For three consecutive weeks since the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States, The Economist maga-zine has led with the story on its cover. It started with its September 15 edition, which carried the headline "The day the world changed". The cover was illustrated by a telling picture of Manhattan up in dust from the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The next edition, i.e. that of September 22, was headlined "The Battle Ahead". A side view of the face of a sober-looking President Bush looking into an uncertain future, the American flag flying beside him, illustrated the cover. The latest and current edition of the magazine was titled "Closing in". The story was illustrated with a fighter jet closing in on a map of Afghanistan and some of its neighbours, in the background.

It's unusual for The Economist to give an event such saturation coverage. But then these are unusual times, if not for the rest of the world, certainly for the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain, its closest ally. Actually, for the citizens of much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America September 11 represented pretty little change in their lives; nasty, brutish and short - thanks in no small measure to what one, Arundhati Roy, has described in a lengthy and very thoughtful article in the September 29 edition of The Guardian of London, as "the US government's record of commitment and support to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry, and unimaginable genocide (outside America)".For much of the rest of the world then, September 11, far from being "the day the world changed", was merely the day that heralded a season of hyperbole, or call it demagoguery if you will, from which even the otherwise sober Economist has apparently not been immune. Naturally taking the lead in all this was President Bush himself. September 11, he has said, was the first war of the 21st Century. It was a war, a different kind of war, against the Americans and the West by "enemies of freedom". "They hate our freedoms- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other".

Next to join the queue, quite predictably, was Britain's Tony Blair. The day after the attack, Blair offered the Americans unconditional support in its counter-war against "terrorism". "We stand shoulder to shoulder", he said, "with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world".

Not to be outdone, Paul Wolfowitz, the American Deputy Secretary of Defence, regarded as the leading hawk of the Bush administration, used the metaphor of "snakes in swamps" to describe Afghanistan and the other so-called sponsors of international terrorism. "We are", he said, "going to try and find every snake in the swamp we can, but the essence of the strategy is to drain the swamps". In other words, the essence of America's reaction to September 11 is to destroy Afghanistan and other countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya and Sudan, which the Americans have dubbed "rogue states".

Bush may have led in what Claire Short, Britain's overseas development minister, called "strident language"- much to the annoyance of her boss, Blair- but the one that really took the cake were the remarks of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister.

After talks in Berlin on September 26 with the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, Berlusconi, who had been severely criticised by even the EU for his government's recent thuggish handling of the anti-globalisation demonstrations in Genoa, Italy, likened the anti- globalist forces with "Islamic terrorists".

"We should", The Guardian of September 27 quoted him as saying, "be conscious of the superiority of our civilisation which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries".

This, for most of Berlusconi's Western colleagues, amounted to really going over the board. As a result, they rounded on him, perhaps less because they abhorred his sentiments than because, by speaking his mind and suggesting that the war on international terrorism was a war between Islam and the West, he was undermining the unity of the coalition, including some so-called moderate Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, which the West needs to deal successfully with "terrorism".

Berlusconi's remarks were the more damaging because they came at a time when policy makers in the West were hoping that they had limited the damage done to the coalition by President Bush's description of the war as a "Crusade against Islamic terrorists", bringing back painful memories of the Christian crusades against Muslims in the Middle Ages, and by the Pentagon's use of the phrase "Operation Infinite Justice", as the codename for the war, something which Muslims believe only Allah can grant.

One of the first Western leaders to condemn Berlusconi for his rather unhelpful remarks was Guy Verhofstadt, the Prime Minister of Belgium, which currently holds the European Presidency. "These remarks" said Verhofstadt, "could in a dangerous way, have consequences. I can hardly believe that the Italian Prime Minister made such statements." Chris Paton, the European commissioner for external relations, soon joined the Belgian Prime Minister. "It may be worth our while in Europe", he said in a pointed rebuke of Berlusconi, "remembering with a degree of appropriate humility that the Islamic world has never been responsible for a holocaust."

Soon enough, Tony Blair added his voice to the barrage of criticisms when he told a group of Moslem leaders in the UK who he met at his residence, that the West had no quarrel whatsoever with Moslems. "What", he said, "happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists; it was not the work of Moslem terrorists.

It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple."

Following the flood of criticisms, Berlusconi soon felt obliged to apologise, somewhat. "I am", he said, "sorry that a few words taken out of the general context may have been badly interpreted and may have offended the sensibilities of my Arab and Muslim friends." However, any suspicions that the Italian leader was insincere in his apology was quickly confirmed by his insistence that the Western culture was the basis of the Atlantic Alliance which was under attack by anti-globalists and terrorists. "I regret", he added, "that somewhere people have established a supreme tribunal of ideological correctness and that the verdicts of this tribunal are passed without allowing the miscreant the chance to defend himself."

Berlusconi may be insincere in his apology, but in this, he is probably no worse than the Western leaders who have rounded on him. The truth is that the West has since become a captive of its own propaganda that its way of life - whatever that means - is not only the most superior way of life, it is actually the only civilised way of life. Partly arising from this, any criticism of America's over-reaction to September 11 has been condemned as unpatriotic and unacceptable.

Let us look at a few examples, starting with France's President Chirac. When he met with Bush after the attack, he seemed to disagree with the American president that it amounted to war. "I am not sure", he reportedly said, "that one should use the word 'war'.

What is certain is that we have a conflict of a new nature".

However, at the end of their meeting, Chirac, according to The Economist (September 22), had to politely give way to his host. "I don't want to have a semantic quarrel," he said. "This is a war that must be waged on all fronts."

Another high-level criticism of America's over-reaction, which went down badly with the Americans and the British, at least, came from Claire Short, Britain's overseas development minister. "I don't think", she said, soon after September 11, "strident language is helpful, but I think it is understandable, and what's really important is that we don't get strident action". Which, translated in plain English, was that the West should not go to war over September 11. For her views, Short got what The Economist called " a coded rebuke." Other ministers presumably took heed.

Perhaps the most telling example of this intolerance is the case of Bill Maher, host of the Politically Incorrect TV show on ABC station. Maher, among other things, had contrasted the "cowardice" of the suicide hijackers with recent US policy of conducting aerial wars with little or no risk to American lives. "We", he had said, "have been cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly.

Staying in the airplane when it hits the building - say what you want about it - it's not cowardly!"

Following these remarks all hell broke lose. First, Maher was publicly rebuked by the boss of ABC and forced to apologise. Then within 24 hours, two advertisers, Federal Express and Sears, withdrew their advertisements and the show was taken off seven ABC affiliate television stations. Next, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, described Maher's remarks as a "terrible thing to say" and warned Americans that at this time they needed "to watch what they do".

Maher was hardly the first to criticize America's policy of lobbing cruise missiles at it's perceived enemies from 2,000 miles. Bush himself made pretty much the same remarks when he tried to prepare Americans for the eventuality that the war against Afghanistan may involve ground troops. In apparent criticism of his predecessor's policy in the Balkan war, he had said he was not interested in "lobbing 2 million dollar cruise missiles into empty ten dollar tents."

Maher may not have been the first or the only person to criticize America's policy of bombing its perceived enemies, but the difference with Bush, obviously, was that Maher seemed opposed to a war, which Bush and his right-wing circle had pretty much made up their minds to wage.

Because Western nations have become captive to their own propaganda that international terrorism is a manifestation of the envy by non-Westerners of "the western way of life" rather than a sign of their hatred for the economic and political policies of Western governments in the rest of the world, it is very unlikely that these policies will ever be re-examined. It is very unlikely, for example, that they will re-examine their policy of arming the Israelis to the teeth and of ignoring Israel's sole possession in the Middle East of nuclear weapons, while at the same time bombing the Iraqis under the pretext that their country possesses weapons of mass destruction. They are also unlikely to end the imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq, a policy that, by 1996, has led to the death of over half-a-million Iraqi children.

For Madeline Albright, the US Secretary of State at the time, the death of these children was merely a "very hard choice" for Americans in their bid to punish Iraq for offences, which her friends and she herself are even guiltier of. Obviously for the Albrights of this world, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children are nothing compared to those of the not-as-innocent American adults who died in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh.

Berlusconi may be alone among Western leaders in speaking out his mind about what September 11 means and how to deal with it, but most, if not all of them probably secretly share his sentiments. This is why, in spite of their protestations at Berlusconi's demagoguery about the clash of Islam and the West, Bush and his Western allies will still carry on with their war against "rogue nations" who give support to so-called terrorists and who, save for Cuba, all happen to be Muslim countries.