Man-made terror pales next to higher power.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: War casualties

I AM A GOD-FEARING MAN, AND I THINK OSAMA BIN Laden ought to fear Allah as much as I do. God, Allah, whatever force of spirituality or nature that can claim 225,000 lives over a post-Christmas weekend again proved its unmistakable power in the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26.

The tsunamis created by an undersea earthquake disrupted the world's pace that day and continue to, just as Bin Laden's madmen did on Sept. 11, 2001.

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But God proved a more fearsome destroyer.

In the days following the tsunamis, as the death toll climbed inconceivably into the tens of thousands, I could not help recalling the feelings of helplessness and grief that plagued me following the collapse of the two towers in New York and the deaths at the Pentagon and in that Pennsylvania field. I wrote then that writers who have a venue to comment on such disasters have a responsibility to speak up.

Yet part of my helplessness after 9-11 was the realization that, in the face of such death and destruction, I was also still seeking a business application to whatever comments I could make. That's my business, commenting on business.

And just as during the weeks after Sept. 11 when I kept checking the websites and reading the newspapers for business issues arising from 9-11, I was again checking the news in recent weeks hoping to find the "business angle" to a horrific ocean tragedy.

For some reason, that makes you as a writer feel that your perspective is a little warped.

Yet there are business angles to the tsunami story. Business and political angles.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, wrote that in the aftermath of the devastation, the United States had a huge opportunity to show, with its fund-raising and military assistance, that this nation's waging of war in Iraq was, as billed, not at all intended as a war against Islam. Muslims in the Indian Ocean would be by far the most numerous recipients of American aid.

MSNBC.com, meanwhile, carried a story from The Washington Post that reported how Muslim religious leaders in Aceh province in Indonesia, the hardest hit area of the island of Sumatra, were preaching to survivors that the flood marked the...