ANY nation that has been the victim of such an unspeakable crime as the killing of thousands of innocent people in New York and Washington will find it difficult to resist the urge to retaliate against suspects and their backers with overwhelming force.

This is especially true for the United States, which is the world's most powerful country and one whose mainland has been immune to the depredations of terror and war.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration would do well to resist the temptation to lash out. Tuesday's terrorist outrages call for painstaking investigation in order to identify the individuals or groups responsible so that they may be brought to justice.

Any use of force by the US will probably be illegal in international law and counter-productive as well. America cannot buy security for its own people by making life more insecure for people elsewhere.

US airstrikes will invariably lead to the 'collateral' killing of innocent civilians and provide more fuel to the already incendiary mindset of those who have historically been victims of US policies.

Far from stopping terrorist outrages, US airstrikes will make future occurrences even more likely.

When the use of force in international politics has been raised to the level of a cult by the US in the years since the Cold War ended, it is inevitable that America's enemies and victims around the world will adopt equally monstrous methods.

The attack on the World Trade Center is a product of the same diseased moral compass which allows the slow strangulation of Iraq's civilian population through economic sanctions, the destruction of Sudan's main pharmaceutical plant, the killing of journalists in the deliberate bombing of Belgrade's television station, or the continuing humiliation of the Palestinians.

Thanks to US insistence on sanctions remaining in place, more than 500,000 Iraqis have been sent to an early grave, most of them children. The official Iraqi reaction to Tuesday's carnage was appallingly callous; but no more so than Madeleine Albright's ghastly declaration that the death of half a million Iraqi children ''is a price worth paying''.

In the past, Washington has used force against those it considered responsible for acts of terrorism but none of its actions brought the US greater security.

In 1986, the Reagan administration sent bombers to blast an area around the residence of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which two American soldiers died.

Scores of innocent people, including Gaddhafi's infant daughter, were killed but Washington has still been unable to prove the complicity of the Libyan government in the Berlin bombing.

If that bombing was meant to serve as a 'deterrent', it was, by Washington's own reckoning, a spectacular failure since, according to the US, Libyan agents later planted a bomb on PanAm 103 which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland.

In 1998, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at a medicine factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and a suspected training camp of Osama bin Laden at Khost in Afghanistan.

The attack was in retaliation for the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The US claimed the Sudanese factory was a chemical weapons plant but blocked an attempt by the UN to investigate the veracity of this charge.

The owner of that factory is now suing the US in a Washington court for millions of dollars. As for the former CIA operative, Osama, the Khost attack did nothing to blunt his enmity or capacity to hit back.

Earlier this year, militants believed to be linked to the Saudi millionaire blew a huge hole in USS Cole, a US warship anchored off Aden. And now, if initial leads by US investigators prove correct, Osama's men have delivered their most catastrophic and brutal blow yet.

Even as they mourn the thousands who died in New York and Washington, the American people must resolve to force their government never to undertake military operations which violate international law and place innocent civilians at risk.

Rather than seeking to build an international coalition against 'terrorism' in order to try and eliminate the problem though the use of force, the US must confront the historical legacy of its flawed policies towards West Asia and other parts of the world.

US support for repressive regimes like Israel and Saudi Arabia, its interventions in Lebanon and Afghanistan, and its use of sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction against the people of Iraq have caused so much death and suffering that irrationality has become an integral part of the region's politics. As the grievances pile up in combustible layers, fanatics have no difficulty in finding and motivating others to do the unthinkable.

In the territories occupied by Israel, for example, young Palestinians are prepared to blow themselves up just so that they can kill one Israeli in the process. No cruise missile or world coalition can ever provide protection from such a perverse and self-destructive sense of victimhood.

Only the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions and the chance for Palestinians to live in dignity can help. Full statehood for the Palestinians and the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza will do more to take the wind out of Osama's sails than the bombing of Kabul, Kandahar or Khost.

Since several hundred Indian nationals are thought to have been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, India is very much an interested party.

But instead of counselling the Bush administration that it is embarking on a foolish and dangerous path which can only make the world's peoples more insecure, the Vajpayee government has indicated that it will offer the US military facilities for the 'war' against international terrorism.

Of course, the government is being driven primarily by its desire to use Washington against Islamabad but what this will also do is to make the US even more of a player in South Asia than it already is.

Those desirous of an alliance between India and the US may ask whether that is necessarily a bad thing. What they should realise is that America has its interests and will stick to them.

'Global' coalitions are summoned only when those interests are endangered. Helping India to develop, feel secure or combat terrorism do not figure anywhere in Mr Bush's list of priorities.