We have played straight into Bin Laden's hands

The best approach was felt to be a stolid determination that life should go on as normally as possible

The reappearance of Osama bin Laden has, at least, answered one question: why the dramatic increase in communications traffic among al-Qa'ida ranks, which in turn has set off Tony Blair's warning earlier this week that "something big is about to happen"? The text of Bin Laden's message has also confirmed why the British, in particular, have become so nervous. Contained in it is the clear warning that it will be a European country that will be targeted as a "punishment" for supporting America.

So what have we done about it? The blunt answer is play straight into his hands. Terrified of being blamed for not having acted on warnings, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to generalised warnings that do nothing to tell the public what to do but everything to enable ministers to cover their backs come the next terrorist outrage.

"Thank God this lot weren't in charge in the last war," as a retired senior civil servant put it this week. "They'd have had the entire populations of the cities streaming out to the countryside, the factories unable to work and the tubes and trains all shut down for fear of an air attack."

The comparison is not entirely fanciful. It was not that the general population weren't nervous of air raids in the war, nor that they did not have every reason to be. Indeed, Winston Churchill (rather distrustfully I've always thought) had teams going out to give regular reports on civilian morale. They did not bring back heroic answers.

Most people feared for their lives and took a dim view of toffs and politicians whom they thought (rightly to some extent) were looking after themselves rather better than their poorer fellow citizens. Evacuating children was unpopular and rationing was approached with anything but a spirit of fair play. But in the end the best approach was felt to be one of a stolid determination that life should go on as normally as possible, coupled with a peppering of humour.

Compare that with today, when Mr Blair and George Bush have actually increased the air of unease by talking of generalised threats and intelligence traffic without detailing what it amounts to. Worse, they have tried to give the impression that they are doing something by upping the ante on the entirely unrelated issue of Iraq, and they have globalised fears by giving credence to the idea that the explosions in Bali and Moscow are all outpourings of a single worldwide campaign.

We don't know that. We don't know how strong al-Qa'ida is, or indeed, how it is really run now. We don't even know for certain that Bin Laden, should he be alive (which we should probably assume he is), is in charge or capable of running a worldwide terror network.

What we do know is that Bin Laden would very much like to create an air of general fear in the West and that he would like to wrap up every local Muslim dissatisfaction in a general conflict between Islam and the West. He would also want America and Britain to invade Iraq and Israel to continue ever more violent "incursions" into Palestinian territory in order to prove his point.

He doesn't have to try too hard, the way we're behaving. It is astonishing that, having cornered Saddam Hussein and forced him to give in to a ferocious UN resolution, both Washington and London are saying that they don't believe him and that the war plans are still on, for all the world giving the impression that the object is forced regime change whatever he does. How do we think this goes down in a Muslim world that is already convinced that President Bush is pursuing a plan that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with oil?

What do we think we're doing when we indicate that we support President Putin in Chechnya, when we pretend not to notice what the Chinese are doing with the Turkomans, or when we support the worst of regimes in Uzbekistan and Jerusalem? "Ah," said the political editors before Tony Blair's Mansion House speech this week, "the Prime Minister has some very important initiatives on the Middle East. You watch."

He had no such thing. What he gave us was a broad sense of threat that was bound to set off fears that anyone with a beard and reading the Koran could be about to let off a biological bomb .

It needn't be like this. And it shouldn't be. The first duty of a responsible government should be to keep the temperature down. The second should be to brief the public on what it thinks the threat is and what it knows of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist organisations. The third, and most important, thing is to do everything it can to deprive al-Qa'ida of any legitimacy in the Islamic or the Third World.

My own feeling is that the al-Qa'ida threat is greatly exaggerated. It has money. It has a hard core of loyal devotees. And it has relations with a host of Islamic groups of one sort and another round the world. But it doesn't control them and it can only succeed with them in so far as their individual causes are given life.

Deprive the group of its funds (as we have so far been singularly unsuccessful in doing) and you remove its influence. Deprive it of its cause, and you leave it without its justification. If Bin Laden becomes a champion of the Muslim downtrodden, it is only because we will have made him so.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk