Possibilities for lasting peace can be seen in the ashes of the Iraqi war

Of course, huge as its reconstruction needs undoubtedly are, Iraq cannot provide an adequate stimulus for the whole of the tottering world economy. But can it provide a model?

If the world's governments can come together to formulate and implement programs of reconstruction for Iraq, that can serve as a smaller-scale exercise for a worldwide effort to bring public and private enterprise and investment together in sound, mutually-agreed programs that can abolish chronic poverty everywhere, while at the same time turning back the momentum towards deep cyclical poverty that is now such a grave threat to the world economy.

That was - and is - the objective of the Initiative for Victory Over Want (VOW). That Initiative was founded on the realistic conviction that governments did not then have the will to formulate and implement international programs substantially to reduce or eliminate world poverty. Direct democratic action was therefore envisaged as necessary to achieve it.

If the Iraqi situation and the gathering economic storm might now be caused to stimulate the will of governments to act and to do so urgently, that would be a wondrous flower of peace and prosperity that we might pluck from the terrifying nettle of Iraq.

There are and will be meetings of the Group of Seven, the World Bank and IMF, the OECD and, of course, the United Nations, going on all the time. Routine or ad hoc meetings will be held among the major powers - France, Germany and Russia and these three, no doubt, with the United States and Britain. The Arab countries will be meeting and the Asian countries, in their various routines or specialities of bilateral and multilateral consultation.

On the agenda of all these meetings in the days, weeks and months ahead, a prominent item should be how to turn back the rush to catastrophic conflict and economic collapse, so that we can institute, instead, a grand and imaginative program to bring together all countries, races and religious groups in an enterprise of rescue and revival for us all.

If this were done, it would, inter alia, ensure that the tarnished page in human history that President Bush of the United States, Prime Minister Blair of Britain and Prime Minister Howard of Australia are now likely to fill, will become, instead, a page bearing witness to the vision that they were able to display at one of the most crucial moments in human history.