This is no flagging war

PERHAPS accidentally, one scene in Steven Spielberg's latest piece of sci-fi escapism, War of the Worlds, prods today's Western dilemma. After monster tripods attack the ordinary folk in a working-class suburb in New York, Ray (Tom Cruise) takes refuge in a dank cellar with a deranged Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), who has lost his family to the monsters. Ray and Ogilvy argue over how to confront the enemy. Ogilvy, who wants to run and hide, starts digging a tunnel. After a time, he says to Ray in an exhausted hicksville drawl: "You and me ... I don't think we're on the same page."

Sometimes you get the feeling that too many in the West are, like Ogilvy, on a different page. On the one hand, Australian Muslim communities rightly condemn terrorism. On the other hand, an Islamic bookstore in western Sydney is selling how-to manuals for suicide bombers, endorsed by Osama bin Laden. Other equally abhorrent literature is on sale in other Islamic stores in western Sydney.

On the one hand, two pastors in Victoria are prosecuted for criticising the Koran. On the other hand, we are allowing the sale of books in western Sydney that encourage the enemy "to wire up one's body or a vehicle or a suitcase with explosives and then enter a conglomeration of the enemy to detonate".

Let us all try to get on the same page here. That means Muslims and non-Muslims alike. We are at war with a group of fundamentalists whose goals are to sideline moderate Islam and to overthrow Western civilisation. So let's stop tiptoeing around things that need to be done.

After ASIO raids in June on houses in Victoria and NSW, some Muslim leaders and non-Muslim lawyers said the raids were a political stunt to justify renewing our anti-terrorism laws, set to expire next June and presently being reviewed by a parliamentary joint committee. Others claimed the raids were designed by the Howard Government to "revive the flagging war on terrorism". A week later that flagging war saw more than 50 innocent commuters in London killed. And so the Robbins team's line of turning away from the obvious is looking rather indefensible. Britain is tightening anti-terrorism laws to reflect the reconfirmed reality.

In Australia, renewed interest in national security has kicked off a debate about national identity cards. And hopefully, when our anti-terrorism laws come up for renewal, the opposition we saw in June will have the wisdom to keep quiet.

But don't count on it. Soon enough there will be more talk about a "flagging" war on terrorism. The High Court's Michael Kirby will perhaps again urge us not to exaggerate the risks of terrorism. We can expect former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser to once again howl about the Government frightening the community about terrorist attacks.

These so-called civil libertarians seem to have problems prioritising rights. They suppose a person with information about a terrorist attack has a right to silence that trumps the right of commuters not to be blown up by bombs.

Why aren't we all on the same page here? At bottom, because these people don't believe there is a war going on. Though not a conventional war between states, this is a war of ideologies. A war in which neither side wears uniforms. A war in which one side eschews all forms of civilised conduct. Though unusual, this conflict has all the hallmarks of a war. Well trained and highly organised, albeit in non-traditional ways, terrorists share common beliefs and have a common enemy they want annihilated through violence.

Of course, taking on the usual "this is not a war" crowd is poor sportsmanship, similar to playing chess with Paris Hilton. But there is something deeply concerning when, after the London terrorist attacks, the BBC re-edits stories so that terrorists become bombers. According to BBC policies, the T-word "can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding".

The Beeb's failure to use the T-word is a barrier to our understanding. These days even Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas calls the action of a Palestinian suicide bomber a terrorist attack, as he did last week after the atrocity in Netanya. It's troubling, too, that conservatives such as British MP Boris Johnson refuse to call the conflict a war. In The Weekend Australian he said that by calling this a war, we dignify the terrorists as soldiers, only encouraging more of them to seek martyrdom by detonating a backpack full of explosives.

Though more intellectually respectable, Johnson's objections are, in the end, also wrong. If we stop calling this a war, terrorists are not going to stop seeing themselves as soldiers in a war against Western civilisation. They know they are fighting a war. The problem is not that we are calling this a war. The problem is that it took us too long to do that.

Johnson is right to say we must, at every opportunity, assert our values and beliefs and try to win over the hearts and minds of those who may be tempted by terrorism. But that is a long-term goal.

In the short term, we need laws that may have been unthinkable before September 11, 2001. That is the nature of war. Those still opposed to calling this a war are not merely on the wrong page. They are reading the wrong book.