Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies

PAX AMERICANA IN THE ARAB WORLD

From one end of the Arab world to the other, the drumbeats of

anti-Americanism had been steady. But the drummers could hardly have

known what was to come. The magnitude of the horror that befell the

United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, appeared for a moment

to embarrass and silence the drummers. The American imperium in the

Arab-Muslim world hatched a monster. In a cruel irony, a new

administration known for its relative lack of interest in that region was to

be pulled into a world that has both beckoned America and bloodied it.

History never repeats itself, but when Secretary of State Colin Powell

came forth to assure the nation that an international coalition against

terrorism was in the offing, Americans recalled when Powell had risen to

fame. "First, we're going to cut it off, then we're going to kill it," he had

said of the Iraqi army in 1991. There had been another coalition then, and

Pax Americana had set off to the Arab world on a triumphant campaign.

But those Islamic domains have since worked their way and their will on

the American victory of a decade ago. The political earth has shifted in that

world. The decade was about the "blowback" of the war. Primacy begot

its nemesis.

America's Arab interlocutors have said that the region's political stability

would have held had the United States imposed a settlement of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and that the rancid anti-Americanism now

evident in the Arab world has been called up by the fury of the second

intifada that erupted in September 2000. But these claims misread the

political world. Long before the second intifada, when Yasir Arafat was

still making his way from political exile to the embrace of Pax Americana,

there was a deadly trail of anti-American terror. Its perpetrators paid no

heed to the Palestinian question. What they thought of Arafat and the

metamorphosis that made him a pillar of President Clinton's Middle East

policy is easy to construe.

The terror was steady, and its geography and targets bespoke

resourcefulness and audacity. The first attack, the 1993 truck bombing of

the World Trade Center, was inspired by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar

Abdel Rahman. For the United States, this fiery preacher was a peculiar

guest: he had come to bilad al-Kufr (the lands of unbelief) to continue his

war against the secular regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The

sheikh had already been implicated in the 1981 murder of Mubarak's

predecessor, Anwar al-Sadat. The young assassins had sought religious

guidance from him -- a writ for tyrannicide. He had provided it but

retained a measure of ambiguity, and Egypt let him leave the country. He

had no knowledge of English and did not need it; there were disciples and

interpreters aplenty around him. An American imperium had incorporated

Egypt into its order of things, which gave the sheikh a connection to the

distant power.

The preacher could not overturn the entrenched regime in his land. But

there was steady traffic between the United States and Egypt, and the

armed Islamist insurgency that bedeviled Cairo inspired him. He would be

an Ayatollah Khomeini for his followers, destined to return from the West

to establish an Islamic state. In the preacher's mind, the world was simple.

The dictatorial regime at home would collapse once he snapped its lifeline

to America. American culture was of little interest to him. Rather, the

United States was a place from which he could hound his country's rulers.

Over time, Abdel Rahman's quest was denied. Egypt rode out the Islamist

insurgency after a terrible drawn-out fight that pushed the country to the

brink. The sheikh ended up in an American prison. But he had lit the fuse.

The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that he launched was a mere

dress rehearsal for the calamity of September 11, 2001. Abdel Rahman

had shown the way -- and the future.

There were new Muslim communities in America and Europe; there was

also money and freedom to move about. The geography of political Islam

had been redrawn. When Ayatollah Khomeini took on American power,

there had been talk of a pan-Islamic brigade. But the Iranian

revolutionaries were ultimately concerned with their own nation-state. And

they were lambs compared with the holy warriors to come. Today's

warriors have been cut loose from the traditional world. Some of the

leaders -- the Afghan Arabs -- had become restless after the Afghan war.

They were insurrectionists caught in no man's land, on the run from their

homelands but never at home in the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria,

tenacious Islamist movements were put down. In Saudi Arabia, a milder

Islamist challenge was contained. The counterinsurgencies had been

effective, so the extremists turned up in the West. There, liberal norms

gave them shelter, and these men would rise to fight another day.

The extremists acquired modern means: frequent flyer miles, aviation and

computer skills, and ease in Western cities. They hated the United States,

Germany, and France but were nonetheless drawn to them. They exalted

tradition and faith, but their traditions could no longer give them a world.

Islam's explosive demography had spilled into the West. The militant

Islamists were on the move. The security services in their home countries

were unsentimental, showing no tolerance for heroics. Men like Abdel

Rahman and Osama bin Ladin offered this breed of unsettled men a

theology of holy terror and the means to live the plotter's life. Bin Ladin

was possessed of wealth and high birth, the heir of a merchant dynasty.

This gave him an aura: a Che Guevara of the Islamic world, bucking the

mighty and getting away with it. A seam ran between America and the

Islamic world. The new men found their niche, their targets, and their

sympathizers across that seam. They were sure of America's culpability for

the growing misery in their lands. They were sure that the regimes in Saudi

Arabia and Egypt would fall if only they could force the United States to

cast its allies adrift.

NOT IN MY BACKYARD

Terror shadowed the American presence in the Middle East throughout

the 1990s: two bombings in Saudi Arabia, one in Riyadh in November of

1995, and the other on the Khobar Towers near Dhahran in June of 1996;

bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; the

daring attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in October 2000. The U.S.

presence in the Persian Gulf was under assault.

In this trail of terror, symbol and opportunity were rolled together -- the

physical damage alongside a political and cultural message. These attacks

were meant for a watchful crowd in a media age. Dhahran had been a

creature of the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia ever since American oil

prospectors turned up in the 1930s and built that city in the American

image. But the world had changed. It was in Dhahran, in the 1990s, that

the crews monitoring the no-fly zone over Iraq were stationed. The attack

against Dhahran was an obvious blow against the alliance between the

United States and Saudi Arabia. The realm would not disintegrate; Beirut

had not come to Arabia. But the assailants -- suspected to be an Iranian

operation that enlisted the participation of Saudi Shi`a -- had delivered the

blow and the message. The foreigner's presence in Arabia was contested.

A radical Islamist opposition had emerged, putting forth a fierce,

redemptive Islam at odds with the state's conservative religion.

The ulama (clergy) had done well under the Saud dynasty. They were the

dynasty's partners in upholding an order where obedience to the rulers

was given religious sanction. No ambitious modernist utopia had been

unleashed on them as it had in Gamal Abdel al-Nasser's Egypt and Iran

under the Pahlavis. Still, the state could not appease the new breed of

activists who had stepped forth after the Gulf War to hound the rulers over

internal governance and their ties to American power. In place of their

rulers' conservative edifice, these new salvationists proposed a radical

order free from foreign entanglements. These activists were careful to

refrain from calling for the outright destruction of the House of Saud. But

sedition was in the air in the mid-1990s, and the elements of the new

utopia were easy to discern. The Shi`a minority in the eastern province

would be decimated and the Saudi liberals molded on the campuses of

California and Texas would be swept aside in a zealous, frenzied

campaign. Traffic with the infidels would be brought to an end, and those

dreaded satellite dishes bringing the West's cultural "pollution" would be

taken down. But for this to pass, the roots of the American presence in

Arabia would have to be extirpated -- and the Americans driven from the

country.

The new unrest, avowedly religious, stemmed from the austerity that came

to Saudi Arabia after Desert Storm. If the rulers could not subsidize as

generously as they had in the past, the foreigner and his schemes and

overcharges must be to blame. The dissidents were not cultists but men of

their society, half-learned in Western sources and trends, picking foreign

sources to illustrate the subjugation that America held in store for Arabia.

Pamphleteering had come into the realm, and rebellion proved contagious.

A dissident steps out of the shadows, then respectable critics, then others

come forth. Xenophobic men were now agitating against the "crusaders"

who had come to stay. "This has been a bigger calamity than I had

expected, bigger than any threat the Arabian Peninsula had faced since

God Almighty created it," wrote the religious scholar Safar al-Hawali, a

master practitioner of the paranoid style in politics. The Americans, he

warned, had come to dominate Arabia and unleash on it the West's

dreaded morals.

Saudi Arabia had been free of the anticolonial complex seen in states such

as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. But the simplicity of that

Arabian-American encounter now belonged to the past. A fatwa (Islamic

decree) of the senior religious jurist in the realm, Sheikh Abdelaziz ibn Baz,

gave away the hazards of the U.S. presence in Arabia. Ibn Baz declared

the Khobar bombing a "transgression against the teachings of Islam." The

damage to lives and property befell many people, "Muslims and others

alike," he wrote. These "non-Muslims" had been granted a pledge of

safety. The sheikh found enough scripture and tradition to see a cruel end

for those who pulled off the "criminal act." There was a saying attributed to

the Prophet Muhammad: "He who killed an ally will never know the smell

of paradise." And there was God's word in the Koran: "Those that make

war against Allah and his apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be

put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate

sides; or be banished from the country. They shall be held to shame in this

world and sternly punished in the next." The sheikh permitted himself a

drapery of decency. There was no need to specify the identity of the

victims or acknowledge that the Americans were in the land. There had

remained in the jurist some scruples and restraints of the faith.

In ibn Baz's world, faith was about order and a dread of anarchy. But in

the shadows, a different version of the faith was being sharpened as a

weapon of war. Two years later, bin Ladin issued an incendiary fatwa of

his own -- a call for murder and holy warfare that was interpreted in these

pages by the historian Bernard Lewis. Never mind that by the faith's

strictures and practice, bin Ladin had no standing to issue religious

decrees. He had grabbed the faith and called on Muslims to kill

"Americans and their allies ... in any country in which it is possible to do

so." A sacred realm apart, Arabia had been overrun by Americans, bin

Ladin said. "For more than seven years the United States has been

occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia,

plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people,

threatening its neighbors, and using its peninsula as a spearhead to fight the

neighboring Islamic peoples." Xenophobia of a murderous kind had been

dressed up in religious garb.

INTO THE SHADOWS

The attack on the Cole on October 12, 2000, was a case apart. Two men

in a skiff crippled the Cole as it docked in Aden to refuel. Witnesses say

that the assailants, who perished with their victims, were standing erect at

the time of the blast, as if in some kind of salute. The United States

controlled the sea lanes of that world, but the nemesis that stalked it on

those shores lay beyond America's reach. "The attack on the U.S.S. Cole

... demonstrated a seam in the fabric of efforts to protect our forces,

namely transit forces," a military commission said. But the official language

could not describe or name the furies at play.

The attack on the Cole illuminated the U.S. security dilemma in the Persian

Gulf. For the U.S. Navy, Yemen had not been a particularly easy or

friendly setting. It had taken a ride with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf

War. In 1994, a brutal war had been fought in Yemen between north and

south, along lines of ideology and tribalism. The troubles of Yemen were

bottomless. The government was barely in control of its territory and

coastline. Aden was a place of drifters and smugglers. Moreover, the

suspected paymaster of anti-American terror, bin Ladin, had ancestral

roots in Hadramawt, the southeastern part of Yemen, and he had many

sympathizers there.

It would have been prudent to look at Yemen and Aden with a jaundiced

eye. But by early 1999, American ships had begun calling there. U.S.

officials had no brilliant options south of the Suez Canal, they would later

concede. The ports of call in Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea were

places where the "threat conditions" were high, perhaps worse than in

Yemen. The United States had a privileged position in Saudi Arabia, but

there had been trouble there as well for U.S. forces: the terrorist attacks in

1995 and 1996, which took 24 American lives. American commanders

and planners knew the hazards of Yemen, but the U.S. Navy had taken a

chance on the country. Terrorists moved through Yemen at will, but

American military planners could not find ideal refueling conditions in a

region of great volatility. This was the imperial predicament put in stark,

cruel terms.

John Burns of The New York Times sent a dispatch of unusual clarity

from Aden about the Cole and the response on the ground to the terrible

deed. In Yemen, the reporter saw "a halting, half-expressed sense of

astonishment, sometimes of satisfaction and even pleasure, that a mighty

power, the United States, should have its Navy humbled by two Arab men

in a motorized skiff." Such was imperial presence, the Pax Americana in

Arab and Muslim lands.

There were men in the shadows pulling off spectacular deeds. But they fed

off a free-floating anti-Americanism that blows at will and knows no

bounds, among Islamists and secularists alike. For the crowds in Karachi,

Cairo, and Amman, the great power could never get it right. A world

lacking the tools and the political space for free inquiry fell back on

anti-Americanism. "I talk to my daughter-in-law so my neighbor can hear

me," goes an Arabic maxim. In the fury with which the intellectual and

political class railed against the United States and Israel, the agitated were

speaking to and of their own rulers. Sly and cunning men, the rulers knew

and understood the game. There would be no open embrace of America,

and no public defense of it. They would stay a step ahead of the crowd

and give the public the safety valve it needed. The more pro-American the

regime, the more anti-American the political class and the political tumult.

The United States could grant generous aid to the Egyptian state, but there

would be no dampening of the anti-American fury of the Egyptian political

class. Its leading state-backed dailies crackled with the wildest theories of

U.S.-Israeli conspiracies against their country.

On September 11, 2001, there was an unmistakable sense of glee and

little sorrow among upper-class Egyptians for the distant power -- only

satisfaction that America had gotten its comeuppance. After nearly three

decades of American solicitude of Egypt, after the steady traffic between

the two lands, there were no genuine friends for America to be found in a

curiously hostile, disgruntled land.

military performance, a pain born of the gap between Egypt's exalted idea

of itself and the poverty and foreign dependence that have marked its

modern history. The rage against Israel and the United States stems from

that history of lament and frustration. So much of Egypt's life lies beyond

the scrutiny and the reach of its newspapers and pundits -- the ruler's

ways, the authoritarian state, the matter of succession to Mubarak, the

joint military exercises with U.S. and Egyptian forces, and so on. The

animus toward America and Israel gives away the frustration of a polity

raging against the hard, disillusioning limits of its political life.

In the same vein, Jordan's enlightened, fragile monarchy was bound to the

United States by the strategic ties that a skilled King Hussein had nurtured

for decades. But a mood of anger and seething radicalism had settled on

Jordan. The country was increasingly poorer, and the fault line between

Palestinians and East Bankers was a steady source of mutual suspicion. If

the rulers made peace with Israel, "civil society" and the professional

syndicates would spurn it. Even though the late king had deep ties with the

distant imperial power, the country would remain unreconciled to this

pro-American stance. Jordan would be richer, it was loudly proclaimed, if

only the sanctions on Iraq had been lifted, if only the place had been left to

gravitate into Iraq's economic orbit. Jordan's new king, Abdullah II, could

roll out the red carpet for Powell when the general turned up in Jordan

recently on a visit that had the distinct sense of a victory lap by a soldier

revisiting his early triumph. But the throngs were there with placards, and

banners were aloft branding the visitor a "war criminal." This kind of fury a

distant power can never overcome. Policy can never speak to wrath. Step

into the thicket (as Bill Clinton did in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and the

foreign power is damned for its reach. Step back, as George W. Bush did

in the first months of his presidency, and Pax Americana is charged with

abdication and indifference.

THE SIEGE

The power secured during Desert Storm was destined not to last. The

United States could not indefinitely quarantine Iraq. It was idle to think that

the broad coalition cobbled together during an unusually perilous moment

in 1990-91 would stand as a permanent arrangement. The demographic

and economic weight of Iraq and Iran meant that those countries were

bound to reassert themselves. The United States had done well in the

Persian Gulf by Iraq's brazen revisionism and the Iranian Revolution's

assault on its neighboring states. It had been able to negotiate the terms of

the U.S. presence -- the positioning of equipment in the oil states, the

establishment of a tripwire in Kuwait, the acceptance of an American

troop presence on the Arabian Peninsula -- at a time when both Iran and

Iraq were on a rampage. Hence the popular concerns that had hindered

the American presence in the Persian Gulf were brushed aside in the

1990s. But this lucky run was bound to come to an end. Iraq steadily

chipped away at the sanctions, which over time were seen as nothing but

an Anglo-American siege of a brutalized Iraqi population.

The campaign against Saddam Hussein had been waged during a unique

moment in Arab politics. Some Muslim jurists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt

even ruled that Saddam had run afoul of Islam's strictures, and that an

alliance with foreign powers to check his aggression and tyranny was

permissible under Islamic law. A part of the Arabian Peninsula that had

hitherto wanted America "over the horizon" was eager to have American

protection against a "brother" who had shredded all the pieties of

pan-Arab solidarity. But the Iraqi dictator hunkered down, outlasting the

foreign power's terrible campaign. He was from the neighborhood and

knew its rules. He worked his way into the local order of things.

The Iraqi ruler knew well the distress that settled on the region after Pax

Americana's swift war. All around Iraq, the region was poorer: oil prices

had slumped, and the war had been expensive for the oil states that

financed it. Oil states suspected they were being overbilled for military

services and for weapons that they could not afford. The war's murky

outcome fed the belief that the thing had been rigged all along, that

Saddam Hussein had been lured into Kuwait by an American green light --

and then kept in power and let off the hook -- so that Pax Americana

would have the pretext for stationing its forces in the region. The Iraqi ruler

then set out to show the hollowness of the hegemony of a disinterested

American imperium.

A crisis in 1996 laid bare the realities for the new imperium. Saddam

Hussein brazenly sent his squads of assassins into the "safe haven" that the

United States had marked out for the Kurds in northern Iraq after Desert

Storm. He sacked that region and executed hundreds who had cast their

fate with American power. America was alone this time around. The two

volleys of Tomahawk missiles fired against Iraqi air-defense installations

had to be launched from U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf and b-52 bombers

that flew in from Guam. No one was fooled by the American response; no

one believed that the foreign power would stay. U.S. officials wrote off

that episode as an internal Kurdish fight, the doings of a fratricidal people.

A subsequent air campaign -- "fire and forget," skeptics dubbed it -- gave

the illusion of resolve and containment. But Clinton did not have his heart

in that fight. He had put his finger to the wind and divined the mood in the

land: there was no public tolerance for a major campaign against Saddam

Hussein.

By the time the Bush administration stepped in, its leaders would find a

checkered landscape. There was their old nemesis in Baghdad, wounded

but not killed. There was a decade of Clintonianism that had invested its

energy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but had paid the Persian Gulf scant

attention. There was a pattern of half-hearted responses to terrorist

attacks, pinpricks that fooled no one.

HAVING IT HIS WAY

It was into this witch's brew that Arafat launched the second intifada last

year. In a rare alignment, there had come Arafat's way a U.S. president

keen to do his best and an Israeli soldier-statesman eager to grant the

Palestinian leader all the Israeli body politic could yield -- and then some.

Arafat turned away from what was offered and headed straight back into

his people's familiar history: the maximalism, the inability to read what can

and cannot be had in a world of nations. He would wait for the "Arab

street" to rise up in rebellion and force Pax Americana to redeem his

claims. He would again let play on his people the old dream that they

could have it all, from the river to the sea. He must know better, he must

know the scales of power, it is reasonable to presume. But there still lurks

in the Palestinian and Arab imagination a view, depicted by the Moroccan

historian Abdallah Laroui, that "on a certain day, everything would be

obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants

would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled." Arafat knew the

power of this redemptive idea. He must have reasoned that it is safer to

ride that idea, and that there will always be another day and another offer.

For all the fury of this second intifada, a supreme irony hangs over

Palestinian history. In the early 1990s, the Palestinians had nothing to lose.

Pariahs in the Arab councils of power, they made their best historical

decision -- the peace of Oslo -- only when they broke with the

maximalism of their political tradition. It was then that they crossed from

Arab politics into internal Israeli politics and, courtesy of Israel, into the

orbit of Pax Americana. Their recent return into inter-Arab politics was the

resumption of an old, failed history.

Better the fire of an insurrection than the risks of reconciling his people to a

peace he had not prepared them for: this was Arafat's way. This is why he

spurned the offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000. "Yasir Arafat

rode home on a white horse" from Camp David, said one of his aides,

Nabil Shaath. He had shown that he "still cared about Jerusalem and the

refugees." He had stood up, so Shaath said, to the combined pressure of

the Americans and the Israelis. A creature of his time and his world, Arafat

had come into his own amid the recriminations that followed the Arab

defeat in 1948. Palestine had become an Arab shame, and the hunt for

demons and sacrificial lambs would shape Arab politics for many years.

A temporizer and a trimmer, Arafat did not have it in him to tell the 1948

refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan that they were no more likely to

find political satisfaction than were the Jews of Alexandria, Fez, Baghdad,

and Beirut who were banished from Arab lands following Israel's

statehood. He lit the fuse of this second intifada in the hope that others

would put out the flame. He had become a player in Israeli politics, and

there came to him this peculiar satisfaction that he could topple Israeli

prime ministers, wait them out, and force an outside diplomatic intervention

that would tip the scales in his favor. He could not give his people a decent

public order and employ and train the young, but he could launch a war in

the streets that would break Israel's economic momentum and rob it of the

normalcy brought by the peace of Oslo.

Arafat had waited for rain, but on September 11, 2001, there had come

the floods. "This is a new kind of war, a new kind of battlefield, and the

United States will need the help of Arab and Muslim countries," chief

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat announced. The Palestinian issue, he

added, was "certainly one of the reasons" for the attacks against the

United States. An American-led brigade against terrorism was being

assembled. America was set to embark on another expedition into

Arab-Muslim domains, and Arafat fell back on the old consolation that

Arab assets would be traded on his people's behalf. A dowry would have

to be offered to the Arab participants in this brigade: a U.S.-imposed

settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A cover would be needed for

Arab regimes nervous about riding with the foreigner's posse, and it stood

to reason that Arafat would claim that he could provide that kind of cover.

The terror that hit America sprang from entirely different sources. The

plotters had been in American flight schools long before the "suicide

martyrs" and the "children of the stones" had answered Arafat's call for an

intifada. But the Palestinian leader and his lieutenants eagerly claimed that

the fire raging in their midst had inspired the anti-American terror. A

decade earlier, the Palestinians had hailed Saddam Hussein's bid for

primacy in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, they had been given a claim on

the peace -- a role at the Madrid Conference of October 1991 and a

solicitous U.S. policy. American diplomacy had arrived in the nick of time;

the first intifada had burned out and degenerated into a hunt for demons

and "collaborators." A similar fate lies in wait for the second intifada. It is

reasonable to assume that Arafat expects rescue of a similar kind from the

new American drive into Arab and Muslim lands.

No veto over national policies there will be given to Arafat. The states will

cut their own deals. In the best of worlds, Pax Americana is doomed to a

measure of solitude in the Middle East. This time around, the American

predicament is particularly acute. Deep down, the Arab regimes feel that

the threat of political Islam to their own turfs has been checked, and that

no good can come out of an explicit public alliance with an American

campaign in their midst. Foreign powers come and go, and there is very

little protection they can provide against the wrath of an angry crowd. It is

a peculiarity of the Arab-Islamic political culture that a ruler's

authoritarianism is more permissible than his identification with Western

powers -- think of the fates of Sadat and of the Pahlavis of Iran.

Ride with the foreigners at your own risk, the region's history has taught.

Syria's dictator, Hafiz al-Assad, died a natural death at a ripe old age, and

his life could be seen as a kind of success. He never set foot on American

soil and had stayed within his world. In contrast, the flamboyant Sadat

courted foreign countries and came to a solitary, cruel end; his land barely

grieved for him. A foreign power that stands sentry in that world cannot

spare its local allies the retribution of those who brand them

"collaborators" and betrayers of the faith. A coalition is in the offing,

America has come calling, urging the region's rulers to "choose sides."

What these rulers truly dread has come to pass: they might have to make

fateful choices under the gaze of populations in the throes of a malignant

anti-Americanism. The ways of that world being what they are, the United

States will get more cooperation from the ministers of interior and the

secret services than it will from the foreign ministers and the diplomatic

interlocutors. There will be allies in the shadows, but in broad daylight the

rulers will mostly keep their distance. Pakistan's ruler, Pervez Musharraf,

has made a brave choice. The rulers all around must be reading a good

deal of their worries into his attempt to stay the course and keep his

country intact.

A broad coalition may give America the comfort that it is not alone in the

Muslim world. A strike against Afghanistan is the easiest of things -- far

away from the troubles in the Persian Gulf and Egypt, from the head of the

trail in Arab lands. The Taliban are the Khmer Rouge of this era and thus

easy to deal with. The frustrations to come lie in the more ambiguous and

impenetrable realms of the Arab world. Those were not Afghans who flew

into those towers of glass and steel and crashed into the Pentagon. They

were from the Arab world, where anti-Americanism is fierce, where terror

works with the hidden winks that men and women make at the

perpetrators of the grimmest of deeds.

BRAVE OLD WORLD

"When those planes flew into those buildings, the luck of America ran out,"

Leon Wieseltier recently wrote in The New Republic. The 1990s were a

lucky decade, a fool's paradise. But we had not arrived at the end of

history, not by a long shot. Markets had not annulled historical passions,

and a high-tech world's electronic age had not yet dawned. So in

thwarted, resentful societies there was satisfaction on September 11 that

the American bull run and the triumphalism that had awed the world had

been battered, that there was soot and ruin in New York's streets. We

know better now. Pax Americana is there to stay in the oil lands and in

Israeli-Palestinian matters. No large-scale retreat from those zones of

American primacy can be contemplated. American hegemony is sure to

hold -- and so, too, the resistance to it, the uneasy mix in those lands of

the need for the foreigner's order, and the urge to lash out against it, to use

it and rail against it all the same.

There is now the distinct thunder of war. The first war of the twenty-first

century is to be fought not so far from where the last inconclusive war of

the twentieth century was waged against Iraq. The war will not be easy for

America in those lands. The setting will test it in ways it has not been

tested before. There will be regimes asking for indulgence for their own

terrible fights against Islamists and for logistical support. There will be

rulers offering the bait of secrets that their security services have

accumulated through means at odds with American norms. Conversely,

friends and sympathizers of terror will pass themselves off as

constitutionalists and men and women of the "civil society." They will find

shelter behind pluralist norms while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

There will be chameleons good at posing as America's friends but never

turning up when needed. There will be one way of speaking to Americans,

and another of letting one's population know that words are merely a

pretense. There will step forth informers, hustlers of every shade, offering

to guide the foreign power through the minefields and alleyways. America,

which once held the world at a distance, will have to be willing to stick

around eastern lands. It is both heartbreaking and ironic that so

quintessentially American a figure as George W. Bush -- a man who grew

up in Midland, Texas, far removed from the complications of foreign

places -- must be the one to take his country on a journey into so alien, so

difficult, a world.