[sam h]

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I'll also note that the liberal view on this seems rather appeasement and fear oriented, as if we ought to be be doing everything possible to "not make them mad at us". I guess you guys still don't get it: they're going to be "mad at us" no matter what we do, and more terrorists are going to be created regardless of how "nice" we are to them. We aren't dealing with rational people here: these are religious nutcases of such conviction and fanaticism that they truly make Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson look like liberal and open-minded by comparison.

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But who are "they"? It is certainly true that in Al-Qaeda and other organizations we are dealing with a bunch of religious nutcases bent on our destruction. But most Arabs are not like that, and we need to think about how we might keep them that way.

I don't see how this cannot be seen as an absolutely fundamental prerogative. If we are to succeed, we need to be truthful with ourselves about the forces that are pushing people towards extremism. These include:

A) Despotic governments propped up by us - this topic has been covered pretty extensively and needs no further mention

B) The absence of real states - post-colonial state structures in the middle east are underdeveloped and the governments lack legitimacy in much of the territories they purport to control. This is a huge problem, maybe one without a solution.

B) Enormous economic problems - it is simply a fact that much of the increase in radicalism in this area of the world coincided with the oil bust of the 1980s. Arab nationalism was really a modernizing ideology, and it was discredited among many once things fell apart economically.

C) Demographics - these are very young populations, and young men who are serially unemployed and see no prospects in life tend to be pretty good marks for extremist recruiters

D) Serious anger about perceived American imperialism - like it or not, our actions in Iraw and Afghanistan have provoked enormous resentment, as has our complete unwillingness to own up to our checkered history of intervention in the region during the cold war.

One big problem is that, out of interest in their own survival, politicians in America simply cannot acknowledge two things. The first is that part of this mess is of our own making, through a long history of misguided interventions and shady deals with tyrants, not to mention more recent policy. The second is that so much of this mess is actually completely out of our control. The structural factors like the absence of real states in the region and underdeveloped economies are the ultimate sources of problems. And there is no policy prescription for dealing with them.