To give our theme its due, I should say that if there is one constant trend in the Middle East, it is that things have been bad, but they could improve. And there is some reason to be modestly hopeful.

There are three facets of the Middle East that must be examined in order to gain a true understanding of the region. There are our enemies, there are our allies, and there is the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which acts as a bridge between the two sides of the spectrum.

We are in the midst of a war on terrorism. That war is led by the United States, but there are many other nations--liberal democracies, moderate Islamic states and others--on our side. Some of our allies are more reluctant than others, but then our side was defined for all of us by our enemies, not by ourselves. Our enemies denounce the values that America and Europe have fought for over the last century, and it is in the existential battle, not the tactical one, that single victories or losses will have the greatest impact.

I believe, and I think many in the United States and in the Bush Administration also believe, that the United States made an enormous mistake in the past by allowing a culture of terrorism and hatred and violence to spread throughout the Middle East unchallenged. There are two distinct faces to the Middle East--the one that gazed outward for the world to see (for good or for bad), and the other, more sinister face that looked inward, watching the people of the Arab and Islamic world. By ignoring the internal realities in Middle Eastern nations both friend and foe, we allowed al Qaeda and others to grow and flourish. We did not admit soon enough the potential challenges that the terrorist mentality could present to us.

To understand how the US views the role of the Middle East in September 11, it is necessary to look at that old world to see how it shaped this new one. But let me be very clear: I believe that there is nothing on the face of this earth that the United States--or indeed anyone--could do to deserve the kind of mass terror that was seen in September 11th. There are no excuses to be found in the policy world, no reasons to be found in history, no roots in hopelessness or despair that can justify what was done.

In retrospect, if we had seen the true face of the Middle East, we might have seen it coming. But we thought that we had the luxury to separate the domestic and foreign policy decisions of the Middle Eastern regimes, and we ignored the grim realities of everyday life in the Middle East which lead many to chose extremism over stagnation.

I will try to paint a picture of the domestic situation of the Middle East using the staggering statistics from the United Nations Development Program Arab Human Development Report. These statistics, while themselves dull, dry things, bring to life a region that needs a great deal of attention and help. Again, I don’t believe that anything excuses terrorism. But I do believe that Islamic extremism is an interesting and fashionable alternative to people who live in a world without options. Listen to this:

• 61 percent of the world's oil reserves and 21 percent of gas reserves are in the Middle East, which should bode well for the regional economies.
• But in the 1950s, per capita income in South Korea and Egypt were roughly similar. Today, Egypt’s GDP per capita is less than 20 percent of South Korea’s. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia had a higher GDP than Taiwan; today it is less than 50 percent.
• Trade exports from the Middle East, 70 percent of which are oil or oil related, grew at 1.5 percent per annum in the booming 1990s. Compare that to global export growth rates of six percent. Then figure that non-oil exports from the Middle East and North Africa are about $40 billion, approximately equal to Finland’s annual exports. Only Finland has one-fiftieth the population of the Middle East and North Africa.
• The population of the region is roughly that of the European Union, but the total GDP of the region--including oil--is less than half that of the UK or France. In fact it is closer to Canada or Mexico. Remember, that’s all of the Middle East and North Africa’s gross national product, marginally above that of Mexico.
• According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 1999, 28 million more people in the region were added to the numbers living on less than $2 a day. The region has the highest unemployment rates in the world, and those figures are only going to get worse. Average growth in the labor force is 3-4 percent--twice as high as in all other developing regions--but GDP growth is not expected to exceed 3-4 percent in the coming decade.
• Meanwhile, the number of foreign laborers in the Gulf States increased fivefold between 1970 and 1990. In 1999 alone, 25% of Saudi Arabia's population consisted of non-Saudis--and I don’t mean Kuwaitis and Americans. Therefore it isn’t a lack of jobs--at least in Saudi Arabia--just a lack of people willing or able to do them.
• 65 million adult Arabs are illiterate and women make up two thirds of that figure.
• Arabs represent 0.5 percent of all internet users.Only 0.6 percent of Arabs have access to the Internet and the personal computer penetration rate is 1.2 percent. The Arab world rates below sub-Saharan Africa on the information technology scales used by the World Bank.
• People are not using computers, nor are they doing the basic work of any vibrant culture: They are not researching or investing in science. You have heard, perhaps, that more books were translated into Greek than into Arabic in the last decade. According to the World Bank, in terms of scientific papers per million inhabitants, average R&D output totals 2 percent of that of industrialized countries.
• According to many sources, the United Nations included, Arab nations held the lowest freedom score out of seven world regions throughout the late 1990s.

That said, it serves us well to look back at American foreign policy and ask ourselves some tough questions about America’s friends and enemies in the Middle East. It serves us all well to understand why our enemies believe us to be weak--and why they think we can be defeated.

The history of U.S. policy in the Middle East is not some of our finest. There are bad guys in the Middle East, lots of them, and many are in government. In the old, pre-September 11 world, the United States looked at those bad guys--Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and maybe even Saudi Arabia--and we worried about them. We worried a little bit about how these governments behaved toward their own people. Mostly we worried about what I would call external behavior. In other words, we were concerned about whether what these countries were doing would endanger the United States or our allies. But faced with a lack of more appealing alternatives, we were forced to engage the relatively distasteful Middle Eastern leaders in order to maintain a presence in this strategically important region.

When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, we chose to side with the despicable Saddam Hussein and help him beat what was then perceived to be the greater evil, Iran. In that decision, we were heartily backed by most Gulf countries and many western ones as well. We have to live in the real world, and I don’t think that was a terrible decision at the time.

Iran’s seizure of American hostages augured badly for our relationship with the mullahs from the start, and things really never got any better. We could have been concerned because the Iranian government was systematically restricting the human rights of its people, stifling political dissent, stoning women or chopping off people’s hands. But the United States chose to focus on the growing problem of Iranian support for worldwide terrorism, its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its vocal and active opposition to the Middle East peace process.

During the war years, Iran continued to tighten the noose around the neck of the Iranian people. Opponents of the regime were being mowed down in the streets of Paris and there were widespread allegations that Iran was using banned chemical weapons to fight Baghdad.

In the unattractive world of realpolitik, Iraq was following a similar path as Iran, if on a secular scale. Saddam Hussein did not claim a divine right for his actions like the Ayatollah Khomeini, but he didn’t need to as long he ruled as both god and dictator in his nation. In 1988, Saddam’s troops attacked Iraq’s substantial Kurdish population with chemical weapons in the Anfal campaign, and killed upwards of 100,000 men, women and children.

Saddam was also extinguishing all forms of dissent, stocking his prisons and his execution chambers with political opponents. At the same time, he was developing weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. During the 1980s and 1990s, Saddam also cultivated relationships with various terrorist organizations and eventually made his way onto the U.S. list of state supporters of terrorism.

Ideally, as Henry Kissinger said once, both Iran and Iraq would have lost. But of course, they didn’t. Where we went wrong, inarguably, was continuing to support our chosen bad guy once the Iran-Iraq war was over instead of changing our policy to ensure that both sides essentially lost. Instead, we stuck with our pro-Iraq stance until just weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Libya and Syria did not stand aside with Iran and Iraq were vying for power. Both were active in the world of international terrorism. Syria was operational headquarters for a number of terror groups, most of which continue to reside in Damascus to this day. Syria likely provided logistical support for the infamous kidnappings of the 1980s (although Iran was clearly the godfather of Hezbollah’s kidnappers). Syria’s diplomats provided support for terror operations across Europe. Syria also probably provided support for the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing that killed 144 U.S. marines and caused the United States to withdraw from Beirut. Once Syrian troops had consolidated their political, military and financial occupation of neighboring Lebanon, they began supporting the terror group Hezbollah.

The United States was not willing to overlook Syria’s behavior entirely, and we withdrew our ambassador for a period of time. We did not, however, respond forcefully to Syria’s lack of political freedom, its 1982 murder of some 20,000 political opponents in the city of Hama, or its occupation of Lebanon. These were ancillary “domestic” issues, as ever secondary to the external problems Syria caused.

Syria remains active in the terrorism business, is known to have a stockpile of chemical weapons and is possibly negotiating with Moscow for a nuclear reactor like the one being built in Iran.

In Libya, Qadhafi was importing missiles and chemical weapons components from willing sellers. Libya was also working with a variety of terror groups and as you all know, he financed and supported the Pan Am 103 bombing and the La Belle discotheque bombing in Germany (in which two U.S. servicemen were killed), among other foul acts. Ronald Reagan bombed Tripoli in 1986 in response to the La Belle bombing. He did so without the support or approbation of what we now call the international community. The French government, in fact, refused U.S. forces the right to fly through their airspace. Afterward, it seemed that Qadhafi had gotten the message. Two years later Pan Am 103 was knocked from the sky. Clearly we had not dealt with Qadhafi decisively.

The U.S. had taken quite a hard line with Qadhafi from the start, as he made few friends by expropriating US businesses. We also perceived him--correctly--to be a lunatic. But the stakes in the U.S. relationship with Libya were lower than with Syria. We weren’t terribly dependent on Libyan oil. And we certainly didn’t care about his dictatorship or his bizarre green book, through which he ruled his people viciously and arbitrarily. When we learned of his hand in terror, we reacted strongly. But not strongly enough.

The final candidate for the group of what I have called the bad guys of the Middle East is one with which some might disagree. But while Saudi Arabia has ostensibly been a good friend to the United States, it was in fact pursuing policies that are anathema to our beliefs. The Saudi government has directly and indirectly financed terror through contributions to charitable organizations. Saudi national policy was to promote Wahhabi Islam worldwide and stifle moderate Islam throughout Central Asia and Africa, especially in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Hints to the true nature of their behavior should have been apparent. The bombing of Khobar Towers was known to have been an Iranian sponsored act of terror against American troops, yet the Saudis did their utmost to interfere in the investigation and point fingers elsewhere. Would a true friend do such a thing? Why was the United States so willing to ignore Saudi behavior?

Meanwhile, inside Saudi Arabia, Mullahs, newspapers, textbooks, and government leaders alike were preaching hatred of the west, hatred of Christians and Jews, and extremism. The Saudi people were being suffocated by the government--with restricted personal, religious, civil and political freedoms and a variety of other oppressive measures that the United States and others have glossed over for too many years. In this instance, you can argue that much of the west took at face value Saudi friendship and never examined that nation’s other activities in the world. That was an enormous mistake. This oversight was further delineated when it became clear that Saudi money was used to pay tribute to the families of suicide bombers.

So while our enemies in the region are both internally and externally flawed, there is more to the Middle East than just enemies and questionable allies. There are nations over which we have some leverage and with which we maintain reasonably friendly relations, specifically Jordan and Egypt.

In each of these cases, I would argue that the United States has done more--though not enough--to use our influence to alter both the internal and external faces of these nations. We have encouraged peace with Israel. We have pressed for better governance, better accountability and more respect for human rights and international norms. I don’t think we have been entirely honest or entirely successful, but at the very least we recognized the necessity of regional peace and internal reform in order to guarantee the long-term security of the region. Egypt remains a quasi-dictatorship and Jordan’s democracy is not as open as we would like. Work needs to be done, but September 11 has encouraged new engagement in the region.

OK. Let’s end this brief survey and interpose September 11, 2001. You cannot overestimate how this event changed American perspective. Suddenly, American priorities, which in the Middle East largely revolved around stability at the expense of consistent policy decisions or support for democratic values, were turned around. September 11th lifted the tinted shades through which we had previously viewed the Arab and Muslim worlds. We had a closer look at these nations of the Middle East (and some others) and saw a very different picture than the one we had chosen to see before.

We saw a place where extremism had taken root, and where enemies of western liberalism were flourishing. We saw the mistake of our own inaction, in allowing Afghanistan to drift into chaos and Talibanism. We saw that Islam was not the problem, but was itself being corrupted by the political and religious fanaticism that sought to use Islam as the basis for its legitimacy. Worst of all, we saw how those that we perceived to be our friends were part of the problem. Saudi Arabia was home to 15 of 19 hijackers; this forced us to make a painful reassessment of our “special” relationship with them.

For the first time, we looked out through the eyes of those like Osama bin Laden and analyzed the weakness of which he accused us. He had seen our responses to the bombings of our African embassies, the Cole, and Khobar Towers. He had seen our weak-kneed relationship with Iraq. Perhaps he had even seen our deal to deprive--through bribery--North Korea of its nuclear weapons. He looked at American unwillingness to commit ground troops in the Balkans and at our cultural debates and he concluded that there was no fight left in the United States.

We, in turn, looked at the environment that had sustained the culture of bin Ladenism and extremism and fanaticism and allowed them to flourish, and we asked ourselves some tough questions about our priorities in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Perhaps we should not stand idly by and allow dictators to dominate the Arab world.

Perhaps we should not just develop relationships with the powerful few of the region, but with the powerless masses.

And perhaps the United States should, above all else, respond forcefully in favor of the values that we have enjoyed for so many years to remove threats to our national security.

Truthfully, that is an analysis of trends in U.S. foreign policy itself and not the Middle East, but I would argue that without the U.S. forcing change in that part of the world, there would indeed be none at all.

The United States is also examining the mistakes that were made in Afghanistan and trying to learn from them. We did not take the Taliban seriously until well after we should have, even though we knew that they were harboring bin Laden, were brutal and terrible to their own people, and were being supported by Pakistan and others. We had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan only to abandon the country when we finally had a chance to influence it and shape its future. We have not made the same mistake this time. We looked from Afghanistan to places like Iran and decided, finally, that we must take sides in the fight for freedom from oppression. We no longer live in a world where we can sit idly by and watch internal disputes from the bleachers when we need to take action on the playing field.

Nor will the United States wait for problems to come to us. September 11th set a new standard for the proverbial glove-slap, and we do not intend to give our enemies the opportunity to trump it. That means that we must proactively intervene with weapons programs in countries like Iraq and Iran and we must do our utmost to ensure that regimes with evil intent--not just for us but for their own people--are not handed the tools to terrorize. This is part of President Bush’s doctrine of preemption, and in perspective you can see why we feel that this is wise.

Finally, I promised you a word about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States has reassessed the ongoing Israeli conflict with the Palestinians with a new understanding of what it is like to face terror. Washington wants to solve the problem, but we recognize, perhaps as never before, that a democracy cannot make peace with terrorists and dictators. Something is going to have to change, and that is the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

Much as in the rest of the Arab world, the PA has refused accountability, refused to shoulder the burdens of governance, refused to provide for its people. Instead, the leadership has deflected responsibility for its problems onto Israel and the West--a similar tactic to what the Taliban used to recruit in Afghanistan. The PA has embraced terror as a negotiating tool, inciting people to violence in order to escape the burdens of democracy and decency. Are there faults on the Israeli side? For sure. Do they merit a terror attack on a disco or a kindergarten?

Increasingly, you will see a desire on the part of the United States to hold Middle Eastern leaders to account for their actions, for their words, and for their failure to deliver a better life to their own people. Whether our new role will be welcomed by the governments of the region remains to be seen, but whether it will be welcomed by their people is another.

Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.