In addition to the manipulations of a corporate media, this ethos explains why so many Americans support the actions of their government abroad - in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Iran, Palestine or Iraq, to name only a few. It is unnecessary to look too closely into these interventions since they are undertaken to secure 'our' interests. Even if they result in deaths - the deaths of more than three-quarters of a million children, as in Iraq - to borrow a felicitous phrase from Madeline Albright, "the price is worth it."

Of course, few Americans understand that their country has long stood at the apex - and, therefore, is the chief beneficiary - of a global system that produces poverty for the greater part of humanity, including within the United States itself; that this system subordinates all social, cultural, environmental and human values to the imperatives of corporate capital; a system that now kills people by the millions merely by setting the rules that devastate their economies, deprive them of their livelihood, their dignity and, eventually, their lives. The corporate media, the school curricula, and the Congress ensure that most Americans never see past the web of deceit - about a free, just, tolerant and caring United States - that covers up the human carnage and environmental wreckage this system produces.

The wretched of the earth are not so easily duped. They can see - and quite clearly, through the lens of their dark days - how corporate capital, with United States in the lead, produces their home-based tyrannies; how their economies have been devastated to enrich transnational corporations and their local collaborators; how the two stifle indigenous movements for human rights, women's rights, and worker's rights; how they devalue indigenous traditions and languages; how corporate capital uses their countries as markets, as sources of cheap labor, as fields for testing new, deadlier weapons, and as sites for dumping toxic wastes; how their men and women sell body parts because the markets place little value on their labor.

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The world - outside the dominant West - has watched how the Zionists, with the support of Britain and the United States, imposed a historical anachronism, a colonial-settler state in Palestine, a throw-back to a sanguinary past, when indigenous populations in the Americas could be cleansed with impunity to make room for Europe's superior races. In horror, they watch daily how a racist Israel destroys the lives of millions of Palestinians through US-financed weaponry and fresh-contrived acts of malice; how it attacks its neighbors at will; how it has destabilized, distorted and derailed the historical process in an entire region; and how, in a final but foreordained twist, American men and women have now been drawn into this conflict, to make the Middle East safe for Israeli hegemony.

In Iraq, over the past thirteen years, the world has watched the United States showcase the methods it will use to crush challenges to the new imperialism - the New World Order - that was launched after the end of the Cold War. This new imperialism commands more capital and more lethal weapons than the old imperialisms of Britain, France or Germany. It is imperialism without rivals and, therefore, it dares to pursue its schemes, its wars, and its genocidal campaigns, under the cover of international legitimacy: through the United Nations, the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization. In brief, it is a deadlier, more pernicious imperialism.

Under the cover of the Security Council, the United States has waged a total war against Iraq - a war that went well beyond the means that would be needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait. The aerial bombing of Iraq, in the months preceding the ground action in January 1991, sought the destruction of the country's civilian infrastructure, a genocidal act under international law; it destroyed power plants, water-purification plants, sewage facilities, bridges and bomb shelters. It was the official (though unstated) aim of these bombings to sting the Iraqis into overthrowing their rulers. Worse, the war was followed by a never-relenting campaign of aerial bombings and the most complete sanctions in recorded history. According to a UN study, the sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children by 1995; the deaths were the result of a five-fold increase in child mortality rates. It would have taken five Hiroshima bombs to produce this grisly toll.

Then came September 11, 2001, a riposte from the black holes of global capitalism to the New World Order. Nineteen hijackers took control of passenger airplanes in Boston, Newark and Virginia, and rammed them, one after another, into the twin towers of the Word Trade Center and the Pentagon; the fourth missed its target, possibly the White House. Following a script that had been carefully rehearsed, the nineteen hijackers enacted a macabre ritual, taking their own lives even as they took the lives of nearly three thousand Americans. The hijackers did not wear uniforms; they were not flying stealth bombers; they carried nothing more lethal (so we are told) than box cutters and plastic knives; they had not been dispatched or financed by any government. And yet, using the principles of jujitsu, they had turned the civilian technology of the world's greatest power against its own civilians. As Arundhati Roy put it, the hijackers had delivered "a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong."

The terrorist attacks of 9-11 shocked, perhaps traumatized, a whole nation. Yet the same Americans expressed little concern - in fact, most could profess total ignorance - about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians caused by daily bombings and crippling sanctions over a period of thirteen years. Of course, the dollar and the dinar are not the same. American deaths could not be equated on a one-to-one basis with Iraqi deaths. If indeed so many Iraqis had been killed by the United States, those were deaths they deserved for harboring ill-will towards this country. They were after all evil. And evil people should never be given a chance to repent or change their evil-doing propensities. Senator John McCain said it succinctly: "We're coming after you. God may have mercy on you, but we won't."

There are some who were impressed and alarmed - in equal measure - by the grisly efficiency with which the terrorists had executed their operation. (On this ground, some even argued that it could not have been the work of "incompetent" Arabs.) However, it would appear that there is greater political cunning at work in the conception of these attacks. Al-Qaida gave the Bush hawks what they wanted, a terrorist attack that would inflame Americans into supporting war against the Third world; and the Bush hawks gave al-Qaida what they wanted, a war that would plant tens of thousands of Americans in the cities and towns of the Islamic world.