The headlines today are bleak. In Beirut the Arab Summit announces that any attack on Iraq will be regarded as an attack on all Arab States. In Washington the trial balloons carry the message of a US attack on Baghdad in the early fall. Israeli tanks are firing on Yassar Arafat’s compound and a fresh bomber explodes herself in a Jerusalem supermarket. Holed up in a windowless basement Arafat calls for more resistance and holed up somewhere Osama Bin Laden sends an e-mail screed to an Arabic language newspaper in London calling for more war. The “last battle” of the Afghani war has been fought and we are again told we won it and to prepare for a long and dispiriting war. From the Suez to the Khyber Pass blood repays blood and an eye answers for an eye. Take an eye for an eye and soon all are blind.

We have come in the first years of this Century to live in the Land of the Blind. Murderers are called martyrs and heinous crimes are called terrorist acts. Bandit chiefs are called warlords and criminal gangs are called private armies. Revenge is reprisal and the civilians who get in the way of tanks or smart bombs are collateral damage. We simply have no eyes left to see and so we continue to shoot at surrogates and miss the real targets. The destruction of the World Trade Towers was not an act of war. It was an horrendous and heinous crime. The planners and perpetrators were not combatants in a war, declared or undeclared. They were mass murderers, no more and no less. That is how we should refer to them, that is how we should treat them and that is how we should go after them until they are brought to the same bar of American justice, as were those who planned and perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bombing Afghanistan into bigger piles of rubble is no substitute for dogged police work.

Israel’s leaders are as blind as are ours. Bombing a Seder celebration is no terrorist act. Bombing a family supermarket or a pizza parlor or a disco are not acts of warfare. These are horrendous and heinous crimes amnd they need to be treated as crimes. Justice is not in sending tanks to isolate Arafat. Justice is not in assassinating another Hamas leader with a hellfire missile. Justice demands that the criminals who plan such outrages be apprehended, tried and punished according to the rule of law. That is not Arafat’s job. It is Sharon’s job. If Israeli troops are to be in action let them do the right job. They know who leads Hamas. They know where those leaders are. Go and get them. If there is credible evidence that Arafat participated in planning, supporting or lending tangible support to the commission of those crimes, then put him in the dock alongside them.

Neither the United States nor Israel are served when we are blind to simple truths that there is a difference between criminals and combatants; that there is a difference between enforcing the rule of law and lashing out in frustration at convenient surrogates; that we cannot permit criminals to define their crimes as warfare. We need to stop now before the entire world has lost its eyes.