A SECOND LOOK Peter Vale John Stremlau’s piece (”SA’s role in the war on terrorism”, December 20 2001) is not an analysis of the current inter-national moment, but an effort to recruit South Africa’s people to the debates that all too often justify political mischief and military power. However, his petition is emptied of memory, both local and international. America’s war on terror must be seen for what it is: a new crusade to fashion the world in its own interests. Any comparative study suggests how little US foreign policy has changed these past 50 years: stripped of its modern hype, ”containing terrorism” is a re-run of the once infamous ”containing communism”. What happened on September 11 was monstrous but this is a long way off from believing that the course of history was forever changed. In the aftermath of the attacks it was relatively easy for the US to line up other states behind their crusade. But history, let alone memory, suggests that outrage alone is often not glue sufficient enough to keep allies together. Another side of this policy triangle is the determination of a number of coalition partners to use both mood and the moment to settle scores against homegrown terrorists. Russians in Chechnya provide the most obvious example, but India and Pakistan are tit-for-tatting their enmity in a conflict which threatens the planet. The most explosive side of this triangle involves the ”Clash of Civilisations” thesis the idea that Muslims and Christians are involved in a fight for global superiority. Can a country like South Africa, where each of a thousand social balances are delicately poised, tip one way or the other on an issue like this? The plain truth is no. Our predicament is illustrated in the absurdity of Stremlau’s single policy proposal. Does he really believe that despatching local Muslim women to Kabul to help build a modern secular state will further reconciliation in this country? Our concern must be with humanity: with those who died in New York, with those who needlessly perished in Afghanistan and the many lives that this crusade now threatens. Our government must jog the memories of how, in the years following World War II, a coalition not markedly very different to the present one embraced the apartheid government for 46 years. Of how easy it was for them to believe that Nelson Mandela should be imprisoned for 27 of them because he was a communist. It might remind the US and its partners of how a nod and wink from the CIA drew the hapless John Vorster to once follow a US-led crusade. An event, I am sure, remembered by ordinary Angolans as they prayed for peace in their country on Christmas Day almost exactly 27 years to the day after Vorster gave the nod for troops to invade their country. Peter Vale is senior professor in the School of Government and professor of social theory at the University of the Western Cape