It didn't take long - just as the sensory horror begins to fade, the cudgels are taken up by some left-wing and pro-Arab commentators using last week's terrorist attacks as the opportunity to beat up on the United States, implying that in some way it brought September 11's events upon itself.

It's known as "blaming the victim".

The Age has carried an article by a La Trobe University lecturer, Dr Sharam Akbarazadeh ("Killing bin Laden won't end the terror", on this page on Wednesday), who argues that terrorist ringleader Osama bin Laden is but a symptom of "outrage" in the Middle East over US foreign policy in the region.

Akbarazadeh argues that if the US really wants to solve the problem of terrorism it needs to back off from its support of Israel and work with the United Nations to resolve the situation in Palestine.

And before that The Age published an article by Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein ("The end of warfare as a video game", on this page on Monday), who similarly argues that the attacks were a "wake-up" call for Americans who believed they could remain unaffected by the brutality of US foreign policy in areas such as Iraq, Kosovo and Palestine.

As Klein puts it, US foreign policy is responsible for the twisted logic that made last week's attacks possible. She uses the terrorist attacks to maintain her own rage against corporate globalism.

Similar arguments have been apparent, too, in some of the letters published in The Age. If only American foreign policy was different, they seem to be saying.

This sort of logic used to be described as "moral equivalence" - the notion that both sides of a conflict are equally as bad as each other. During the Cold War, this was the line often run by left-wing commentators, justifying any new excess by the Soviet Union as being understandable because they considered it to be no worse than anything done by the US.

In recent years moral equivalence has increasingly become a justification for terrorists' actions in the Middle East, where the premeditated taking of innocent civilian life is seen as being understandable and almost acceptable, given the nature of US foreign policy in the region.

Of course such arguments are morally obtuse - how can you compare the calculated, cold-blooded murder of civilians with the unintended consequences of a nation's foreign policy? One is a tragedy, the other is murder.

If moral equivalence was only a rhetorical tool it could be dismissed for the banal form of logic that it is. Unfortunately, in the current crisis and in the Middle East generally it has come to be something much worse - a kind of smokescreen behind which terrorists such as bin Laden can hide and then use as their own foreign policy weapon.

Already, bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein are using moral equivalence to try and drive a Muslim-Christian/Arab-Western wedge through US attempts to form an international coalition.

These two leaders know that by arguing the perceived injustices of US foreign policy and by defining any US military response to them as the further oppression of Muslims, they can mobilise a significant groundswell among Arab populations and make any Arab leader think twice before coming out in support of the US.

They also know that such arguments play well with and gain sustenance from left-wing political commentators in the West who suffer from their own form of anti-Americanism.

Commentators such as Klein and Akbarazadeh have denounced last week's attacks - but only as a kind of afterthought to what they perceive as the key issue, which is to effect change in US foreign policy. But they have got it back to front: what must first be dealt with is the criminality and inhumanity of the acts themselves. The politics of change, while important, are for later.

It is appropriate that the US should at some stage revisit its policies on the Middle East and Israel. It is true that at some point a long-term solution to terrorism will almost certainly require an international attempt to resolve the issues of the Middle East.

For now, though, the real issue is the immorality of the terrorist actions in the US last week. Confronted with such a definable evil, moral equivalence has no place.

Melbourne writer Michael Scammell was media officer for the US consulate in Melbourne from 1989 to 1995.
E-mail: michaelscammell@hotmail.com