By Robert Rosenberg

There is a very simple proposition -- terrorism, meaning violent attacks on civilians, is no longer an option. Calling it the poor man's weapon, saying one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, or all the other ways to "explain" terrorism and thereby legitimize it, can no longer be allowed. National liberation movements, ethnic liberation movements, cultural liberation movements all have one basic choice -- to engage their enemies politically or violently. If they choose violence, they will rule out any chance of political engagement.

As the world lines up now on this issue, there are steps the U.S. government and NATO can take that do not involve immediate military action.

Inform all those states and semi-states -- Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria -- that are known to harbor known terrorists, meaning people who have used the deliberate strategy of attacking civilians as a means of political struggle, that they have 30 days to deliver those people to the international court of law in the Hague.

At he end of those 30 days, those states who refuse to comply are evicted from the United Nations, lose all aid packages, their national arilines are no longer allowed to land in any North American or European airport, and all commercial trade with them, whether importing or exporting, is deemed illegal and punishable by fines of 10 times the value of the transaction.

Yes, innocent civilians in those countries will suffer. But the power centers in those countries will not be able to last very long, because in all those countries, the power centers are identical to the main business interests and those interests will be fatally damaged.

Those states and their power centers will have another 30 days after the expulsion from the UN and the imposition of the above steps, to hand over the known terrorists. At the end of those 30 days, the U.S. and NATO will undertake full-scale military war with those countries.

At the same time as the above takes place, something else takes place -- a concerted international effort to force warring parties in regional conflicts to engage in political dialogue. This means instructing Israel and the Palestinians, for example, to immediately begin good faith negotiations for a final settlement to their conflict.

The WTC disaster is an opportunity -- if the democracies have the stomach to say aloud what is well-known in private: that in each and every regional conflict there is an obvious compromise to be made between the parties that requires both sides to make concessions that neither is ready to do as long as they are not both "punished" for their refusal. It is time to start punishing the recalcitrant.

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