by Dr. Stanley Kalpage
The global reach and military might of the world's sole superpower were dramatically displayed in the swift US response to the 07 August bombings of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania which left 263 persons, including 12 Americans, dead and nearly 5000 persons injured.

Three individuals were separately indicted in a US Manhattan court. Two of then were charged on counts of murder, conspiracy and using weapons of mass destruction. One, an engineer of Jordanian origin, Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, who carried out a profitable fishing business along Kenya's Swahili coast was flown in from Pakistan. The second, a Yemeni national, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al Owhali, who allegedly rode on the explosives laden truck, was brought to New York from Nairobi.

Both Odeh and Owhali were alleged to have links with a Saudi-born millionaire, Osama bin Laden, the villain of the piece, said to have masterminded the attack and to have provided the explosive materials.

Simultaneously, 73 Tomahawk cruise missiles, at an estimated cost of $70 million, were fired from US warships on what the Americans have described as bin Laden's "infrastructure of terrorism" used in his alleged "declaration of war" against everything American. The two targets chosen for the cruise missile attacks were a pharmaceutical plant near Khartoum, with tenuous ties to Osama bin Laden, and a complex of camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border said to be the headquarters of Osama bin Laden's terrorist guerrillas.

Odeh and bin Laden
While there has been widespread support, except perhaps in the Muslim world, for the US action against the scourge of terrorism, the US retaliation has been widely commented upon and criticised. There has been much speculation as to whether the US move has been inspired more by exasperation rather than by cool reason.

Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, said to be a disciple of Osama bin Laden, has been arraigned with having planned the East African bombings. The complaint laid the blame for the bombings on Al Quaida, an organisation at the centre of bin Laden's far-flung terrorist network, but did not provide any direct evidence of bin Laden's complicity in these bombings. Odeh is alleged to have told Pakistani authorities that he had helped plan the Nairobi attack.

A "terrorist university" in Afghanistan?
Osama bin Laden, a young Saudi engineer, founded the Al Quaida organisation in the mid-1980s to organise Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion. He fought beside the Afghan rebels trained and equipped by the CIA. After the Afghan war, Al Quaida remained as a paramilitary organisation seeking to overthrow all Muslim governments which bin Laden considers to be corrupt. It also advocates the destruction of the United States which is seen as the chief obstacle to reform in Muslim societies.

As he tells it bin Laden's goal is to foment a religious struggle that will unify the world's 1 billion Muslims. "We deal with the Islamic world as a single state and co-operate with people on a basis of righteousness and piety as far as we can," he said shortly after his return to Afghanistan in 1996, after his expulsion from Sudan under heavy U.S. pressure. "We are a single nation with one religion."

The US cruise missiles were directed at a complex of Al Quaida's camps located near the town of Khost in the Afghanistan mountains. Bin Laden is said to have been at the camp complex in Khost but is thought to have escaped unhurt. One US report describes the training facility as "the largest Sunni training facility in the world" where terrorists from around the world receive paramilitary training. Others say that it is no more than a ramshackle of camps where bin Laden's men received their indoctrination and training.

A pharmaceutical complex or a chemical weapons factory?
The other object of the cruise missiles attack was the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory north of Khartoum which the Americans allege prepared a chemical precursor used in the manufacture of VX gas and was financed by bin Laden through Sudanese authorities. The evidence adduced is not so convincing. It is still not clear as to why the US decided to strike El Shifa when previous reports had not categorised it as a chemical weapons manufacturer.

The Americans were secretive to begin with on the details and later said that they had soil samples with traces of a chemical which could only be used in the production of VX chemical, known by its acronym EMPTA. A pentagon official added. "Soil samples don't lie." One the other hand, Sudanese officials emphasised that the pharmaceutical facility made life-saving medicines, such as drugs for use against malaria.

The Sudanese invited the UN to send a mission to investigate the US claims. They even suggested that ex-president Jimmy Carter could come and see for himself. In Martyrs' Square, Khartoum, president Omar Hassan Bashir mounted a podium bedecked with posters of president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and told a chanting mass of 10,000 people: "This is a wicked president. This president lied to the whole world and to his people, and he is still lying.

Fight against terrorism
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, during her visit to Kenya and Tanzania, where she visited the devastated U. S. embassies, lashed out at the use of terror. "Terror is not a form of political expression and certainly not a manifestation of religious faith," she said. "It is murder, pure and simple." Albright characterised terrorism as "unfortunately the war of the future."

President Clinton's national Security Adviser Samuel ('Sandy') Berger said the Untied States considered the Afghan training camp in Khost to be a military target. He cited two laws, one international and one American, to justify the attack. The first; Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which cites the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations."

The second; a 1996 law passed by Congress that instructs the president to "use all necessary means, including covert action and military force, to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy international infrastructure used by international terrorists, including overseas terrorists training facilities and safe havens."

US allies applaud
Russian president Boris Yeltsin was reported at first to be "outraged" by the US attacks. "The whole world did not know about it," he told a questioner, "that makes it even more indecent." But a Yeltsin spokesman later said that the US and Russia "are in the same boat as far as the struggle against terrorism is concerned."

European allies were strongly supportive of the US missile strike. Britain's Tony Blair expressed Britian's "immediate and unconditional support" for the strikes. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave a ringing declaration of support. "There is no greater scourge today worse than international terrorism."

Japanese Prime Minister Kezo Obuchi was less enthusiastic in his support, telling Japan's parliament that "the Japanese government is currently investigating the details, but I believe we can express understanding of the U. S. position."

Muslim world is divided
Muslims in the United States were of the view that although they were against terrorism, Clinton had not adduced convincing evidence that the violence was justified.

The more radical Islamic countries like Iraq, Libya and Iran were predictably critical of the US bomb attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. They predicted that the US action could invite more attacks on US targets in the future.

Those countries more favourable to the US like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt were more muted and restrained in their comments or silent. They condemned terrorism from which their countries were also suffering but preferred that the US would act through the United Nations Security Council.

Two of the alleged terrorist camps hit in Afghanistan were said to have been operated by Pakistani Islamic guerrilla groups and the cruise missile attacks killed dozens of Pakistani nationals, thus further testing already-strained US-Pakistani relations. The government of Nawaz Shariff was severely criticised by its domestic opponents, mostly conservative Muslim groups, who condemned the American attack as ''a cowardly attack against Islam''.

The more militant Muslim groups in the Middle East and elsewhere were of the view that American ''muscle flexing'' will ''cause more hatred against America and ignite the flames of instability and extremism in the region''.

In the longer term and a broader perspective, the clash between Western culture and values and those of the Islamic world populated by some 1 billion or more of humanity, was gathering momentum. What Samuel P. Huntington, in his book ''The Clash of Civilisations'', calls the Islamic Resurgence has touched almost every Muslim society.