BAR HARBOR – While dropping soldiers from the sky to assassinate terrorist leader Osama bin Laden might win President Bush’s “war against terrorism” in the minds of countless Americans, severing the head cannot destroy the beast, journalist Philip Geyelin said this week.

“I think there are more young boys who can be persuaded to strap explosives around their waists and blow themselves up than we can possibly eradicate,” Geyelin said.

Rather, the best way to battle al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations in the Middle East in the long term is to understand and address the historic grievances against Western culture that have been building for centuries, he said.

Geyelin, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who served as the Washington Post’s editorial page editor from 1968 to 1979, has studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for several decades.

Geyelin presented a lecture titled “The First War of the 21st Century” Thursday afternoon at College of the Atlantic. The lecture, attended by more than 75 people, was sponsored by Acadia Senior College.

Beginning with a brief survey covering several centuries of Arab history in the Middle East, Geyelin painted a portrait of a people crushed by countless Western imperialists who repeatedly conquered, then abandoned the region.

Turkish, British, French, Soviet and American forces each left their mark in turn, while the Arab Muslims in Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt and other areas lived in poverty and laid blame on the increasingly wealthy Westerners, he said.

“I think that these countries are going to continue to breed terrorists because there’s no other outlet for their fury,” Geyelin said. “We are the world’s last superpower, and these grievances piled upon grievances have become our burden to bear. We can’t wind the wheel backward.”

Bin Laden’s power over his terrorist army lies in this long-nurtured mistrust of the Western world, he said.

“We might say he’s a crazy fanatic, a devil incarnate,” Geyelin said. “But in the eyes of his followers, he’s the embodiment of every anti-Western sentiment in the Arab world.

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Bin Laden has told journalists that his chief grievance is the presence of American troops in two of Islam’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. American bombing of Baghdad – also a historically significant Islamic city – during the Gulf War takes a back seat, as does continued American support of Israel.

Ironically, the direction of modern American foreign policy in the Middle East was set when President Woodrow Wilson, distracted by war concerns, supported the creation of a Jewish homeland more by deference than by intent, Geyelin said.

“I think we just overlooked what we were doing, and what we were setting ourselves up for,” he said.

Geyelin questioned whether America’s continued willingness to provide millions of dollars in economic assistance to Israel, while ignoring the poverty of Arab nations such as Egypt, has played some role in the creation of terrorist societies that hate the West.

“We’re giving billions of dollars in aid to a country that has the economic conditions of Great Britain,” he said.

That dichotomy between supporting Israel, and protecting oil interests in primarily Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, has muddied American foreign policy in the region for decades, Geyelin said.

“Our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is huge, something like 45 percent,” he said. “We treat Saudi Arabia with kid gloves, but at the same time, we’re putting them under terrible pressure.”

Because of our precarious position in the region, Geyelin cautioned against an American-led assault against all Arab terrorists.

“Quite possibly, we have too much baggage,” he said. “We’re facing these old, old grievances that they might be able to forget if we didn’t constantly refresh the wounds of these people by doing things that aren’t too different.”

The former journalist proposed that the European Union or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization take the leadership of a peaceful international assault on terrorist groups.

Geyelin, however, approved of the Bush administration’s strategy of attacking bin Laden’s claims of a holy war by appealing to moderate Islamic states and leaders.

“It’s clear that we’re trying to cut the ground out from under the fundamentalist leadership,” he said.

In fact, he applauded the cautious, intelligence-based approach that the Bush administration seemed to take once the anger over the Sept. 11 attacks began to cool.

“President Bush started with talk of war, war, war – crusade is still a dirty word in that part of the world,” Geyelin said. “It’s hard to find a word to define this unprecedented confrontation.

“We can only proceed in the way we’re proceeding and hope for the best,” he said.