“They just don’t get it!” The thought jumps out as one follows the Great Presidential Debate in the USA, with John Kerry, George Bush and their respective supporters going on and on about the “war on terror”. None of them seem to understand that not only is this a war that is un-winnable by force alone, but their involvement in it is actually contributing to the spiralling of violence around the world.

Brute force and superior military power may topple regimes, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, but unless accompanied by political initiatives, they cannot win wars. President Bush has the gall to claim that “freedom is on the march in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere,” apparently oblivious to ground realities. Both Afghanistan and Iraq today are more unsafe places than ever before, suffering from thousands of civilian casualties, destroyed infrastructure and no law and order to speak of. This has consequences not only for the USA but for the rest of the world. Around the world, there is an unmistakable link between the state’s use of force and the rise of ‘private’ violence, with law and order breakdowns and political vacuums only worsening the situation.

If there is freedom in Iraq, it appears to be in the hands of insurgents and criminal gangs, engaged in what has been described as one of Iraq’s “fastest-growing enterprises”: the kidnappings-for-ransom that are plaguing ordinary citizens, although it is only ‘news’ when a foreigner is kidnapped. This situation is a direct result of the US-led invasion because, as a Reuters report notes, “American forces completely destroyed Iraq’s domestic security” (“Kidnappings-for-Ransom Fear Grips Iraq”, July 31, 2004). And the person responsible for this breakdown is G.W. Bush, the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces, who took the decision to send them there.

Over 140 foreign workers have been kidnapped (including the 40 or so male hostages killed, including Nepalis and Pakistanis) since the spate of abductions began in April 2003. So far, few foreign women have been abducted – the most prominent foreign worker to be kidnapped in Iraq so far, Margaret Hassan brings their number to eight. The abducted women have until now been freed unharmed, although there are rumours of huge amounts of ransom money having been paid for their release. Still, this does allow some hope for the Dublin-born 59-year old Mrs Hassan.

Mrs Hassan, who has British, Irish and Iraqi nationality, has been living and working in Iraq for the last 30 years, most recently as the head of the global poverty relief organization Care. She was fiercely opposed to the US-imposed sanctions on Iraq -- which made her work there even more crucial. She went about her work relatively freely while the Evil Dictator Saddam ran the country. Today, she is pleading for her life in a televised video tape, at the mercy of her unknown captors.

Her Iraqi husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, a retired airline engineer who studied in Britain, appealed to her abductors on Al-Arabiya satellite television: “I would like to tell the kidnappers that we are in the holy month of Ramadan and my wife has been helping Iraq for 30 years and loved this country,” he said, stressing that his wife “had nothing to do with politics”.

The kidnappers in Iraq don’t seem to care about the politics of their victims. Margaret Hassan had been a friend of the Iraqis for long before the invasion, as The Independent’s Robert Fisk outlines in ‘Kidnapped: The heroine who offered hope for Iraq’ (http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles433.htm).

Although Mrs Hassan’s kidnappers have made no demand yet, her situation is made more precarious by the British government’s acceptance of the US request to re-deploy Black Watch, the British troops stationed in the south of Iraq to the more combative north, in order to free up American soldiers for an all-out second attack on Fallujah. There is already fierce opposition to this in Britain, including by Robin Cook, who resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest against Britain’s involvement in what he, along with millions of protestors around the world, saw as an unjustified invasion.

Mr Cook now notes that a “large part of the problem is not that the US does not have enough troops but that it does not have any troops trained in peacekeeping. They have brought their military culture of overwhelming force to Iraq and have met any resistance with escalation.” Their “heavy-handed military tactics”, he says, are actually provoking most of the current resentment against the occupation. (‘Deeper into the Iraqi quagmire’, The Guardian, Oct 22, 2004)

This is a simple point, that that the American leadership seems incapable of appreciating, either in terms of insurgency in Iraq, or elsewhere. The rising anti-U.S. sentiment around the world is fuelled by US high-handedness; if allowed to continue unchecked, it will only lead to more ‘terrorism’ and make Westerners in general more unsafe. Yet, commenting on this sentiment, high-ranking US national security officials, like one quoted recently, still make vacuous statements like: “I don’t think it matters. It’s about keeping the country safe, and I don’t think that matters.” (‘Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide’, The Washington Post, Oct 22, 2004).

For Margaret Hassan and the dozens of others suffering at the hands of their kidnappers, and their families, it matters.