Dear Mr Bush, stay your hand

Even though I have spent some of the most exciting years of my life in the US 8212; between Princeton, The Boston Globe and covering school committees in Peabody, Danvers and Marblehead for the Salem Evening News 8212; I stopped visiting the US after 9/11. Your deeds globally and the thrust of your propaganda transformed me into a Muslim.

I was always a proud Muslim, but I was among equally proud Jews, Christians both White and African Americans. My religion was my private affair, as was theirs. We argued, disagreed on books, ideas, on a vision for a world in which my country, India, was trying to make a mark. Call it romantic, but in those days a pilgrimage for us used to be Monticello, Jefferson8217;s house. Here was a renaissance man who turned to Europe for ideas, the same Europe Donald Rumsfeld disparages as 8220;old Europe8221;.

A society that harps on its past is reactionary; but a society which disengages itself from its classics becomes brittle, soulless, with a hole in the heart.

It was Jefferson who inspired generations of Americans we looked up to. Of course, there was always that envy of American prosperity. For intellects shaped in the stratified British social structure, there was also that persistent jibe at the 8220;ugly American8221;. The first Indian Prime Minister Nehru8217;s and his Sancho Panza, Krishna Menon8217;s anti-Americanism was primarily an Anglaise anti-Americanism, a preference for tweed over polyester, Oxford shoes over Keds. But since the 8217;70s, an international elite has been trained in your campuses. But most of them evolved in the Wilsonian framework of liberal internationalism.

Your somewhat callous unilateralism, as in Iraq, places these elites under unbearable pressure. Thirty years of investment in the life of the mind across the globe, is in danger of being squandered.

That is a minor loss compared to the rampaging anti-Americanism your external policies are inflicting on your hardworking, hospitable people. Wayne Camden, 25, our guide at the natural bridge in Virginia, bright as a button, does not know the capitals of India and France but lives in fear of the conspiracies being hatched against his country in Fallujah and Najaf.

Of course, conspiracies are being hatched in both those places. I can testify because I was there. But these are of your making. Relentless bombing of Iraqi cities are killing men, women, children day after day, in pursuit of a spooky figure who is probably not even in Fallujah. Just as you bombed wedding parties in Afghanistan on the basis of misleading intelligence, destroying not terrorists, nor Al Qaeda, but rival tribes.

I interviewed the Ayatullah in Iran soon after the Shah was ousted. The New York Times invited me to explain the Shia revolution on its Op-ed page. My conversations with Pakistani pilots training Syrians to fly MiGs over Golan Heights was a subject of some interest to friends in India and the west. These episodes bring out in some relief the general reservoir of information available to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

But what one fears now is the fabrication of a civilisational clash in which I find myself on one side. Why would I ever tell you a thing as you grope in the dark for information and drop bombs on innocents describing them as 8220;precision bombings8221; and thereby augmenting Osama8217;s tribe?

No, Mr President, as you embark on your new term, stay the hand of your armed forces. Involve all the neighbours of Iraq in a meaningful dialogue. Above all, stay Sharon8217;s hand. People who suffered the flattening of Warsaw ghettos must not flatten Gaza with impunity. Only then will Palestinian excesses invite global wrath 8212; and thus give you a legitimate handle.

In remembering 9/11 you seem to have forgotten the other more important date when you won the Cold War. What you need to employ are not instruments of destruction but a new architecture.

Do you know that 500 million Muslims live in the South Asian region, more than all the Muslims in the Arab world. And these Muslims have been reared in Sufism and have evolved in an ancient, pre-Islamic civilisational crucible. Moderate them and you have a Muslim bloc which will be an engine for moderating Muslims world-wide. A beginning can be made by Indo-Pak cooperation in stabilising Afghanistan.