You guessed it. That profession is terrorism and the enforcer is President George W. Bush of the United States. The first example of the enforcer's methods is the bombing of Afghanistan, where one of the aims seems to be to pulverize entire mountains. Early outcomes of those methods are the license to wage war seized by Israel and India to solve fundamental political problems they have suppressed for more than 50 years. Waiting in the wings is a long line of countries that may now feel free to choose war as a legitimate means of settling political accounts, under the guise of crushing terrorism.

Syria has already climbed on the bandwagon by revising its version of the 1982 massacre of 10,000 people in the city of Hama. It now says the killings were to crush terrorism by the Muslim Brotherhood. The US, which still characterizes Syria as a terrorist state, has muted its criticism. Instead, it wants Damascus to share intelligence it has gathered on Islamic terrorism since that massacre. The Muslim Brotherhood is still active in Egypt and is known for its hatred of Israel.

Faced with Washington's stern determination to crush global terrorism after September 11, all the world's nations including the UN Security Council lined up to kiss President Bush's ring and pledge allegiance. However, as with courtiers through the ages, most of Bush's foreign coalition partners are waiting for the missteps, setbacks and accidents as America's diplomatic and war machines enter terrains where angels fear to tread.

Almost all nations have learned to nurse the wounds of terrorism and move on, except America. The courtiers wait patiently for Washington to exhaust itself and then come to terms with terrorism as the price to be paid for its imperial ambitions as the world's only superpower.

The coalition's humiliation in this new war may come sooner than expected. While the US trumpets victory in its Afghanistan war, the powers in that region have noted that American bombs were simply allies of the Afghan warlords waiting to avenge their defeats at Taliban hands five years ago. The war was won by the warlords, and the country has moved back to square one. It is fractured again, with a symbolic UN-approved government controlling little more than Kabul city. Even the US recognizes this fact because its soldiers are relying not on the new government but on local warlords for help in tracking down Al Qaeda operatives.

Most of the Qaeda operational capacities may have been destroyed, but the conditions that created them have not been dented seriously. Afghans continue to be desperately poor and a fertile recruiting ground, along with destitute Pakistanis, for religious schools that provide free food and lodging to hide their violent indoctrination and lessons of hate.

To win over Afghan hearts and minds and wean them away from the kind of society that breeds terrorists, the coalition chose three methods: inject coalition troops to ensure security, send in UN teams to secure nation building, and provide financial aid to secure the peace and alleviate hunger.

None of those methods seem likely to be used to best purpose. The coalition troops have arrived, but they lack authority even in Kabul. The UN's nation building efforts have not started because its protégé government controls just one city of the Afghan nation. Starvation may not be warded off this winter because almost no money out of the two billion dollars pledged has actually arrived. Nor is their enough security across Afghanistan for aid materials to be distributed to the neediest. Instead, they risk being commandeered by warlords trying to secure themselves in the affections of their communities.

Meanwhile, the universal values painstakingly built over 50 years by the UN's Declaration on Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions on war are shredded a little more each day. America, the world's most humane nation, stuffs into wire cages in a hot country alleged terrorists from Afghanistan's mountains, who did it no harm either in Afghanistan or in the US. Their leaders may have masterminded September 11, but those hapless, semi literate villagers most likely became fighters to escape poverty and because Taliban mullahs brainwashed them.

Now, Washington denies them prisoner-of-war status because of the evil of leaders most of them never saw. That is what extremists do, not moderates. Bin Laden must be rubbing his hands with glee at having shaken the land of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the rule of law to this lamentable degree.

Such actions are at odds with our current claims to live up to a higher standard of civilization. Humanity stands at the edge of discovering the nature of dark matter in space, altering genetic coding to head off diseases, eradicating hunger and extending healthy lives to 125 years. Yet the hearts of men seem to be hewn of the same rock that yielded to the oceans only when pounded down by asteroids that fell upon our planet. We stand almost as unyielding to the call of our common human needs for fraternal peace and remain as divided by beliefs, ethnic traits and tribal bonding as at the start of our recorded human history.

Terrorism is probably one of the oldest accusations brought by the powerful against violent troublemakers from outside the community. What has changed is that the world is now a global village without outsiders. Even desolate and distant Afghanistan is a shantytown within our community. So all of us quake together before the threat of terrorism and ignore "collateral damage" as a necessary cost, like the cancer remedy that destroys many innocent cells to kill the few cancerous ones.

To put the law on our side, we outlawed terrorism through the UN Security Council, but our responses to the lawbreakers are no more creative than those of our predecessors, going back to antiquity. Like them, President Bush is simply beating the hell out of those he suspects of wanting to harm his people grievously.

So what has changed in us thanks to the "civilization" that we are so proud to have refined since the Stone Age and are fighting to protect from the onslaught of terrorists?

Where violence is concerned, all that seems to have changed is its scale. Terrorists now use plastic explosives, chemicals, bio-weapons and commercial airliners. In return, they and anyone who shelters them find bombs pouring down from invisible heights like the monsoon rains. That is how it is today and will continue to be tomorrow, on a wider scale. The White House has said so; NATO, the world's most powerful military alliance ever, has said so; and the UN Security Council has agreed.

Another change is that Osama bin Laden's cohorts have raised the bar for a single terrorist event to new heights. Within just three hours, the Sept. 11 attacks killed almost 4,000 people, destroyed $100 billion worth of property, lopped $1.5 trillion off the stock market, prompted laws restricting civil liberties for all citizens in almost every country, and started a war that costs $1 billion a day to execute. More frighteningly, Bin Laden's terrorism has revived the specter of traditional Christian-Muslim hatreds smoldering since the Christian Crusades to free the Holy Land. Sandwiched between this rock and hard place are the Jews, Semitic progenitors of both. Of course, middle-of-the-road Christians and Muslims are fighting and will continue to fight for moderation. But such a cataclysm is not a fanciful scenario. A single major biological weapon attack in a Christian country traced to Islamic terrorists will put the moderates out of business.

An example is already at hand. Israeli moderates disappeared in just one year of the Al Aqsa Intifada under pressure from Jewish and Muslim extremists, although Israel is overwhelmingly powerful in relation to its enemies and the kill ratio is 10 to one in Israel's favor. In the US and Europe, race and religion-based profiling has already begun, permitted by new anti-terrorist laws. Even an Arab-origin personal security official of President Bush was not spared prejudice. The 2.5 billion people of other faiths are helpless onlookers for they have no say on Capitol Hill, the White House, NATO or the UN Security Council--or mosques and madrasas.

With such evidence at hand, it is hard to argue that terrorism does not offer hope to its supporters of triggering cataclysmic changes in their favor. Jewish terrorists snatched Israel from Britain. Why would Palestinian terrorists not snatch a viable Palestinian state from Israel, especially if Israel fails to do to them what Syria did to the Muslim Brotherhood?

Terrorism seems to have brought results always, even if they were not the ones desired by the terrorists. Its opponents have always paid an extremely heavy price to stamp it out. Each time one group of terrorists was crushed another grew elsewhere, leading to a new vicious cycle of more intense violence.

The First World War was triggered by a knife-wielding terrorist and caused the collapse of both the centuries-old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. That war introduced the technologies that modern terrorists still use, including poison gas, chemical and biological weapons, booby traps and land mines.

The Second World War crushed Nazi fascism, which came to power through terrorism, at a cost of almost 50 million dead. That war accelerated decolonization but also helped to turn international terrorism into a legitimate instrument of superpower rivalry.

The cold war raised terrorism to a fine art, supported by logistics, organization and high technology. Both camps used terrorists as proxy warriors around the globe, while they lurched from crisis to crisis in an extraordinary game of brinkmanship. By the cold war's end, the world had suffered 135 wars, most of them preceded by terrorism. Millions died and 30 million became homeless. At the same time, superpower military arsenals rose to unprecedented heights, making them capable of destroying every living creature on Earth, from humans through to animals, insects and plants.

During this time, international terrorism continued to threaten a second holocaust for the Jews of Israel and took heavy tolls in almost every country of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The usual method was for terrorists to take refuge in one country and launch their attacks in another. When money, appeals to patriotism and allegiance to warlords failed to motivate the terrorists, their leaders used religion and promises of an after life in paradise as incentives.

Over time, two things have become clear: that technology allows terrorists to become more efficient, and that killing them does not stop others from stepping into their shoes with new causes.

The newest link in that chain is President Bush's current war against "terrorists with global reach." So far, only one major country had been spared attacks by international terrorists on its home territory during the last 50 years. That gap was spectacularly remedied on September 11. America' s reaction was commensurate with its power and prestige. It vowed to eradicate global terrorism by fighting both its warriors and the causes that turn them into terrorists.

Meanwhile, local UN officials hold daily press conferences and make appeals, even as American TV networks and newspapers lose interest in a five month-old story. As all of us know, if network reporters no longer make it to America's parochial evening news, US lawmakers turn to other brawls no matter the situation in distant lands.

Even as I write this essay, Tom Daschle, the Democratic Party leader, has fired the first salvo against President Bush's economic performance. In the end, it may be no bad thing, for if America sticks to what it does best, making money, its wealth judiciously disbursed will melt stony hearts and win grateful friends around the world more successfully than its bombs. Perhaps Sept. 11 will help Americans to realize that spending just 0.15 percent of their gross national product on international aid, compared with tiny Sweden's 1 percent, is a mistake that should be remedied quickly.