All of us recognize that our nation must take some action after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that left thousands of our people dead. Yet treating these attacks as an act of war carries the probability that we will in turn become responsible for the deaths of many more thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, and civilian deaths in Afghanistan in turn create the risk that we will end by unifying the entire Islamic world against us.

In Pakistan and possibly in Saudi Arabia, large groups – quite possibly a majority – of the people share Osama bin Laden’s view of the world, even if most of them deplore his methods. And as our military response expands, who knows how many Islamic countries will dissolve into civil war, as people who see their religion and culture as under attack rise up against pro-Western rulers? In turn, more hatred toward the United States in the Islamic world is certain to generate more acts of terror against the people of the United States: Osama bin Laden has already declared that Americans will not sleep at peace in their beds until Palestinians can sleep at peace in their bed.

Is there an alternative to a war that will put us into potential conflict with the entire Islamic world? To answer this question, we must first ask why at least some Islamic militants hate us enough to do what they did on Sept. 11. Contrary to President Bush, I do not believe that Islamic militants hate us because we are a free and democratic nation. Rather there are, I propose, four basic reasons why they hate us:

1. They hate us because we support corrupt and tyrannical regimes throughout the Islamic world, in flagrant contradiction to our own professed belief in democracy. In this respect the Vietnam experience, where we also aligned ourselves with a self-serving and corrupt elite, seems to have taught us nothing. In the Middle East, we supported the Shah of Iran, who was hated by virtually the entire nation. We support the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, which treats the nation as a fiefdom existing primarily to enrich the royal family. In the Gulf War, we unleashed all our military power to re-establish a similar monarchy as the government of Kuwait. We have supported and we continue to support these corrupt and undemocratic regimes because the governments in question promise to keep the supply of oil flowing to the U.S., now dependent for 40 percent or more of its oil on this region.

2. They hate us because our commercial culture, which tends to supplant all other values with a rampant consumerism, has penetrated the Islamic world through the electronic media. The spectacle of America as the land of infinite consumption is attractive to many people in poor nations, especially the young. Yet we need to recognize that the culture of consumerism erodes all social and religious values in favor of a worship of the Great God ME. Muslims are not alone in feeling that such a culture trivializes human life, and the emptiness of our consumerism means that the call to protect traditional cultures from the plague of Westernization falls on receptive ears throughout the Islamic world.

3. They hate us because the weapons that we supply to Israel are used in attacks that the Israeli army directs at Palestinians, in sometime indiscriminate reprisal against Palestinian attacks on Jews. Certainly, we must support the rights of the Israeli people to live in peace. But a more even-handed U.S. policy in the region, one that would seek not only to protect the integrity of Israel but also to address the sufferings of the Palestinian people, might go far to diminish the hatred toward us within the Islamic world.

4. But above all, they hate us because we are indifferent to the poverty of the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and to the suffering that results from that poverty. With less than 5 percent of the population of the earth, we consume upwards of 20 percent of the earth’s resources – and we act as if we have a perfect right to do so. (For example, the U.S. consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s total production of what remains the key global resource, oil.) The last decades of the 20th century saw a steady increase in income disparities between the rich nations and the poor nations – and we need to remember that the Islamic nations, including Afghanistan and Bangladesh, are among the poorest.

Even before the bombing began, world hunger agencies were predicting that 7 million people will die of starvation in Afghanistan this winter, unless the world mounts a massive relief effort. Undoubtedly, the ignorance and fanaticism of the Taliban rulers is in part responsible for this crisis. But while our government provided major military aid to Islamic fundamentalist rebels during their effort to drive out the Russians, after 1989 we essentially ignored the country, as the mujaheddin (who were themselves Islamic fundamentalists) first sought to destroy the modernizing but pro-Communist Najibullah government, and as they then fought one another.

The wars between competing mujaheddin leaders left thousands of civilians dead and paved the way for the Taliban, which at least offered an alternative to endless battles between competing warlords. President Bush says that he doesn’t think the United States should be involved in “nation building,” but our refusal to help moderates in Afghanistan build a nation and a modern economy after 1989 ended by giving us the Taliban. We must not make that same mistake again.

To find an alternative to war, we must be prepared to question the most fundamental premises of a foreign policy that has been, since World War II, designed to ensure that Americans can continue to enjoy their high-consumption lifestyle, while ignoring the plight of millions throughout the world who go to bed hungry every night. We must, that is, pass beyond our ignorance and complacency about that is happening in the rest of the world, and we must recognize that our great wealth entails a great responsibility to address the poverty and suffering of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

I offer one concrete proposal. President Bush wants to devote many hundreds of billions of dollars to building a missile shield – a shield that will not, we have now graphically learned, make us invulnerable to attack. What if we took those billions and devoted them instead to a “war” against AIDS? According to Time magazine, upwards of 35 million people in Africa will die of AIDS by 2010, unless something changes radically within the next few years. AIDS is, we have learned in this country, if not a curable disease, at least a controllable one. And yet our nation has done essentially nothing to prevent the holocaust that is engulfing Africa.

What if, over the last ten years, we had been devoting our wealth, not to supplying weapons to corrupt dictators, but rather to providing Africa with the drugs and medical services necessary to control the spread of AIDS? Is it possible that if we had done so, the people of the poor world would feel for us a little less of the envy mixed with hatred that they currently display, but rather some measure of respect and admiration?

Burt Hatlen of Bangor is the director of the National Poetry Foundation and a professor of English at the University of Maine.