OPINIONOn New Year's Day Atif Irfan boarded a flight in Washington, DC, with seven members of his family. Edging down the aisle, he wondered out loud whether the back of the plane was the best place to be. His sister-in-law said she thought it was the safest part, rather than being close to the engine or wings ''in case something happened''.
The conversation was overheard by two teenage girls, who took one look at the men's dark skin and beards and the women's headscarves and saw a family of suicide bombers, including three small children aged between two and seven. The girls told their parents, who told the flight attendant, who told the air marshals and the captain. The air marshals called the FBI and the airport police.
The pilot asked the marshals to remove the family from the plane. Then officials asked everybody else to get off so they could perform a thorough sweep. The family and a family friend were surrounded by armed guards, detained for questioning and then released. The plane eventually took off without them. When they tried to get on a later flight the airline refused to book them. The Irfan family's ordeal escalated according to its own humiliating logic.
But, seven years after 9/11, it's not an isolated incident. Presumptive and discriminatory, it speaks volumes about the prevailing values in the United States. A country that confuses Muslim and terrorist, and conflates the civilian and combatant by taking popular fear and prejudice and handing them over to state power. Driven by the maxim that you are better safe than sorry, it leaves nobody safe and everybody sorry.
There is nothing particularly American about this. The war on terror may have started in the US but it quickly went global. In the months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, everybody wanted a piece of the action.
However, few nations pursued it with such consistent zeal as Israel. ''You in America are in a war against terror,'' Ariel Sharon said after he left the White House following suicide bombings in Haifa and Jerusalem in December 2001. ''We in Israel are in a war against terror it's the same war.''
The trouble is that over the past seven years, the war on terror has been thoroughly discredited not only morally, but militarily and strategically. Nobody listens to moderates, let alone to reason, when bombs are falling and people are dying. That is as true for the rockets that have killed a handful of Israelis as it is for the bombs and tanks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.
By erasing any prospect of negotiation, the violence did not weaken extremists but emboldened them. Israel may want to boost the moderate Fatah faction which governs the West Bank now. But Hamas's electoral rise was a direct result of the contempt the Israelis showed them in the past.
Meanwhile, the Iraq war has left Iran the primary sponsor of both Hezbollah and Hamas with far more influence in the region than they would have had. On almost every front in almost every part of the world, including in the US, the war on terror is now seen as a colossal mistake. Only Israel did not get the memo. And it is now set to fail for the same reasons that America has.
Diplomatically, Israeli efforts to sell its bombardment and invasion of Gaza as a straightforward extension of the war on terror have been fairly blatant. It has described the shelling of homes, mosques and police stations as the destruction of ''the infrastructure of terror''. Even as the rest of the world condemns it, Israel's foreign minister, and Kadima party leader, Tzipi Livni, has been saying that her country's actions place it firmly within the community of nations and leaves Gazans and their democratically elected rulers outside. ''Israel is part of the free world and fights extremism and terrorism Hamas is not,'' she said. Livni added, ''These are the days when every individual in the region and in the world has to choose a side.''
Meanwhile, Israel has been busy implementing the very tenets of the war on terror that have served the US so badly, primarily that intractable political problems can be solved solely by military means with the aim of not simply bombing your enemies into submission, but eliminating them and then creating resolution on your own terms from the rubble.
''What I think we need to do is to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern,'' Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon said. ''That is the most important thing.'' Who he thinks should govern when Hamas has gone, and precisely what legitimacy they would have, does not seem to bother him.
On this matter Livni is right. People have to choose sides. But, so far, it has not been her side. The war on terror is over. War lost. For the first time in a long time, that even appears to be true in the US.
A recent poll shows the US public far less indulgent of Israeli aggression than many previously believed. Opinion on the bombing of Gaza is fairly evenly divided, showing 44 per cent supporting Israel's military action against the Palestinians and 41per cent saying it should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the problems. Given the absence of any honest or informed debate about events in the Middle East, this suggests significant room for manoeuvre for President-elect Barack Obama in pursuing a more even-handed policy towards the region, if he should choose to take it.
The benefits could strengthen America's hand throughout the region. Majorities in seven Arab nations say their opinion of the US would significantly improve if it put pressure on Israel to comply with international law in its treatment of Palestinians.
That is the change the US and the Middle East need. It's also the change most of the rest of the world wants to believe in.
Gary Younge writes for The Guardian.