Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated

At the time of last month's anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, an assessment of the state of the war against terrorism seemed horribly inconclusive.

Now we know why. Now we can understand a little better that this is what the "war unlike any other war" is going to be like: long periods of relative quiet punctuated by the horror of the deaths of large numbers of unsuspecting people. In fact, there have been several attacks over the past year that have been attributed to al-Qa'ida or similar organisations, but they have not struck at targets so familiar to us as office workers in Manhattan. Now we have holidaymakers in Bali.

As if ordinary grief were not enough, the tragedy of the bombing in Indonesia is that it may simply reinforce President Bush's resolve to take the war against terrorism to Iraq. The hawks will accept that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 11 September – or for the bomb in Bali. But the analogy is clear: we must act pre-emptively to disable new threats to our security.

It is even possible to sympathise with the politicians' dilemma. The struggle against militant anti-Western Islam cannot be won within the kind of periods in which they operate. Rather than a chess game of tighter security, better intelligence and patient policework, combined with a resolute attention to the causes of Muslim alienation, it is easy to see the attraction of a short war against a widely hated foe.

Yet the true lesson of the weekend's awful carnage is quite the opposite. A war in Iraq would be the worst response to the sense that the war against al-Qa'ida is not going well. It ought to be obvious now that the inevitable focus of the war against terrorism on the person of Osama bin Laden was misplaced. Mr bin Laden may well be dead – that seems the likeliest explanation of his failure to record a video taunting the US for failing to kill him – and the main territorial centre of his organisation in Afghanistan has been overrun. But the deep hatred of Westernism that exists among Muslim extremists from North Africa to the Philippines can be, and is, mobilised by a range of overlapping networks, organisations and sects. Whether or not the one calling itself al-Qa'ida was responsible for the weekend's atrocity, it none the less seems the product of the same phenomenon.

Apart from the obvious response of taking precautions and of trying to bring terrorists to justice, the real issue is how to deal with the underlying causes. Of course, this is not easy; it may not even be possible. It may be that there will always be enough people in the world with irrational beliefs about the wickednesses of others to want to kill them at random.

But some of the pool of grievances on which al-Qa'ida draws are real injustices – in particular the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. These injustices ought to be resolved anyway, but resolving them may well reduce the supply of potential martyrs to murderous causes.

A pre-emptive war against Iraq would have the opposite effect of increasing martyrdom. It is bound to heighten the sense among some Muslims that the US and its allies are engaged in a crusade against their values. It will make attacks like the bomb in Bali more likely.

The response of world leaders to this weekend's attack should be to act to ensure that there is more justice in the world, rather than to deepen the sense of injustice that is the breeding ground of terrorists.