Five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the global war on terror initiated by the world's only superpower is still in a dark tunnel, and no ray of hope has yet appeared. In October that year, the U.S. started war in Afghanistan to put down Taliban Islamic fundamentalists. It started another war in Iraq in March 2003, wrongly assuming that the Middle Eastern country had links with the 9/11 terrorist network and that its regime under Saddam Hussein was secretly armed with weapons of mass destruction. Washington thought, optimistically, that with its military might it would not be so difficult to help establish stable and viable democracies in these two countries. But things have not been going as the U.S. hoped. Plagued by sectarian violence and ethnic divisions, Iraq is sliding into civil war and Afghanistan is far from attaining stability.

Sept. 11 lowered the world's terror threshold. A sad fact about the war on terror is that it set off a chain reaction of violence, rather than stopping the tide of violence or eradicating its source -- much less producing trust among peoples and nations: Bali, Madrid, London, and more if terrorist attacks and plots not clearly linked to al-Qaida, the group responsible for the 9/11, are included.

While executing the war on terror, the U.S. allowed actions that ran counter to its ideal of upholding human dignity: Long confinement of suspects of terrorism at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; torture and abuse of prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and "special renditions" of suspects of terrorism to secret prisons in Europe run by the Central Intelligence Agency.