A world of terror

摘要

The death toll was shocking, the target unexpected, the deed itself monstrous. But in some ways last weekend's car-bombings in Indonesia were no surprise. The holy war Osama bin Laden declared in 1998 against "America and the Jews" was always going to be a long one. This is a war, moreover, for which the rest of history will not obligingly stop while the world works out how to win it. Other dangers, some of them related dangers, need to be guarded against at the same time. Chief among these is the prospect of unstable individuals acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In the case of Saddam Hussein, the best guess is that Iraq is still a few years away from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the case of Kim Jong II, it now looks as if the nuclear genie has slipped out of the bottle. Confronted a fortnight ago with incriminating evidence from American intelligence, the North Koreans at last admitted that they had been systematically flouting the solemn agreement they had made with Bill Clinton in 1994 to freeze their nuclear-weapons work. That agreement, the North Koreans now say, has been "nullified". In short, one member of George Bush's "axis of evil" may already have the bomb.