NO political cause or grievance can justify or excuse the terrorist outrages inflicted on US citizens last week.

It is difficult to come to terms with the mentality of those who took part in an action that was bound to lead not only to their own deaths but to the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands.

President Bush has already threatened to react against those he deems guilty of those atrocities.

And our Prime minister, as on many other occasions, has echoed the words of the US President.

There have been strident calls for decisive military action against whoever is seen as the perpetrators, but there should be caution abut embarking on any acts of war likely to add to the already horrifying loss of innocent life.

The ability to strike other countries with apparent impunity, using long-range rockets and high altitude bombing, is one of the contributing factors to the growth of indiscriminate slaughter of civilians as a political weapon. Launching bombing raids on, say, Afghanistan would merely add to the growing list of countries where civilians have been massacred to force their governments to bend the knee.

The heartache experienced by citizens who lost loved ones in these latest atrocities has already been felt by Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Palestinians, the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and many more.

Tony Blair did not appreciate the irony of his words when he described those behind the destruction of the World Trade Centre as utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life.

More than one million Iraqi's have died since the end of the Gulf War as a result of US air raids backed up by British planes, and sanctions that kill Iraqi children while leaving the Saddam Hussien dictatorship unscathed.

This example is not given to trade one atrocity against another. It is to emphasise the need for a new approach to global relations and an ethical foreign policy, as the Labour government once briefly pledged before plumping for Washington's might-is-right approach.

Equality and justice have to be the watchwords of such a policy, rather than domination and exploitation.

It is illusory to imagine that the rich and powerful states can be isolated in their fortresses from the problems and injustices that their policies inflict on the rest of the world.

And while Arab leaders like Gadaffi and Arafat have condemned these terrorist acts and expressed sympathy to the people of the USA, it is no secret that many of the most downtrodden, desperate and dispossessed people in the region have welcomed the carnage as a blow against the state which they see as the author of their problems.

A bloody US military response that wreaks mayhem among civilians will confirm them in that view.

On the other hand, a new approach that recognises the rights and needs of the Palestinians, Iraqis and other suffering peoples would create a new international climate that would undermine and isolate those committed to terrorism.

P. KAISERMAN.