Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand the US's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated - it becomes ever more clear - to provoke the US into just the blind, arrogant punch which the US military is preparing.
Bin Laden - every day his culpability becomes clearer - has personally described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and going on to Egypt, Jordan and the others.
In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships - most of them sup ported by the West - the only act which might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the US.
Bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs but a close student of the art and horror of war.
He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster which retaliated and revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until - faced with war without end - the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.
The Chechens learned this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechenya - the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechenya - is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people".
Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies which have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation.
But the Americans need look no further than Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's futile, hopeless war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation.
In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hezbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation. The Hezbollah would retaliate with a missile attack and the Israelis would then retaliate with a bombardment of southern Lebanon.
In the end, the Hezbollah - the "centre of world terror", according to Sharon - drove the Israelis out of Lebanon.
Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War without end.
And while Bush - and perhaps (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair - prepare their forces, they explain that this is a war for "democracy and liberty", that it is about men who are "attacking civilisation".
"America was targeted for attack," Bush informed us, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."
But this is not the reason why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and the US's stewardship of the area.
Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom which Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 percent in the elections (Washington's friend Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force trained by the CIA which tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison.
No, it is "our" democracy and "our" liberty and freedom that Bush and Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the place of terror and injustice the Middle East has become.
Let me illustrate. Nineteen years ago the greatest act of terrorism - using Israel's own definition of that much misused word - in modern Middle East history began.
Does anyone in the West remember that on September 16 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila that cost 1 800 lives? It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon - designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig - which cost the lives of 17 500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all civilians.
Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon.
I repeat, what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, interrogation, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision" bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives.
But the trap has been sprung. Bush - perhaps we too - are now walking into it.