The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy

January 6, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

4:45 p.m.	Registration
5:00	Presenter:	Reuel Marc Gerecht, AEI
	Discussants:	Michael Doran, Princeton University
		Jackson Diehl, Washington Post
		Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
		Salameh Nematt, Al-Hayat
7:30	Adjournment and Reception

Proceedings:
MR. GERECHT: All right.  I think we probably should get going here.

I want to thank everybody for coming.  This is a panel on my little monograph, the Islamic Paradox, with underneath it Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy.

I am Reuel Gerecht.  I'll just introduce the panel every quickly.  We have Michael Doran from Princeton, Salameh Nematt from Al-Hayat.  We have Jackson Diehl from the Washington Post and Thomas Carothers from the Carnegie Foundation.

And I'm going to have the little odd position today because someone else at AEI had somewhat of a housing emergency.  They're building a house, which you should never do.

So, I'm going to be both a presenter and a moderator.  I like that a lot because one, I'll get the opportunity to attack myself, so it won't be schizophrenia.  I'm just trying to be fair.  And it will also give me the opportunity to talk more and shut other people up.

So, with that, I'll just start off here, and I think I'll probably start off with a question, which I'll throw out to the audience.  It may seem a little bit disconnected with the subject matter, but I think--I hope fairly shortly that it does have a connection and that is I mean, how many of you out there think that Muslims have a God given right to enslave non-believers captured in war?

There's one.  All right.  That's one.  That's not bad.  Now, I ask that question because I actually think that is a fairly helpful analytical tool to ask that question.  Questions that you usually find in Zogby and Pew, I find less helpful.  That is, do you like the United States?  Do you like Americans, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't find those particularly of much value.  I do find this one of value because if I think you were to ask that in the Muslim world, you would get a similar response to what we just had in this audience.  And that is the majority of the--the vast majority of all Muslims would find the institution of slavery and enslavement to be an unacceptable institution.

Now, if you had gone back to 1807, when representatives of the British Empire and acts of supreme imperial hubris started going around to various parts of the Muslim world, informing the potentates that the slave trade was to be no more, you would have found a completely different reaction, and they would have responded as any sensible Muslim would have and that is that the slave trade was vouchsafed to them by God.  It was in the holy law.

Now, there were restrictions on it, but the institution was sacrosanct, and the English initially did not have much luck.  With time and the Royal Navy, they had more.

Now, what happened was is that the Muslim understanding of slavery evolved.  It became like it was for southern Americans.  It became morally unacceptable, and with the exception perhaps today of a few individuals in Mauritania, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, you don't find anybody willing to stand up and argue for slavery.

I mean, if you notice in Iraq amongst the jihadists in Iraq on the Sunni side, they have engaged in just about every form of barbarism, but they haven't so far as I know enslaved anybody yet.  And on the Shiite side, if you look at Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shiite radical, he for a quick moment toyed with the idea, 'cause he's a naughty boy, of introducing sexual slavery for American female soldiers who are captured.  He quickly dropped that idea because it had a resounding thud amongst the Iraqi Shiite community.  It's just a no go.

I just say that again because there is this notion out there in many quarters, particularly in the West, that Islamic society is sort of hide bound, and that it is locked into the holy law, and that particularly Muslim fundamentalists in general are locked into it, and have no place else to go.  I suggest to you that is very much wrong.  And that if you look back historically, I mean, the Muslim world, what we now call the Middle East or the Greater Middle East, I mean really went into rapid change after 1798 and the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt.  It's from that time that you really have the injection--I mean, enormous amount of Western thought into the Muslim world, into the Arab world.  And you--one of those ideas that actually got in there, and I would argue has been gaining steam ever since is the ideal of popular sovereignty.

And I think that isn't really fully appreciated.  Now, we do appreciate, and it's very obvious that the Islamic world has been very, very adept at swallowing such ideas as--western ideas as nationalism, communism, fascism, socialism.  We all wish they hadn't been for so actually curious and adaptive.

And that is a point that I think needs to be constantly and constantly have to remind yourself; that the Middle East is an incredibly open area intellectually.  It has been swallowing western ideas quite literally--quite ferociously for quite some time.

And one of those ideas that I would stress that has gotten in there and hasn't been appreciated nearly enough is the idea of popular sovereignty and democracy.  And you can find it on both the Sunni and Shiite sides.  It is more forcefully and obviously expressed on the Shiite side.  Anyone who has any knowledge of Iran can see it like the nose on the face.  It's there.  It's voluminously discussed.

And one of the reasons why the current regime has so little legitimacy is, of course, that they have denied that democracy.

Now, it is a good thing that actually democracy, the idea of popular sovereignty in the Middle East is much more widespread than people think because if we're not, we would probably be in a very, very difficult position, because one of the things we have certainly learned from 9/11--it's probably the most important thing that President Bush, I would argue, has done publicly, is that he has stated unequivocally what had been apparent to many people, particularly on the left, years and years ago, and that is there is a nexus between tyranny and Islamic extremism.

Both through oppression of fundamentalists and through indirect support of fundamentalists, Islamic activism and militancy has been growing in the Middle East for decades.  It has been gaining, I would argue, a considerable speed since the 1970s.

Now, there is this notion, this view in certain quarters, and I have a great deal of sympathy with it, and that is that the solution to this problem of trying to find, as President Bush said a forward strategy of freedom, is through the opening of these societies and through nurturing Muslim moderates or liberals.

Now, I have a problem with this.  I don't think it's true.  I don't think it's likely.  I hope it's true.  And certainly, every time I read a column that advocates American support for liberals in the Middle East, I am favor of it.  I think it's a good idea.  I think some of these individuals are incredibly brave, and the United States should always be on the side of the brave.

But also in my mind intellectually it's really--it's more of an issue of imagining Thomas Jefferson without Martin Luther.  And I just don't think we're going to get there.

And then if you look at what's going on in the Middle East, I think you have to understand that, in fact, it is those individuals who define their identity in a much more thoroughly religious manner, who are actually on the cutting edge of--will be the ones who actually bring democracy to the Middle East.

And I suspect it actually could happen sooner and not later.

Now, again, this is actually not a bad thing, and it's primarily not a bad thing since after 9/11 I would argue that it is, in fact, only those who, in fact, define themselves more religiously--Sunni fundamentalists and Shiite clerics--that they are the ones who actually have the ability to kill off bin-Ladenism; that there is no historical reason to believe that unless the--that others are actually going to be able to do that; that it is, in fact, they who gave birth to this form of Islamic activism decades ago.  It is they who, in fact, will end it; that the progressives and the Muslim moderates really can't do it, because in many ways they actually speak a completely different language.

I mean, if you want to use a good rule of thumb on those individuals who now own the intellectual high ground I would argue in the Middle East, just imagine if you go to a dinner party.  If you go to a dinner party and you were with individuals out there that you more or less feel comfortable with, then I suggest to you that they're probably not on the cutting edge.

It's the individuals who, in fact, we begin to feel uncomfortable with.  And most of these individuals are more religiously oriented that, in fact, are the ones who are more likely to fight.  They are the ones who have actually issue in a more pronounced way with dictatorship in the Middle East and have often paid a price.  Now, I would also say that these individuals often aren't very nice.  All right?  I am not of that school of thought that believes that Muslim fundamentalists many of them are, in fact, practical individuals.  You can work with the, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  In many cases, they are not.  But the key component here to remember is that the political systems, the culture has to evolve, and that unless it evolves, you're not going to go anywhere, and the notion that, in fact, you're going to somehow have these--have a system develop that is more liberal without bringing the fundamentalists into it I think is a bit naive.

Again, the way you can tell the chances and prognosis for what you might call the liberal side of Islam is look at women in the Middle East.  Always look at women, particularly middle class and upper class women in the Middle East.  Look at really the countries that matter most.  First and foremost, look at Egypt, 'cause really Egypt really is the make or break country, even more so, I would argue, than Iraq.

And if you look there, you certainly see that middle and upper class women have actually become much more religiously conscious.  You find them in much greater numbers amongst Islamic activist movements.  If you go to someplace like the American University of Cairo, which 25 years ago you did not find women anywhere on that campus.  You did not find them wearing head scarves.  Now, you find them everywhere.

If, in fact, those individuals who have the most to gain from a liberal progressive order, in fact, are not siding with it, but are siding actually with movements that define themselves much more religiously that we would describe as being much more conservative, that should tell you something.

And, again, the issue here is evolution, and I think the two countries you can have in mind here, and it's a good--keep them in mind are Algeria and Iran.

Now, in 1979, it would--I would argue it would be impossible to find anywhere a country that was more anti-American than Iran.  It would be impossible to find any country where you've had more Jihadism.  I mean, the holy warriors of Iran in 1979 and the early '80s really were the cutting edge.  I would say that they were role models in many ways for the people who followed them.

Yet, if you go to today, it's dead.  It's dead as a door nail.  Now, what happened?  What happened is actually the fundamentalists took power.  And when they took power, they effectively secularized the system.

So, you now have, in fact, in Iran you have a fairly--I would argue fairly advanced democratic culture.  You do not have a democratic system.  The clerics still maintain a theocracy.  They still maintain a dictatorship, but the legitimacy for that dictatorship, for that rule, has evaporated.

And you cannot read the literature coming out of that country without being aware what has happened that, in fact, religious governments have, in fact, secularized the system.

Now, what I--what--what's--and if you go and look at Algeria, Algeria is the opposite.  And that is that you had--the fundamentalists moving in a position in 1990, 1991; that they were going to take power.  It's always good to remember that when the fundamentalists, when FIS in particular, the Islamic Salvation Front, first came into prominence in December of 1989, they did so because they were actually marching against secularism.  They were marching against women's rights.  These individuals certainly had an agenda.  It would not be our agenda.  But they were well on the way to at least capturing the first round of the parliamentary elections until the generals of that country squashed it.

Now, what has happened since I would argue to you is zero evolution.  You still have a military dictatorship.  You have not had a serious evolution of Islamic activism in that country.  It has sort of quieted down.  It's underground.  It's in jail.  It's hiding or it's dead.

But fundamentally, it hasn't really changed.  I think now, and certainly I was on the other side of this equation those many years ago that the United States government and France made a serious mistake back in 1991, when we did not support actually the elections that could have allowed FIS to come into power.  If you remember back then, there were a lot of people who were very, very happy, particularly on the left, particularly amongst feminist movements when the military came in and crunched the Islamic Salvation Front and other Islamic movements.  I would argue in retrospect that was a serious mistake.  You didn't have the possibility for evolution.  Things halted.

And I also might add as just a side note that you did have the growth, serious growth I would argue, of Islamic radical networks in northern Europe, which later were grafted on to the networks of Al Qaeda.

Now, I think that, again, if you--let's go back just for one moment of the Iranian experience, and I'll take it to Iraq, because I think that's rather pertinent right now.

When you look in Iraq, and that is one of the reasons I think you can be very hopeful, is that what has happened in Iraq is that it has benefited from the Iranian Revolution.  I mean all of Iranian Shiite history really starts from one moment: modern Shiite history, modern political thought, and that is the 1905, 1911 revolution, where actually for the very first time, the Iranian and the Iraqi clergy, because both were involved in it, actually started to articulate what was the nature of legitimate government.

Everybody--all the clergy of Iraq and Iran actually spring intellectually from that revolution, from the discussion of constitutionalism to some extent the discussion of democracy, but it was more a question of checks and balances on a king.  And they have moved forward.  Khomeini took that to a place it had not gone before, where, in fact, he set up clerics as the absolute overlords of the system, and he, in fact, divorced the clergy from--with upholding the Holy Law.

I mean, that is the major point that people again need to appreciate is that Khomeini actually downed the Holy Law.  He set himself up and the clergy above it.  The Iranian government today actually almost in a perfunctory manner sometimes pays attention to the Holy Law, but more or less they do whatever they want to do, and they justify it in the name of Islam, and what has that led to?  It's led to the secularization of Iranian society.

Now, the same thing, a similar thing--I shouldn't say it's a similar thing, but a similar process is happening actually inside of the clergy in Iraq.  And that is that they have benefited from all the terrain that the Iranians have gone through.  And when you look at, for example, the statements of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who's the preeminent cleric in Iraq, look at the statements of someone else by a Grand Ayatollah Al-Hakim, you see very clearly these individuals are not talking about Khomeini talked about.

They are talking about the ultimate check on the political system is one man one vote.

Now, that means, in fact, they have put, and they're very open about this, they have put one man one vote above the Holy Law.  Again, it shouldn't be that--all that surprising to people because, in fact, if you look at the evolution of Islamic thought since Napoleon, it's quite clear that this process is going on; that it's not uncommon for clerics who are amongst the most intellectual, curious, and adaptive of all, which you might say intellectuals in the Middle East to be a the forefront of this.

And now, there are going to be enormous debates coming up in Iraq amongst the Shiia and amongst the Sunnis and the amongst the Kurds, and I do believe in the end the Shiia and the Sunni are not going to split on this because the relationship is actually still fairly close in Iraq.

They're going to have big debates about what it means.  They know, the clergy in Iraq know, they're going into uncharted territory here.

They're actually pretty open about it.  They know that they don't know--they don't know what the limitations on democracy should be.  They are unsure of what democratic morays are.  They have major questions about, for example, again women's rights is a big issue.  And I suggest to you that actually as women's rights are one of those things that you're probably going to see compromised as democracy moves forward in the Middle East, not enhanced.

And down the road, you will see women's rights grow, but in the early stages of this democratic movement, you can actually expect to see retrograde steps.  And it's entirely possible that you will see that in Iraq.  You may not, but I just--I caution if you go to the main shrine in Najaf, and you look on all four corners and all four doors, you will only see that the only new tiles there are new tiles that were put up that actually encourage women to remember that if they don't wear the proper deja [ph], the proper covering, they are actually aiding and abetting the enemies of Islam.

Now, the only way that could--that's been put up since the fall of Saddam Hussein.  The only way those plaques could have been put up is that all the Grand Ayatollahs agreed to it.

Now, that shows you the sensitivity of this issue.  However, this--I think it needs to be digested that this doesn't mean these individuals in there are anti-democratic.  There are going to be a grand debate on what certain civil liberties are, but they have recognized and they are openly, repeatedly saying this; that in the end democracy has to be the way that we actually approve our political system; that every individual, every single Iraqi has the right to participate in it.  They have essentially done without doing too technical made the great revolution.  There's a phrase in Islamic law and Islamic tradition known as forbidding wrong and encouraging the good--as Al amr bil Ma'roof wan Nahi 'an al Munkar [ph].  And that really is the categorical imperative inside of Islamic history.

And up until modern times, this has always been seen as a check on sort of what you might call the lascivious dark side of human nature.  It's to keep people in.  It's not to allow them to politically--to express themselves, give reign to their freedoms.

What has changed now, and Iraq really is on the cutting edge of this, is that actually--this idea now, democracy now has the force.  It is amr bil [ph].  It is a good.  It is Ma'roof.  It is undeniably something that we are going to support, which is why I suggest to you that in Iraq, for example, it is Shiite clerics who, and there are going to be a lot of people who will be with them, but Shiite clerics actually are probably be the ultimate guarantors of the democratic system.  The greatest threat in Iraq will be secularized Shiite generals in the future.

Now, the big argument here is, you know, can the same thing happen in the Sunni world.  And, again, I suggest to you it can; that the intellectual terrain and the histories of the various nations are really, in many important ways, quite similar.

I mean one of the great things about intellectual history and Islam is that you have the pilgrimage.  I mean up until modern times where you now have satellites and, you know, phenomenal communications, and you do have them.

I mean, I had the pleasure of being in Iraq sitting down with a cleric, and I had the cleric suddenly start asking me about stuff I had written.  And I mean, he had some idea.  And I was so shocked.  And I mean, it was simply that they had done his homework.  He had prepared, and he had been able to contact people who had access to the Internet.

But what has happened is there has always been actually an enormous exchange of ideas inside Islamic society first and foremost, because of the pilgrimage, because it gave an opportunity, when people came to Mecca, to exchange ideas.

Now, what I suggest to you is that when--that fundamentalists actually--it's going to be very, very difficult for fundamentalists, and it's entirely possible for them to actually sabotage a democratic system once it starts to roll.

That's why, one reason why, fundamentalists have always--really hard core fundamentalists--preferred actually the Iranian model, or what they had hoped would happen in Egypt, and that is a coup d'etat from the top.  Because if you actually go from the bottom up, then you introduce a certain ideal of popular sovereignty.  You also play back to an idea which is very, very powerful in Islamic history and that is that you have--Muslims together cannot agree upon an era.  I mean, this is known as the tradition of the Prophet, and it is--it has a conical force.

It also--this is another important factor--I mean, Islam is an extremely rational faith.  Muslims associate with one another voluntarily.  People become a Muslim, if you had any experience with clerics or just ordinary lay Muslims, and they'll often ask you, you know, why you haven't become a Muslim.  They're not asking you why you haven't become a Muslim because they think it's going to make you feel good or it touches your soul.  I mean, I don't want to get into dissecting the differences between, say, Islam and Christianity, but it's a different creature.

I mean, they are more or less asking you--I mean, you seem a rational, intelligent individual.  Why haven't you chosen Islam?

This force of rationalism I will argue will actually be a very, very powerful pillar of the new democratic ethic inside of Muslim society; that if you, in fact, allow people to voluntarily associate, you allow rational individuals to make their own choice, it's going to be very, very difficult for fundamentalists to actually squash this three years down the road, four years down the road, six years down the road.  They themselves may not want to.  That is I think the extent--the point to where we are now actually; is that the democratic ethic certainly inside of Egypt has been sufficiently imbibed that it makes the democratic idea competitive; and that people have to play along.  Even some of the worst individuals inside the FIS, and God knows there were frightening individuals inside of that, still sort of publicly had to endorse the idea of democracy, because they could not really say that we know better than you do.  We wanted--now, they certainly believe that most--and the same is true inside of Iraq with many of the Shiite clergy--they believe that if people have a chance to vote, that they will vote the way they want them to.  But they are I think certainly inside--in Iraq, they are prepared for that not to happen.  And they are prepared to make an argument, and that what has to happen is that Sunni fundamentalists have to make arguments.  They have to, in fact, persuade people that they have the right to become their representatives.  That starts the process of evolution.

Again, this is the key--I think the most important word we have to keep in our minds.  We have to start the evolution.  If we don't do this, there is again no reason to believe that bin-Ladenism, this virulent anti-American holy warriorism, is going to go away.  They have to evolve.  They have to essentially kill it themselves.

Now, as this process happens, and I'm not going to say it's inevitable, but I think it's pretty close to inevitable, one thing we're going to see is we're going to see a rapid growth of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.  It is inevitable.  If you think anti-Americanism is bad now in the Middle East, just wait for democracy to start to take hold.

But don't be scared of it.  I mean, it is a pos--it is part of breaking the fever of bin-Ladenism.  I mean, we've seen this before.  I mean, Latin America was a very good example of that, where democrats certainly initially and even today often have a very anti-American tone to them.  It's going to be much more forceful in the Middle East, much of it for very good reasons.  I mean, the United States has for a very long time supported the dictatorships and tyrannies that have, in part, impoverished that region.  And there are many other reasons, some good, some bad.  But it's going to be part of the process, and we have to be prepared that, in fact, as tyrannies start to crack that anti-Americanism, in fact, is going to go up.

And I think for that we have to be also--I mean, we need to be generous.  I mean, I tend to believe in open borders anyway.  The more Americans, the merrier.  But I think we also have to say to ourselves as democracy starts to move in the Middle East, and if it moves in the way I think it's probably going to, there are going to be a lot of people who aren't going to be able to stomach it, particularly women.  There are going to be a lot of women who have been raised under secular dictatorships who really don't like democracy, because democracy may, in fact, in the beginning--and again I think in the long run that's not true because women generally, you know, at least 50 percent of the population--in a democracy that counts--but in the beginning it's not going to be unlikely that you can see women's rights actually restricted and many of those things that we consider to be sort of natural rights, you're going to see retrogression.

For those women who cannot stomach the democratic transition, I think we should, you know, open the borders and take them in.  But understand that it's--that is not an excuse to support dictatorship, because that takes you right back to the conundrum we were in.  It takes you right back to 9/11.

I mean, one of the things that Khomeini did unintentionally, and he has shown us the way out.  All right?

You want to go down that road.  You certainly don't want people to experience the ugliness that you--that the Iranians had to go through in the Islamic Revolution, though I might add historically, if you look at what happened in the Islamic Revolution in Iran, it was far less bloody than what happened in Russia and what happened in France and what happened in China.  But you have to get that evolution going, and if you start it I think from the bottom up, you are less likely to have that ugliness.  You are more likely to kick into the gear those forces inside of Islamic history that actually make it much more difficult for the would-be totalitarians and dictators out there to take a hold of the system and keep it.

Now, I'll just stop.  I've gone over my time I should allot myself, and I'll just make one little note, and it's a little bit of idiosyncratic note, but I think it's worthwhile to mention.

The American academic community has had a really hard time with this, with democracy in the Middle East.  There are two different sides on this.  One you might call the Orientalist of Medievalist side.  That's actually the side I come from.  And then there's the modernist side.  Both sides have had trouble with it.  For those who are Orientalist, who come from that tradition, I mean, one of the things that you always see and you ask yourself somewhere in your third or fourth or fifth year of study is why do Muslims take this, 'cause you're looking at medieval society, you look at feudalism in the west, you look at feudalism in Islam, and you see that feudalism in Islam just doesn't develop as it should.  You don't have these little civic bodies develop.  You don't have the beginnings of freedom, and it makes you very depressed.

And it also makes you appreciate acutely the genius of western civilization and the pain that western civilization went through to get where it is today.

But one of the things it also instills in you is you have I think a much too long appreciation for time.  You don't realize how time is compressed now.

If I look back to the professors who trained me, I mean, they tend to talk in centuries, sometimes even millennia.  And they don't--they don't fully appreciate that time really is rapid now.

On the other hand, what you have in the modernists, which is I think is probably even worse, because they--their contributions should be more pertinent--is they actually have been consumed by two sort of complementing diseases.  One is the disease of Edward Said [ph] and the other is the disease of Tier Mondism; and that is that somehow it is wrong for western ideas to actually become implanted in the Middle East; that there's something just not right about it.  And they become very uncomfortable in particular if the United States is out there pushing certain ideas, even if those ideas are actually being pushed much more forcefully by people in the Middle East themselves; that somehow, there's just something not kosher--maybe I shouldn't have used that word--there's something not kosher with American actually being on the forefront of encouraging democracy in the Middle East; that somehow it makes it tainted.  All I will suggest to you is that Americans are not on the forefront of encouraging democracy in the Middle East.  People who are on the forefront are, in fact, people like Grand Ayatollah Sistani al-Hakim, and I suggest to you even pretty repugnant awful people that you would not want to have at you dinner parties, but, in fact, in the long run and in the short run of history, people in the Iwan [ph] in Egypt and elsewhere, who are actually are doing God's work, in the sense that they are the ones who are going to kill off the Islamic extremism.  They are the only ones who can speak to their own children.

And if you give them the chance to compete for power, you give them the chance to actually become responsible, then I think you're going to start having a giant debate, a huge intellectual tug of war.  And at the end of that road, actually is the end of the type of Islamic extremism we saw on 9/11.  And at the end of that road, you actually have a much, much healthier Middle East.

And at that, I'll stop myself.  I think what we'll do is I'll just go down the panel and let them crucify me, and then we'll--we'll then take questions after that.  And we might as well go in order.  I'll go to Mike Doran.

MR. DORAN:  Thanks very much, Reuel, and thanks to everybody else for coming.

While I really enjoyed reading the book, what he's done for us I think in this short and pithy little book, is first of all he's described for us the landscape of the Shiites in Iraq, and that's a very helpful thing.

And then he's also made the case for Iraq as the model for democratic transformation in the Middle East against the doubters who have come out since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.  And that's also a very beneficial argument to have made.

I want to throw up a little--first of all, I wan to say I basically agree with everything that Reuel said as kind of general statements of principle, but I see a problem between saying that in order to implant democracy in the Middle East, you really have to go to the heart of Islamic thought.  I'm even willing to go with you and say that, over time, this will probably happen; that there's going to be a--that there's going to be a kind of pluralization of Islam and of Islamic thought.  But then there's that the road you have to travel between here and there, the difficulties along the way, the difficulties for the Muslims themselves, and the difficulties for the United States.  And that's what I want to put emphasis on.

But first back to what was--what I really liked about the book.  Reuel has showed us--Reuel likes Shiites.  This is one thing I realized in reading it.  He's a--in the Middle East, when you do Middle Eastern studies after a while, you become like a Middle Easterner and the first--you know, the minute you meet somebody, you start asking well, what side are they on.  You know, do you like the Arabs.  Do you like the Israelis.  Do you like the Shiites, the Sunnis, and Reuel doesn't really hide it very well.  He really, really likes the Shiites, and so he contrasted the--you know, he talked about Zbigniew Brzezinski in there who says, you know, let's have a realist foreign policy.  Support your dictators, but solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, because if we get peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then that will kind of--they'll be this beautiful warm glow that will spread out across the region.

And Reuel very delicately dismissed that, and said, no, we actually have to have transformation within Muslim society.  So, he said Iraq is the engine.

I'm not sure.  I have some doubts.  I want to believe that as well, but I have some doubts about the kind of reverberation effect that Iraq, the engine is going to have.  First of all, there are a couple of passages in which where Iraq's, where Reuel says if it all goes well in Iraq, and that's already the big if that this thing has to be--Iraq has to be put together before it can have the--

MR. GERECHT:  I'll use my right as the moderator--if it fails, we're toast.

MR. DORAN:  Yeah.  Right.  So, the--now, what you've got going for you in Iraq are a couple of things.  Number one, you have, as Reuel says, one of the strongest parts of the book I thought was his explanation as to why the Iraqi Shiites are going to come down on the side of democracy, and that's that they have the failed Iranian model in front of them.  And it's had a huge impact on them.

And then the next part of the argument is that the Sunni community in Iraq is a minority community, and so it's got no--if it's not going to be completely dominated by the Shiites, it has got to enter the political marketplace that democracy offers and try to establish itself in that respect.

So, the kind of democratization of Shiite thoughts is going to spread to the Sunnis for good realpolitik reasons.  They have, as a minority community in Iraq, they've got no choice other than to play that game.  That's the best thing for them, so they're going to--so they're going to grab it.  I think everybody here could envision scenarios in which Iraq will--won't work probably, so I won't bother going through those.

But the next question then is how is that going to reverberate out?  And the one country that Reuel didn't ever mention in the book--actually I shouldn't say that, you probably did mention it, but you didn't dwell on it.  You didn't dwell on it now--is Saudi Arabia.  And it happens to be the country that I'm most obsessed with now, so I want to talk about that a little bit.

It's also the country the United States has to be most concerned about, because it's got 25 percent of the world's oil reserves.  And no matter what happens, oil is going to continue to be very important to us, and we're going to be concerned about Saudi Arabia.

This--it seems to me that this reverberation effect probably won't go very far inside Saudi Arabia.  And if it does, it might look very ugly.  I'll give you a couple of scenarios here.

First of all, if the Sunni community in Iraq adopts this kind of thinking about politics and develops a kind of pluralistic view of Iraq, that is going to have in certain parts of the Middle East, and in particular in Saudi Arabia, a Shiite tinge to it.  It's exactly the things that Reuel likes about it, a significant percentage of people in Saudi Arabia are going to hate.

And I'm not talking just about the authoritarians at the top of the system, the Al Qaeda movement and radical Wahhabism absolutely detests Shiites.  It doesn't like democracy either.  But it also hates Shiites.  It fears Iran horribly.  And it fears the spread of Shiite power into Saudi Arabia because 10 percent of the Saudi population is Shiite, and that 10 percent sits on the--in the strategic eastern province where all the oil is.  Seventy--75 percent of Bahrainis are Shiites.  They're ruled by the Sunnis in Bahrain.  So, you've got--there aren't that many Bahrainis, but you've got Shiites here in Bahrain.  Then you've got Shiites here in Saudi Arabia.  And then you've got Shiites up here in Iraq.  And then you've got this big Iranian power over here, and it all looks from a Saudi point of view, from a Saudi realpolitik point of view, from the authoritarians at the top, it looks very scary to have this kind of Shiite power spreading out underneath them.

For the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, and I don't know what percentage of the population in Saudi Arabia is, you know, sort of dyed in the wool fundamentalists.  Let's say 15 percent.  My own belief is that human beings have a--sort of naturally there's a default setting among 15 percent of us to be fundamentalists.

So 15 percent of Saudis are hard core fundamentalists.  They don't like--they don't like the Shiites, and they're going to fight this thing tooth and nail.  They're going to fight it tooth and nail, and they're going to use a lot of the money that they get from their oil wealth to fight it.  And it's going to be very difficult for us--it's going to be very difficult for the United States to come in, first of all, because we need the Saudis.  We need them for a lot of reasons, mainly economic, but there are other strategic reasons as well.  And it's going to be very difficult for us to step into them and say reform along the lines of those Shiites over there in Iraq.  And even if we do, I don't know that they're going to listen to us for a second.

So, that's one point, and I'll be brief.  I just want to make one other point and that is the other thing that Reuel didn't talk about in here was Al Qaeda itself.  You kind of took them out of the picture.  I'm very worried about them.  I don't think they're going away anytime soon.  I agree with Reuel a hundred percent that pluralism and democracy is the answer to Al Qaeda ultimately.  But how long is it going to take and how are we going to get there?  I have a lot of worries about that.  And I'll tell you what I mean in just a second.  I was thinking as Reuel was speaking about this globalization business and the Internet being available to everybody, I've been reading--I've been working on an Al Qaeda thinker, an Al Qaeda strategist, the last few weeks.  A guy named--who's totally unknown to anybody--named Abu Bakr Najee.  It's a pseudonym.  I don't know who he is.

MR. GERECHT:  I just want to let you know that Michael doesn't have an active social life.

MR. DORAN:  But he reads--he quotes Paul Kennedy.  He quotes Palmerston [ph] or paraphrases Palmerston.  He quotes western experts on managerial sciences and so forth, all in order to explain to radical cells how to operate.  So this guy is totally clued in and knows who we are extremely well.

What he's saying is quite interesting.  He is saying that we're in a--we're going through a moment of sort of epochal change; that there's a change of regime going on in the Middle East.  And the reason for that, he is saying, is there's a retraction of state power.  There's a--the states are becoming weaker.  I mean, if we sort of see it on a spectrum that the state on one end of the spectrum the state provides service in the sense of jobs, goods; service in the sense of servicing identity and religion; and on the other, we have brute force.  He's saying that the scale has moved all the way over toward brute force.  What the state is offering today is stability and it's keeping everybody in line.  But it's not providing a lot of these other services, and space is opening up between state and society.  Now, this is the space that we all feel that Reuel and others are feeling into which people--a civil society is starting to emerge.

But Al Qaeda is reading that as well, and they're saying this is a great opportunity for us.  We should use it in order to wreak havoc and chaos.  What we want to do is set groups at odds with each other; set the state against society.  We want to bring the Americans into the heart of the Middle East so that they're in a direct conflict with Muslims, and we want to ride this chaos--and this is the way he calls it, he calls it management of barbarism.  And it's not barbarism in the sense that Muslims talk about barbarism as jahile [ph].  It's wild Towahush [ph]--animal like behavior.  We're going to manage this barbarism in order to--in order to increase the balance of power between us, which is the radical Muslims and them, meaning the states and the Americans.  We're going to designate certain specific groups that where we think we can kind of detach them from the state or carve out a--carve out a little sphere of power and that's what we're going to do.

So, this--while we, who are complete outsiders don't really understand this place, are going to try to support democratization, these guys are going to be there with their car bombs and their suicide bombings trying to manage the chaos.  And I don't see this ending anytime soon.

And you can imagine a scenario--this is sort of the nightmare scenario that this--that Reuel's model starts to take shape in Iraq.  It does start to have a little bit of a reverberation effect outside in Saudi Arabia.  But it begins in Saudi Arabia to create a competition.  Democracy is a competition.  You're going to have a competition inside Saudi Arabia between haves and have nots and between different have nots, between different regions who want a--already the Shiites in Saudi Arabia are saying that all the oil wealth of the eastern province is going to the nudge and not to them.  You're going to have the people in the south, the impoverished south of Saudi Arabia, they're going to say, we want a chunk of that oil wealth as well.

And then you'll have Al Qaeda step in, and they'll say to the people of the south, who are Sunnis, and they're going to say those Shiites, they're taking your oil wealth away from you.  And they'll start bombing Shiites and so forth and setting one against the other.  That's my nightmare scenario.  I'll stop there and pass it on.

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you for the cauchemar.  Salameh.

MR. NEMATT:  Thank you.  I'm going to begin by disagreeing with Reuel on a very, very controversial statement about the link between democracy and anti-Americanism.  The argument that the more democratization we begin to see in the region, we're going to have more anti-Americanism.  I totally disagree with that.

I'd like to just use a real life example, from Iraq.  I believe that, you know, people think that after elections, we're going to have a completely different situation on the ground or maybe they would like to believe that, you know, the--you know, the dynamic is going to change a lot.  I believe that we should really look at what's going on in Iraq and not just the stories about, you know, the violent stories and the explosions and murders, et cetera, but to look at what's happening, which is not really being reported a lot.  One hundred fourteen newspapers.  If you look at these newspapers, they're predominantly, predominantly secular.  There are, of course, the Islamic parties.  Each has its own newspaper.  But if you go and investigate a little bit and find out that the number one newspaper in Iraq today is called Al Nadr [ph], and it's basically edited by a former colleague who was correspondent in Moscow, an Iraqi who returned to Iraq to help rebuild his country.  Now, this is the most popular newspaper.  It's extremely, extremely secular, anti-Baathist, and it is basically run by an editor who's a Sunni.  I believe that, you know, we're talking about democracy in Iraq and the future.  I believe that we're already--we're already half way there.  If we really look how the Iraqis behaved just a few weeks after the fall of the Iraqi--immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, these newspapers sprouted up.  We have today over 80 political parties.  Some people put the figure at over 100.  These, the 80, are registered political parties.

All these newspapers basically--there's no control.  You don't need a license to publish a newspaper in Iraq, which is not the case throughout the Arab world.  Every political movement you can think about, including a greens environmental party, has been--is basically emerging in Iraq, and they have their own newspaper.

But I'm--the point I'm making is that we already have the democracy basically emerging in Iraq already, while the occupation is still in place.  And in my view, the elections are going to basically end up confirming what we already have today, meaning the Shiites are going to obviously take power because they are the majority.  They're the ones who are--who have basically a truce with the United States.  I mean, Sistani and others and including some of the Sunni parts, they have an agreement that, you know, they don't want the Americans out before they can stand on their own feet.  And what we have--if you really want to--if you analyze the elements that are hostile to the United States in Iraq today, and I always, you know, like to ask this question.  Can anybody name a single opposition figure, opposition, quote unquote, opposition to the Iraqi government or opposition to the United States, a single politician in Iraq who's opposed to the United States and opposed to Allawi's government and supporting the insurgency?  This is really a very important question.  The ones who are fighting today in Iraq are basically the remnants of the regime basically who lost everything.  They're going to be dead anyway if the Iraqi people get their hands on them.  And so they're fighting to death.

The, you know, Baathist leaders they're still in Syria and in Jordan.  They're conducting operations from there, and we know that.  And, of course, you have the elements who want to sabotage the Iraq project--elements in Syria, of course the whole government of Syria; elements in Saudi Arabia; elements in Jordan.  Basically, the difference between 1991--[tape flip.]

And militarily to restore the order that was basically violated by Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait.  So, America went in, kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, restoring the quote unquote Arab order, the Arab order, the Sunni Arab order.  Now, in 2003, America went into basically destabilize that order.  Now, I think the U.S. would be really naïve if it thought that anybody in the region, really anybody in the region, apart from Sistani and the majority of Shiites in Iraq are basically going to help the Americans.  The Shiites are doing not because--doing it because they like the Americans.  They're doing it because they like themselves.  It's the Americans who allowed them, as a majority, to gain power for the first time in the history of the country.  The British put the Sunnis to rule Iraq 90 years before, and now the Americans are basically fixing a situation which was wrong.

Now, another question we ask ourselves:  why wasn't there an insurgency against Saddam's brutal regime?  Why did all the Arab governments remain silent versus--vis a vis what Saddam was doing to this own people--the mass graves.  Of course, they knew about it, because their intelligence services told them what was going on, and everybody knew, whoever wanted to know, knew what Saddam was doing.  It's because they wanted to maintain the status quo.  If we go a little bit backwards and this--in that sense, you know, just to continue on the point that anti-Americanism I think is not going to be [inaudible] to understand why the problem, America's problem, in the region is not a religious problem.  It's a political problem.  We have to answer a very important question:  how come in a country like Egypt, a Muslim country, which has received $60 billion of U.S. foreign aid over the past quarter century, you have a survey showing 98 percent of the Egyptians hate America.  In Iran, which is an enemy of the United States for the past 25 years, the leadership of Iran calls America the Great Satan, 83 percent of the people they look favorably at the United States.  We must answer this question to understand what is America's problem.  Wherever America is hostile to the regime, the people like the Americans.  And wherever Americans are allied with the regimes--Egypt gets this foreign aid--the same thing in Jordan, similar numbers in Jordan--96 percent anti-Americanism--it's because the United States is allied with these regimes.

In other words, the anti-Americanism on the popular level we have today is a protest vote against these regimes that are imposed on them.  They are non-democratic; some of them brutal; some of them less brutal.  But they're dictatorial, nevertheless.  And they have been backed by the United States.  The leaders of these countries come to America, and they're embraced by the U.S. President as friends.  And then they wonder in Washington, why do they hate us these people?

So, the Iranians realize that the Americans are genuinely against the mullahs, the haminas [ph] who are keeping power by force.  The majority of the Iranians are against wil el et fakee [ph], and basically--and they do want separation of the mosques and the state.  And they feel that their only hope of that change is the United States.

If you go to Syria, we have something similar.  A majority of Syrians view America favorably.  Of course, the Syrians always suppress, you know, such surveys, and if they do take this, they have to be done secretly, because they will not allow it, because the Syrians know it.  And it's--we have the opposite picture in a so-called ally of the United States in Jordan and in Egypt.

If we answer this question, we understand the problem.  It's a political problem.  True.  The Shiites today look friendly to the United States because of political reasons.  As I said, the situation in Iran and the situation in Iraq, and the Shiites know that they couldn't have done it on their own had it not been for the United States intervening and bringing down this regime that was basically propped up by every single government in the region.  Every single government in the region--Arab government--backed, you know, was against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  And this is on the record.  It's not a secret.  And every single government in the region is now determined to make America fail in Iraq, because the success of America in Iraq is going to mean that's going to open America's appetite to move forward in the region because President Bush's vision is going to begin to be implemented if America succeeds in Iraq.

So, to go back, while recognizing the differences between the Shiites and the Sunnis, the Shiites never really closed the door of isjihad [ph].  Basically, they're more pragmatic than the Sunnis, and this is an important difference but I believe that the biggest problem is a political one.  And once we see the United States moving to implement its forward strategy for democracy in the Arab world, we're going to see a shift changing.  People are going to begin to talk.  They're going to begin to have free media for a change, which we don't have now anywhere except in Iraq.

As I told you, you cannot publish a newspaper, have a radio station or television without licensing from governments in the Arab world.  And the governments will not give you a license unless you support them, unless you're a crony of the regime.

Now, if the people of the region begin to see the Americans putting their money where their mouth is, and ironically, of course, people are arguing America basically allocates $200 billion for the Iraq project--I mean literally and reconstruction, et cetera.  But it allocates $29 million for democracy.  It shows you how much importance this Administration puts on the question of democracy.  Who's going to really believe that the President and the Administration are serious about it when they continue until this very day as--continue business as usual with the governments in the region, without any indication that they're beginning to isolate these regimes politically, expose them, expose their corruption, their lack of respect for human rights, and until that happens, people are not going to buy it and anti-Americanism is going to continue.  The more proportionately we move towards democratization, the less anti-Americanism are going to--we're going to have simply because they will feel that America is part of freeing them rather than part of oppressing them by allying itself with these dictatorships.

I will basically stop here and we can--you know, I'll take any questions you have.  Thanks.

MR. DIEHL:  I would like to quickly throw out a couple of questions, as Reuel did, though I don't think I can match the idea of American soldiers and sexual slavery.  I mean, my questions have to do with another subject he didn't mention much in his book, which is the Palestinians and I think they're worth talking about in part because they're having a democratic election this weekend, after all.  And I think Palestinians are and the election campaign has been interesting for the spectacle it has already given us of, for example, of aging politicians actually trying to do and say things that the mass of people want to hear, which is new in that part of the world.

But also the Palestinians are interesting to me I think because they are I think more suggestive of what democracy would look like across a large part of the Middle East than anyone else.  They are more open--they have had a more open society for longer, in spite of everything that's happened.  They've had something reasonably close to a more open media than most of the rest of the Arab world.  They've had more political pluralism, more people from different trends being free to act in the last few years.  And as a result, you have a political articulation there that you do not have in Egypt.  You do not have in Jordan and other neighboring countries, and I think you see more in the Palestinians what you might eventually see in those countries were they to be more open.

And that brings me to Reuel's thesis.  I think he makes a couple of really important points.  One of them is that Shiites, Islamic Shiites, and Sunni Islamics will have to be part of any democratic system that's built in the region, and they may become the drivers of it.  But in any case, they have to be included if it's going to work.

And his second point, which I think is extremely important is that maybe their participation in that system, and even their leadership of it, which results in a sort of reform of those Islamic movements that we eventually have to see in order to deal with bin-Ladenism.

But I think the Palestinians are an interesting test of a couple of his subsidiary points about whether the Islamists necessarily will win; whether moderate secular movements necessarily will be marginalized; and whether it's the case that these movements will necessarily end up being hostile to the United States and democracy.

And we look at the Palestinian elections coming up this Sunday in what is the most open political society outside of, say, Iraq, in the Middle East, and the guy who is going to win by a landslide is a moderate secular pro-western politician.  He's not Saidi di Ibrahim [ph], who Reuel rightly cites as being the model for liberals.  But he's, compared to Ayatollah Sistani, he's pretty close, and he's somebody who everyone in this room would enjoy having dinner with.  And he's going to win, in part, because he's--it's not an entirely fair election.  Hamas is not participating.  Marwan Barghouti has been excluded.  But the fact is that they polls show that if Hamas were participating in this election, they would get about 20 percent of the vote.  Hamas just participated in the municipal elections, and, you know, it's--you have lots of arguments about what exactly they did, but, you know, maximum they got about 30 percent of the vote in the municipal elections.

The fact is that Hamas is a distinct minority in the Palestinian polity, and the secular moderates are in the majority right now.  I think the same would be true of Egypt.  I mean, people often like to say if Egypt had an election--Hosni Mubarak likes to say if Egypt had an election tomorrow, the Islamists would win.  And that may be true if the election were tomorrow.  I think if the election were a year from now, and they had as much chance to articulate platforms as had the Palestinians, it's quite likely that Islamic movements in Egypt would get 20 or 30 percent of the vote.

That's because I think, in contrast to what Reuel say, fundamentalism is in retreat in important ways in parts of the Middle East, including among the Palestinians and in Egypt and in Jordan.

Why?  For two reasons.  First, the fundamentalists have suffered a very severe military defeat in Egypt and more recently in Palestine at the hands of the Israelis.

And secondly, because people in those countries, however much they may identify with fundamentalist Islam in cultural ways, can see that there is no credible political program that these movements are putting forward.  People are voting for Abu Mazen freely in the Palestinian elections not because they don't believe in Islamic fundamentalism, but because they see that Hamas has no credible political platform for getting them out of this situation that Abu Mazen just might.

Now, it may be that Hamas is going to participate let's hope in the Palestinian legislative elections later this year, and maybe they'll win, in which case we'll prove to be right.

But I just--but we'll set that question aside, because I think there's another interesting question that the Palestinians raise is, if it's true that Islamic fundamentalists must be part of the solution, is our strategy towards Hamas correct?  Is U.S. policy towards these movements and Palestine correct?

I think one thing is that Abu Mazen agrees with Reuel.  He believes that the Islamists have to be part of the political system.  His strategy about Hamas is to bring them into the system somehow, to get them to declare a cease fire, to get them to participate in a political system, and to turn them eventually into a political party.  That--he has no intention of cracking down on them militarily.

Our policy, which is identical to the Israeli policy, is that the only solution is for a new Palestinian Administration under Abu Mazen to begin by cracking down on Hamas, to fight terrorism as President Bush says over and over again.

And I think Reuel's good thesis raises the question is that the right theory?  Should we, in fact, be trying to make--join with Abu Mazen in making Hamas into a political party rather than pursuing a military crackdown against them?

MR. CAROTHERS:  Thanks very much.  It's good to be here, and I'm the last of the commentators, so I'll try to be relatively brief as well.  I'm sure Reuel wants to get back and say some more things.

Since the United States policy community decided a couple of years ago that it's advisable and, in fact, necessary for the United States to support political change in the Middle East to help undercut the roots of Islamic radicalism, there's been a missing piece on this new conventional wisdom about American foreign policy in the Middle East.

U.S. officials say again and again that the United States would like to see democratic change in Middle East states, but the path for getting there is left unspecified.  To the extent it's filled in, there's a very vague idea of sort of top down reform coming in the friendly regimes in which successive kinds of liberalizing reforms with parliaments and judiciaries and a bit more of civil society would somehow make it so that a bit of reform here and there and one day Egypt would wake up as a democracy, or Saudi Arabia.

And the uncomfortable fact is that such top-down controlled, step-by-step transitions are exceedingly rare in the world.  Of the hundred countries that have attempted to make democratic transitions in the last 20 years, fewer than five have really followed this kind of iterative, gradual path.  In almost all of them, there has been regime collapse at a certain point and a clearing away of the old system.

And so, there's been a certain what I've called magical realism at work in American policy towards political change in the Middle East, which is an unwillingness to face the hard question of what when we talk about the democratization of Egypt or the democratization of Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but what really are we talking about as a political process beyond kind of liberalizing reforms.

And behind this missing piece is a lot of ambivalence in the American policy establishment; I mean, primarily in different parts of the U.S. government, but also parts of the policy community that followed the Middle East about the wisdom of this conventional wisdom.

These days everybody gives lip service to the idea of promoting positive political change in the Middle East.  But a lot of people deep down are not really convinced that this is such a good thing.  And the substance of U.S. policy is somewhere fairly far behind the rhetoric coming from the President and from some of the people who have been really putting forward the idea very forthrightly.

Into this gap steps Reuel with a rather provocative essay--actually very provocative.  And he does several things.  First of all, he says that the question of why they hate us, he says they hate us because of things we're doing, not because of what we are.  He says it's a mistake to say they hate us because we are democratic.  He says they hate us, as he said again tonight, because we're supporting dictatorial regimes.

And then secondly he says I have a vision for what this missing piece looks like and what is the process of positive political change in the Middle East.  And it is a process of empowerment of Islamist political forces, greater participation, inclusion, and then evolution of these forces into more democratic forms once in power.  They are the lever of change, he says, in a sense, the future of democracy in the Middle East.

And the third point he makes is that he does not believe that moderate Muslims or secular Muslim political forces will be this lever.  As he says here, but moderate Muslims may not be the key to a new less threatening Middle East.  Odds are they are not.  If they're defined by their secular culture or a certain affection for the United States, they will probably lose ground as a democratic movement develops in the region.

So, he's saying, at least, three very important things.  And he believes that Iraq is the engine of this change, through the political changes occurring in Iraq that he believes will be influential, a positive contagion effect elsewhere in the region.

I'm pretty sympathetic to all three of his major points about why they hate us, what the lever of real democratic change might be, and the likely significant role of the moderate and the secular political forces.

But--and so I'm sympathetic to the overall framework of the argument, and I think it's well stated and I look forward to the larger book, because, of course, there are many more points to develop.

But I think there are some hard questions, which, whether we agree or disagree with that main framework, that we have to confront, and I think it's only 68 pages, so in the book I hope he'll take up some of these harder questions.  And some of them, of course, will just work in the year of two to come.  Because the first is will it really work in Iraq?

Now, obviously, I don't have the answer to that, but I think, Reuel, you've been emphasizing in your analysis the intentions of the Shiia clerics and the intentions of some of the Shiia political elite who we're assuming will take power after the elections.  Now, I'll take your word for their intentions and their mindset, because I don't know it, and you have studied it and you're much closer to it than I am.

But in studying democratic processes in other countries attempting to go from totalitarian or severe authoritarianism, yes, the intentions of new power holders are important, but just as important is can the society achieve a balance of power among contending forces.  And a lot of countries coming out of conflict or totalitarianism it's a little bit less important what the particular intentions of certain power holders are as can they be checked in a productive way by some political forces.

In El Salvador, for example, neither the left nor the right was very pro democratic in the 1980s.  They were fighting each other tooth and nail.  Today, El Salvador is doing pretty well democratically.

It's not because they both woken up both sides and said, oh, we really believe in democracy.  It's because they have been forced to live together and share power and have learned how to do it.  That is the road to democracy in Iraq.  I'm less concerned about the particular philosophy or intentions of the Shiia clerics than whether or not once they achieve a certain amount of power through the elections, they will be able--and it's not going to be just their task; it's going to be the task of the Sunni community and the Kurds and others--to engage productively and create a balance of power and a political process that genuinely involves sharing power.

And unfortunately, that hasn't happened very much yet.  It's starting to happen in certain ways in Iraq, but it remains to be worked out.  I don't think it can't happen.  But I think it's going to be difficult, and we've seen other societies where it's difficult.

So, I think intentions are important, but balance of power and sharing of power is important as well.

The second question is, okay, if it happens in Iraq and things go well over the next couple of years, how influential will this be, and will this be the lever of change to the rest of the region that you hope and believe that it will?

I think you have to acknowledge that at least initially for many people in the region, even if it goes relatively well, there are going to be still fairly strong unattractive elements to this political model of change.  If you say to somebody, yes, you can have significant political change, but in order to get there, you have to have a major invasion by a foreign power, the looting of some of your major cities, tens of thousands of people killed, several years of chaos, daily violence, but it will work out, trust me.  It's hard.  It's a hard model to sell.  Let's face it.

And yes, it may be a positive place several years from now compared to what it was.  In fact, I'm sure it will be better than it was under Saddam Hussein, but its influence as a model is going to be limited by the path that it had to take to get there.

And even if it is a positive model, I think you have to confront a little more squarely the fact that there's a little bit of magical realism in your own account of Iraq becomes a positive model and somehow there's a surge of openness and greater inclusion of fundamentalists, what happened to these entrenched, static powerful regimes that are determined to fight this, as Michael notes.  They're not just potted plants.  They're going to be fighting back against this, and I think you're going to need to deal with that a little more.

Third, again, you're fairly blunt, and I certainly appreciate that, because in this subject people are usually not about the fact that democratization is going to be very risky for the United States and could entail side effects that are nasty.  As you say here, the march of democracy in the Middle East is likely to be very--and that's your italics--anti-American.  Decades of American support to dictators helped to create bin-Ladenism.  And you're fairly blunt about it, but you don't actually carry through your logic.  You then raise the issue of Israel and say, imagine, you know, if there are fundamentalist regimes in several important Arab countries what this might mean for Israel, but then you just stop, and you don't really carry through the thought.

And Israel, at least, when it looks at the Middle East, it sees Iran and certainly would say we certainly don't like having a Shiia-led fundamentalist regime in Iran.  And, in fact, we view it as our major security threat.

And so, you kind of stop short.  I think part of it is you're just I think respect for Israel and feel like they're big boys.  They'll be able to take care of themselves, which they are.

But you don't really confront in a sense what is this going to mean if you really think there is going to be a transitional period in which you say, for example, you would rather have a fundamentalist Egypt than a Mubarak's Egypt.  And that's a pretty provocative statement.  On page 53:  the United States would be better off with this alternative--that's a fundamentalist-led Egypt--than with the secular dictatorship like Mubarak's.  I think you have to carry through more carefully and more systematically what really are going to be some of the negative side effects of such regimes, because it's true that secular populations, when allowed to express their opinion--I agree with the other commentator--will not prove to be so anti-American, but there are still a number of people who have power and do not like Israel, as you point out in a significant way; do not like the United States for other reasons; and are likely to try to carry out some anti-American and anti-Israeli policies if they have their hands on state levers of power.

And then fourth, the thing I don't think you have time to do, which I'm sure you'll do further, is you don't really differentiate in much of the rest of the region how you think this is going to happen and what it's going to look like.  Michael very usefully raised the question of Saudi Arabia, because it's one of the hardest cases.  But you tend to talk about the potential of Islamic fundamentalism, Arab politics in a somewhat undifferentiated way.  You focus on Algeria to some extent, but I think there's such drastic differences between the role of, say, the Wahhabi establishment in Saudi Arabia with, for example, the role of fundamentalists in Yemen or even in Egypt, et cetera, that I think you're going to need to differentiate a little bit more.  But you can only do so much in 68 pages.

You've given us a lot to think about, and I think you've advanced the debate where I think we've been papering over some of the hard questions until now.

MR. GERECHT:  Thank you.  I'll just quick--very quickly, because I want to have enough time to give people questions, run over just a few points.

On Mike's points on Saudi Arabia, I think they're very well taken.  Listen.  I mean, there's a limited amount that the United States can do in the Middle East, and it's a serious mistake to believe that the United States is--can be in many places an engine for rapid or massive change.  Often the United States is just going to have to get its rhetoric right, but getting its rhetoric right, in some sense, is not an insignificant contribution.

Now, in Saudi Arabia, I think it's absolutely true that as Iraq moves forward, you're going to see a much more pronounced anti-Shiite angle amongst the Wahhabis.  I mean, it's there.  It has always been there, and it's going to get a lot worse.  The--but I don't think the United States should exempt Saudi Arabia from the rhetoric, and that is--I mean, I think Mike is right that the probably default percentage for real hard core folks is probably around 10, 15 percent.  I mean, I have no idea, but that sounds reasonable to me.  You're going to have to assume that, in fact, that the other 80, 85 percent of the people are going to eventually hold the day; and that these individuals are, in fact, going to counter; that they're not going to allow the 10 or 15 percent to determine their lives.  But I think it is important, and has been, I would argue a serious mistake of the United States to align itself with one of the most aggressively reactionary states in the region.  I mean, Bernard Lewis once made the parallel that if you had to think about what the Wahhabis are, just imagine if the KKK took Texas.  I think that's a fair parallel, and I think you have to start from square one.  And square one is the position we have taken with Saudi Arabia is wrong.  It was a contributing factor to the growth of bin-Ladenism.  We need to stop doing it.  You have to somehow make the necessary break and say that we have to develop a new way of handling that state.  That is not going to mean that overnight, you know, you're going--you're certainly not going to use military force on Saudi Arabia.  But you are going to at least get its rhetoric right.  You're going to say that Saudi Arabia should, in fact, have a representative system.  And if that brings forward and allows Wahhabis to participate, let it happen.

Again, the key is the evolution here.  Do not run away from the evolution, even though the process I think is going to be fairly--at times ugly.

Again, on the anti-Americanism, I mean, I agree with Salameh that on the anti-Americanism and Iraq I think that--I hope is exception to the rule.  I can, however, see as this develops, the Shiia becoming in a certain way more anti-American.  That will not I would argue make them any less committed to the democratic process there, but I can see it happening.

In the long term, I think that democracy will actually diminish anti-Americanism.  It may actually diminish it--I hope he's right--in the short term.  I have severe doubts about that because of just the--our history in the Middle East and the history again of the west in the Middle East.  I think the factors there are going to encourage the growth of anti-Americanism, and you're going to have this pent up frustration, which, if you can actually get a more open systems developed, is going to express itself fairly forcefully.

And I would just take this moment on the issue of how you leverage change.  I mean, again, the United States is limited here.  I think the only two countries, maybe three, where we have real leverage, and again I'm skeptical about whether it would work is in Egypt and Jordan and perhaps in Pakistan.  I think we should use that leverage.  I mean, I--whatever leverage you have, use it and see if it works.  Use--tie your economic aid to a democratic transition.  Give it a reasonable amount of time.  Make it two or three years.  And if people do not, in fact, approve of it, then--they do not live up to it, then cut the aid.  I mean, it is interesting that when I was recently in a conference in Jordan, the only two people in the room--most of the people in the room were, by and large, were what I would call sort of the progressive class in the Middle East.  When I asked them would they be in favor of cutting the aid to the Hashemite family to encourage democracy in Jordan, all of the progressives put their hands down.  They told me later some of them might be in favor of it.  But the only two people who really raised their hand very forcefully was a left-wing American professor and a fundamentalist.  I think the left-wing professor and the fundamentalist are right, by the way.

Now, on Jackson's point on the Palestinians.  I don't believe--I think any attempt to exclude Hamas is stupid.  All right?  Let it rip.  And again, I think the default choice is here.  I actually think as you can actually see with FIS, that FIS' support started to decline before the parliamentary elections.  I think that's probably going to happen each and every time.  But let it happen.  You're not--you can't get anywhere.  You can't get this evolution going unless you allow it to see what's going to go on.  The only way that you're going to be able to deal with Hamas, that Hamas itself can evolve or that it can be squashed by the Palestinians themselves, is to have a more open political system and allow these people to participate.

And on--brings that up with your comment, Tom, on the Israelis.  I would just say, you know, the Israelis may have a very difficult time here.  I mean, the Middle East is a difficult place, and that things are going to become more anxious.  I think that is one reason why historically you have seen the Israelis, many Israelis, Sharansky is a notable exception, have an extremely jaundiced view about the possibilities of democracy in the Middle East; why you have seen in the United States in the Jewish-American community a historical dismissiveness about civil liberties in the Muslim world.  But I mean, I think these things need to change, and you need to confront them fairly forcefully and recognize, yes, you're going to have negative side effects, but I mean, I must say, I mean, 9/11 is a fairly significant side effect.  I mean, that's the side effect of the status quo we have now.  And again, I don't see any historical reason for things to change unless you have--you begin to start that change.

There is going to be a limited amount the United States can do, but what it can do it should at least get right, and it shouldn't underestimate the power of its own rhetoric.  It really shouldn't.  I think you can have--it can have an enormous influence on events, and if we don't even try that, you're never going to get there.  And I think actually, I mean, Tom has criticized the Bush Administration for not really moving forward much, and I think much of that criticism is fair, though I would always suggest, you know, rhetoric should proceed process.  It must.  I mean, you have to get these things aligned.  But we will see over the next four years whether, in fact, they are serious or whether they're going to default back to what the State Department would feel comfortable with.

And we'll see.  I mean, if you were a betting man, you would have to say we'll probably default back to what the State Department is comfortable with.  However, I pause there, because I do believe President Bush is cut from a different piece of cloth, and he is the most revolutionary President in American history vis a vis the Middle East.  I think time may tell, but I think he can certainly rank with Reagan and Carter, who were the most advocates of human rights abroad.  I think President Bush may, in fact, come in that category, but we will have to see, and I was just saying that and thinking of Condoleezza Rice, I just start to shake.

But any case, I mean progress--time will tell.

And with that I'll throw it out to some questions.  We may run just a little bit over if there are questions to take us over.

MR. KATZ [ph]:  Thank you.  My name is Saidir Katz from Al Kutz [ph] daily newspaper.  I think the genius of western civilization is that it discovered at one point that religion and democracy are reconcilable and gave someone like Martin Luther to Jefferson to [inaudible], and I agree with you.  I think the more democratic you are in the Middle East, the more anti-American you're likely to be--a liberal, progressive are mostly are the styles.

My question to you is why is it so casually dismissed the fact that the responsibility, indeed, the responsibility of western countries and western civilizations in the creation of the fundamentalist movement in the Arab world.  The whan [ph] were held by western powers.  Indeed, Hamas was facilitated by the Israelis as a counterweight to the PLO and so on.  And that is casually dismissed.  And we talk about aiding authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.  The fact of the matter that the U.S. aided reactionary authoritarian regimes, like Saudi Arabia, like Jordan, but, in fact, it's authoritarian regimes that were pan Arabist or nationalistic like Nashen [ph] and so on.  Thank you.

MR.          :  Very quickly for what I mean.  On that first part about western powers creating fundamentalism.  You know, I have problem with it.  I mean, there are giant historical movements afoot, and I have a real problem when you sort of attach blame here or blame there.  I mean, there has been a continuing collision in some sense between the west and Islam going on now for about 1,400 years.  And some side, for about a thousand years, the Islamic side was winning.  For the certainly last 300, it's been a rout in favor of the west.

Now, I mean, that has repercussions, and it had repercussions both ways.  Some of those repercussions you can look back and say are good.  Some of those repercussions are bad.  So, I mean, I don't become prescriptive because of historical forces like that.

MR. GERECHT:  Was there a second question?

MR. KATZ:  Well, the second question is that, you know, if it's actually in the first question.  They are somehow responsible or somehow they're responsible in advocating supporting these movements because they were reacting.  They were anti-nationalist and so on.

MR. GERECHT:  Well, [inaudible], I'll just say on this there was--there were some senior U.S. officials who said after the Iranian Revolution that the--I think they used the word conservatism of Saudi Arabia was a good thing.  I think in retrospect they would like to eat those words.  I mean, that is absolutely true that we looked upon Saudi Arabia as almost as if it was some sort of folksy traditional conservative Islam without realizing that it was, in fact, a radical force in Islamic history in competition actually with Iran, and it has done I would argue enormous damage to traditional Islamic societies, particularly most importantly in Egypt and the damage it did to Al-Hazar [ph] and it changed the nature of religion in Egypt and I think that did it as a huge debit.

If you want to identify yourself, you can.  If you don't want to, you don't have to.

MR. RAVIV:  I'm Dan Raviv, Reuel, with CBS.  I'm puzzled and here's why:  okay, I've only kind of rifled through the book, and I heard your presentation and some comments.  I don't get why if fundamentalists win elections, for instance, if democracy spreads and so people who--leaders who hate America become the leaders, and basically you're telling us don't be afraid of that.  That's okay.  They represent their people.  I'm not afraid of that.  I don't care if they hate me as long as they don't send 19 suicidal volunteers to hijack airplanes and kill people in the Pentagon and New York.  That's the leap I'm missing here.

You've basically said that the same kind of fundamentalist movements--you didn't explain how.

MR. GERECHT:  I don't think functioning democracies can actually sustain terrorism.  I mean, I'll just--well weigh--that's an empirical statement, and so we'll wait and see if that turns out to be the case, but I just don't think it's true.

I think you can have within democracies you can have terrorist groups, but even there I think their half life isn't long.  And I think that and again that whatever this fringe is, and I think of fringe of holy warriors, by the way, isn't 15 percent.  It's much, much, much smaller; that these folks actually are driven out.  I mean, that's the entire point:  they are driven out by to some sense their mothers and fathers, the people, the intellectual movements that produce them, because they are actually entering in the real world.  They have to compete now.  They are actually fixing the potholes, having to deal with national debt, having to deal with insurance, having to deal with God knows how many different things that actually concentrate your mind on other things but besides a sort of a nihilistic form of terrorism.

MR. RAVIV:  When they fail, they'll blame us, and they'll [inaudible].

MR. GERECHT:  I actually don't think they fail.  I mean, the process is the success.  Will democracy in the Middle East look like something that you see in the United States or Western Europe?  Absolutely not.  It's going to be a long, ugly process.  But I just suggest to you, I mean, you know, Al Qaeda went from a dream to reality in under 20 years.  You know, time is wasting.  You want this process to move forward.  You want the evolution to start.  I actually might dissent a little bit from Mike here in that I actually think that time is really compressed rapidly now, and that you may not have to wait as long as you might fear to see substantial change in the Middle East, though I agree completely it's not going to be pretty.  I mean, one thing we know for sure is the intelligence and security services in the Middle East are really good.  That is one reason why the United States, the Central Intelligence, sends its suspects abroad to be tortured by them; is they're good.  They're effective.  All right?

You know, until you start to see these intelligence and security services crack, to start to break, it's very unlikely that these regimes are going to go down.  And you have to start the popular process that actually ends up, as in the case of the Shah and Sevak, where it actually starts to fall apart, because I would agree with that.  As long as those intel and security services remain behind these regimes, the odds of change I think are miniscule.

Okay, back there.  In red.

MS.          :  It seems like you say--what you're saying is that we either have the, you know, secular repressive regimes or the fundamentalist big masses.  What happens to the, you know, what some of us think is sort of the moderates that happen to be actually the most numerous of them?  And I don't know where you put them.  And I haven't read your book yet, and I'm thinking about the religious moderates.  And, for example, it may or may not be considered Middle East, but, you know, in Turkey there's a process that brought basically a moderate Islamist group to power and that's not necessarily going into sort of the radical direction.  And I think I share some of the CBS gentleman's concern that, for example, you know, you mentioned Pakistan.  If the process, the evolutionary process, were to bring some of those fundamentalists into office or some of the more radical ones as opposed to the moderate Islamic masses or the sort of the third group that I'm wondering where you put them, if a country like Pakistan has that kind of a government, with a nuclear power, I'm not sure if it will be alive to see the end of the evolution.

MR. GERECHT:  I mean that's a good question.  I mean, listen the--I hope the moderates actually turn out to be the majority.  We're not going to know unless they get a chance to vote, unless the activists and the fundamentalists get a chance to participate.  Let everybody compete.

Now, on the Turkish model.  I mean, I adore Turkey.  Unfortunately, I think that there have been a lot of people that have been addicted to what the Turkish model, and the Turkish model, if I can put it very crudely, has been that you have this gradual evolution of dictatorship into democracy.  And that has really been an addiction in certain quarters of the American academe and the European academe that do Middle Eastern studies; that somehow you'll get enlightened dictators in the Arab world in particular that are going to lead to a democratic society and that you somehow will have a military surveillance, as you had in Turkey, to ensure that the process evolves.  It worked in Turkey.

I would suggest to you Ataturk was a truly exceptional individual and followed by Turgut Ozal, the greatest Turk since Ataturk, who, in fact, opened it up and allowed Islamic identities to become more naturally expressed inside of Turkish political society and inside the culture.

I don't think that model works in the Arab world.  I think we've had time and time and time and chance to see it, and what we get are dictatorships that, in fact, encourage extremism; that the dictatorships do not evolve; and they certainly don't want to off themselves.

MR. NEMATT:  Just very quickly.  I think, you know, it's a mistake to look at the situation today and just surrender to a reality and without thinking how did we get here.  I think that the only reason why the Islamists are presenting themselves as an alternative today is because the previous 70 years before the Whan Muslamin [ph] was established and even after it was established, and let's say before the '70s, you know, there was no such as an Islamic movement seriously that would present itself as an alternative.  What happened is that the secular regimes who ruled the Arab world for 70 years, they failed, because they were dictatorships.  The regimes that came to power after the end of colonialism they failed their people.  And the secular opposition basically was crushed under two excuses.  One is because--one because they were fighting communism, and there is where, you know, Said made a point.  At one point, the seculars were crushed because the communists were crushed, and the Islamists were encouraged, because the Islamists were opposed to the communists.

Now, but before that, the most important factor--this is one factor; it's not the most important factor--the most important factor is that the seculars failed.  They crushed everybody or they contained everybody.  The only ones they could not shut up are the Islamists because they were doing it at the mosques, and there's no regime that can close down the mosques.

So, what we have today is the product of a failure of secular regimes who are non democratic, and I think if we have democracies--and there are studies showing that out of the people who voted--vote for Islamists in the region--on average, only 20 percent vote for their political agenda.  Otherwise, they vote for them because they think that they're honest people just like you would vote--you know, you trust your money with a priest rather than, you know, a secular stranger.  A stranger priest rather than a secular stranger.  And, in that sense, it is not--we should not just surrender to the fact.  I think democracy on its own is going to change things.

Iran, you know, the revolutionary Islam of Iran came to power and now, 20 years later, 25 years later, 80 percent voted for Khatami, who's against wil al fatahe [ph], but he couldn't do it.  And then one of the reasons he was dumped is because the--I wouldn't call them seculars, but I'll call them reformers, who were against Islam ruling the state.

So, we should not just look at the situation as if it's, you know, we woke up one day, and this is how things have been all.  This has not been the case.  The transformation took place from the '70s, and it's because of the failure of the secular states who were backed by the west.

And if we have--if we let people have freedom, we're going to see an end.  And hopefully, we'll see that in Iraq.  We'll see very fast that most people are really practical.  They do not believe that Islam or the mosque is going to solve their problems, and they're going to go to modern means of basically conducting their politics.

And so, I disagree that we have no alternative, and I disagree that Islam is the only alternative that exists.  And I do believe that most people do not--if they vote for the Islamist, they vote because it's a protest vote, not because they think they can solve their problems.  The Iraqis showed the failure of the Iranian state under the Khomeinis, and they would not want to imitate the Iranians.

And this is where we're going to see the difference in Iraq.  Thank you.

MR. GERECHT:  That was very well put.  Over there.

MS. GORDON:  Thank you.  Eleana Gordon [ph] from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  One of the points you've been making is that there's a correlation between anti-Americanism and our support for regimes that trample on human rights and freedom.  Therefore, that would indicate to me that what we do not want to do is support the next Iranian regime if that's the phase that we have to go to because if we had supported the Iranian regime, we would not have the support of the people today for the same reason that the people in Egypt don't support us.

So, I don't see why the lesson we're taking from what you're saying is that we should support or we should be on the side of the fundamentalists coming to power.  It seems to me there's a more subtle lesson we need to take away, and I'm not sure what it is exactly.  Maybe it's that we don't stand in the way of the fundamentalists reaching power, but certainly shouldn't be associated with abuses of human rights that are going to come from fundamentalists trampling on women's rights or religious freedom or minority rights.

MR. GERECHT:  I'm not certainly saying that we should support Hamas.  What I'm saying is that you have to allow the fundamentalists to participate in the political system.  All right?  And the United States should back that up, and it should throw its umbrella over those who want to participate in the political system, even if those individuals--it has to keep our focus on this; that the objective here is to get these societies evolved so these things are not produced.

And I don't see, again, any way out of this.  I mean, I wish it were not the case.  Do I like--you know, did I like FIS?  No.  Most of the fundamentalist parties I mean I do not recommend them.  I do not think they are necessarily pragmatic; that they won't do things that are quite ugly.  They may.  But I don't see a way out of the cul de sac we're in unless you move forward and you start the natural political evolution.  And I would go back to what Mike said--

[Tape flip.]

The problem, particularly those who are really the violent, vicious side to go out there to engage in holy warriorism.  This is a very small, selective group of largely, overwhelmingly young men.  But I think you have to kick the ball forward.

MR. KADISH [ph]:  My name is Nadeen Kadish [ph] from Al Hurra TV.  I'll start by disagreeing with Reuel on the Turkish example.  Basically, Turkey evolved from a dictatorship to a democracy.  This is one aspect of the evolution that happened.  This is true, but it's not the basic aspect of this evolution.

What happened is that the Islam in Turkey went into a very radical evolution process that led to a moderate Islamic party ruling now in Turkey, and visiting Israel a couple of days ago, and Gul was in Jerusalem, it was really astonishing that we found Gul in Jerusalem and Arafat was not going there.  We should ask also I think the following question:  why did Gul went to Jerusalem and Arafat is not being able to go there?  This is one thing.

The second thing--the basic concern I think the Americans should be worrying about is that not democracy, not reforming towards democracy in the Middle East, but reforming Islam itself before applying democracy.  And what the gentleman from CBS said is really worrying, because among the 19 hijackers in 9/11, there's no French and no South Korean, while anti-Americanism occurs in France and South Korea.

So, it's not anti-Americanism what matters.  The way people express this is what matters.  And in the Middle East, they expressed it in 9/11.

Does Islam provide legitimate--I mean justifications for this?  Unfortunately, the answer is yes.  So, we have to start by reforming Islam itself before applying democracy.  Otherwise, Hamas on top of the authority in Palestine will be a nightmare for us.

MR. GERECHT:  I'll just quickly say, and then I'll take one more question.  I think we've gone on way over our time here.

Again, I just repeat this:  I mean I think Turkey is an amazing special example.  I wish in some ways it could be a role model that it hasn't been unfortunately a role model.  Maybe in the future it will be.

But the Turkish experience was cheek and jowl with Europe for centuries left it in a completely different situation, and I would also just suggest that the role of the Turkish army, which is a mighty institution, in forcefully moderating Islamic expression just cannot be underestimated.  And the role of the Turkish army I just haven't seen replicated anyplace else in the Islamic world.

This is going to be the last question.

MR.          :  There is a concrete national security threat in recognition of toleration of radical or Islamist forces coming to power.  There are two threats.

One is that, as European examples demonstrated as well as Afghani example, a minority, a political minority that advocates violence and tolerates violence.  And there are plenty of justifications for using violence in the political realm based on the holy law.

Once in power, it will not relinquish power, and you will end up with Islamist totalitarianism.  That's the first thing.

The second thing is once in power, in a country like Egypt, with its scientific and technological base, you may end up with a nuclear armed Egypt.

And thirdly, if you assume that the foreign policy objective of this country is to encourage peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, how on earth you can advocate recognition and embrace of Hamas?  Thank you.

MR. GERECHT:  Again, I just say--I--I mean, we've already gone down the road of one--I mean, I fully understand Edward Durigean's [ph] phrase and argument--one man, one vote once.  All right.  Well, that gave us a dictatorship in Algeria.

Now the dictatorship isn't going away.  It's showing no signs of evolution.  It is that process, that nexus between tyranny and Islamic extremism that gave us bin-Laden; that gave us 9/11.  That's got to be broken.

I--we have to get out of the cul de sac.  What you are suggesting is we stay in the cul de sac.  I do not see these regimes opening up and having a liberal political order triumph immediately.

I mean, would that were happen, but I just don't see it as likely.  In fact, the longer you postpone it, the longer that you keep these regimes in place, the longer they clamp down, in fact, the more powerful become the Islamic extremist forces, and the more likely you are to actually get a situation that you saw in Iran.  You don't want that to happen.  You don't want power to come from the top down, if, in fact, these people can win elections, and it's by no means clear that they can, but if they can win elections, let them do it from the bottom up.  Do not have it from the top down, because as I said before, I think it becomes much, much harder for these forces to actually then deny the democratic system.

Is it possible?  Sure.  But even if it happens, the evolut