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Who wants to fly on September 11? Or the week preceding the first anniversary of last September 11, the day of the deadly terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, or the week following? No one, it seems.

The man poking up the sign above Jean Chretien's head as he addressed a public meeting in Vancouver last week

With the war-mongers in the United States rattling their sabres about a new campaign to dethrone the Iraqi President Saddam Hussain late this fall or next Spring, Ottawa is clearly growing increasingly nervous.

There is no hiding the truth anymore. Slowly but surely Arabs and Muslims, not only in the United States, but in Canada as well, are increasingly a besieged lot.

Canada's foreign policy experts at the Sphinx-like building known as Fort Pearson in Ottawa are burning the midnight oil these days, trying to figure out a way for the Jean Chretien government to tackle the most troubling foreign policy issue that a Canadian Prime Minister has had to face in recent times - how to respond to U.S. President George W. Bush's demand to join an international coalition to wage Gulf War II.

On the face of it, at least, there is a sense of inevitability about it. U.S. President George W. Bush, not finding the 'smoking gun' he was looking for in the 12,000-page Iraqi declaration, is rattling his sabres and flexing muscles again.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien has no plans to step down until February 2004. At least, that is what he said when he suddenly announced that he would retire at the end of his current term, surprising many in his ruling Liberal Party, and even some of the country's top political pundits.

The rise of a unipolar American empire is now complete. If anyone still has any doubts about this, they must surely have been erased after the UN Security Council vote on Iraq last week.

Without doubt, the Canadian Alliance MP, Jason Kenney, was using the embarrassing comment to get some political mileage against the Jean Chretien government in the House of Commons in Ottawa.

The killing of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan by the pilot of an American F-16 fighter jet last week has set off a firestorm of anti-Americanism across Canada. People from British Columbia to Nova Scotia are seething.

These are divisive times, not only in the Middle East, but in Canada and the United States as well. The graphic images of the violence taking place there are causing anxieties and raising tensions among different ethnic groups on either side of the Arab-Israeli divide.

Americans are putting up shutters, locking up doors and barricading themselves behind walls as fears of more terrorist attacks spread across their much-vaunted open society.