Islam and Power

Above all, the forces of moderation thrive in an atmosphere of success. Two Muslim societies in which there is little extremism are Turkey and Malaysia. Both are open politically and thriving economically. Compare Pakistan today—growing at 8 percent a year—with General Zia's country, and you can see why, for all the noise, fundamentalism there is waning. If you are comfortable with the modern world, you are less likely to want to blow it up.

There are better and worse ways to handle radical Islam. We should not feed the fury that helps them win adherents. The Bush administration's arrogance has been a great boon to the nastiest groups in the Middle East, which are seen as the only ones who can stand up to the imperial bully. We should recognize how varied these groups are: some violent, others not, some truly anti-modern, others not—and work to divide rather than unite them. When, for example, Bush added Chechen brutalities to his list of crimes of "radical Islam," he made a mistake. Russia has waged a horrific war against Chechnya for two decades, killing more than 100,000 civilians. To speak of that conflict in the same breath as the London bombings, as Bush did, is to suggest that any time a Muslim kills, whatever the provocation, it's all the same to him.

Give Bush his due. He has correctly and powerfully argued that blind assistance to the dictatorships of the Middle East was a policy that was producing repression and instability. But he has not yet found a way to genuinely assist in the promotion of political, economic and social reforms in the region. A large part of the problem is that the United States—and the West in general—are not seen as genuine well-wishers and allies of the peoples of these countries in their aspirations for a better life. We have stopped partnering with repressive Middle Eastern regimes, but we have not yet managed to forge a real partnership with Middle Eastern societies.

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