Say what you will about Lyndon Johnson's imperfections, the man had a keen sense of the American character. "Our American people", he said during a November 1967 press conference, "when we get into a contest of any kind-whether it is a war, an election, a football game or whatever it is-we want it decided quickly; get in or get out." President Johnson's appreciation for Americans' lack of tolerance for ambiguities, particularly in matters of national security, bears on how we think about and deal with the problem of mass-casualty terrorism. Having to live with vulnerabilities of apocalyptic scale for an indefinite future is, for most Americans, simply inconceivable. It follows that there must be a way to end such vulnerabilities.

For some that way is to kill or capture terrorists everywhere they may be found, and to either overturn or intimidate into good behavior all regimes that aid them. That seemed the essential message of the original Bush Doctrine (since refined into a strategy of conjoint military and political pre-emption-of which more below). For others, the solution is a Middle East Marshall Plan, the premise being that poverty causes terrorism. But nearly everyone sees that a broad and hyperactive military approach, even a technologically stunning one, is unlikely by itself to succeed (and could incite more trouble in future than it can solve in the here and now). The poverty alleviation solution is so impractically suited to the size and urgency of the problem that few responsible people take it seriously. So a political solution, poised between military and materialist ones, has now gained pride of place: fostering Arab democracy.

Since last autumn we have come to suspect that the political culture of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular operates on premises mostly antithetical to our own. Not that many Muslims or Arabs think and would act like Al-Qaeda members, but the extent of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism in the Middle East is great, and it stems not only from particular U.S. policies but from incommensurate attitudes, long in the making, about the ideals and nature of public life. This may or may not translate into a clash of civilizations, but it certainly indicates more than a mere failure to communicate.

Soon after September 11, 2001, therefore, the key question emerged: Can we change Middle Eastern political culture? Some joined Thomas Friedman in defining the aim of the war on terrorism as "it's democracy, stupid." "Those who argue that we needn't press for democracy in Arab-Muslim states, and can rely on repressive regimes" he wrote in his November 20 New York Times column, "have it all wrong." Others thought such ambitions a reach too far. Michael Kelly, for example, conceded in his Washington Post essay the very next day that democracy is necessary for the ultimate establishment of free, tolerant and neighborly states, but "three questions remain: Are we generally capable of overthrowing undemocratic Islamic regimes (and there are a lot of them) and replacing them with free and moderate democracies? What would happen if we tried? If we succeeded?" His answers were sober ones: "By and large we are not capable of overthrowing such regimes. . . . If we tried, we would probably get jihad for real. If we succeeded, we would get a world of unintended consequences", including perhaps a Talibanish regime in Saudi Arabia.

The op-ed page exchanges over this issue reflected a deep and longstanding debate among experts, most outside and a few within the Bush Administration. The question roiled its internal deliberations for months, but by June 1 it seemed resolved in favor of the more ambitious and optimistic view. President Bush said at West Point:

When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The people of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. . . . Mothers and fathers and children across the Islamic world, and all the world, share the same fears and aspirations. In poverty, they struggle. In tyranny, they suffer. And as we saw in Afghanistan, in liberation they celebrate.

To all appearances, then, the administration sees the creation of Arab democracy as a strategic imperative, and as a logical political accompaniment to the policy of military pre-emption. In other words, in addition to pre-empting missiles and madmen, we will in due course pre-empt motives as well.

Political pre-emption takes three forms. First, the United States will increase significantly its foreign assistance and public diplomacy efforts, the assumption being not that poverty and disinformation cause terrorism, but that they provide terrorism with literal and psychological support structures. Second, the United States will engage in nation-building (more accurately, state-building) in cases where potential failed states are strategically situated. And third, the United States will promote democracy both for its own sake and because poverty alleviation, the nurturing of free and responsible media, and nation-building are believed ultimately futile without it. Hence, in specific terms, the administration's acceptance that nation-building in Afghanistan is unavoidable, the linkage of Palestinian-Israeli peace to the democratic reform of the Palestinian Authority, and the conclusion that the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq requires that a democracy be installed in its place.

The project of exporting democracy to the Muslim and Arab worlds has become suddenly very popular. For one thing, it is a delight to speechwriters and White House political operatives, for it elevates a political vocabulary that leaves critics open to easy counterpunching. For another, it accords closely with Americans' sense of their own global mission: "Tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection", as Reinhold Niebuhr once described it. Whenever Americans face a problem in the world for which there is no obvious remedy, democracy promotion-which comes down to making "them" look more like "us"-is the default solution; and it comes, almost invariably, with a condescending high-mindedness to one hand and a cache of technological doodads to the other. (America as liberal imperium is not, however, exceptional in this; similar impulses used to be called "the white man's burden" or "la mission civilatrice", which helps explain the renewed fascination, even in Washington, with Rudyard Kipling.)

Even normally circumspect commentators have rallied behind the project of exporting democracy to the Arabs. Jim Hoagland criticized the meekness of President Bush's June 24 speech on reforming the Palestinian Authority: "The speech that Bush should have given on Monday would have addressed much more fully the ways in which the Arab world as a whole must adapt to modern political and economic democracy-and what the United States will do to help." Urging the United States not to think small, Hoagland foresees "a greatly expanded and intrusive U.S. military presence . . . to help develop and shield new and democratic leaderships in Iraq and in a Palestinian state." That military presence, specifically in Iraq, "will serve as a lynchpin for democratic transformation of a major Arab country that can be a model for the region." Implementing that model, however, will require a new cast of characters: "The administration cannot rely on local leaders who show no commitment to democratic change to be the instruments of that change. . . . These leaders must be challenged rather than comforted or coddled." Michael Kelly, reversing his earlier caution, has predicted a democratic Iraq and Palestine in "only a few years", developments that will "revolutionize the power dynamic in the Middle East, powerfully adding to the effects of the liberation of Afghanistan to force Arab and Islamic regimes to increasingly allow democratic reforms. A majority of Arabs", he argues, "will come to see America as the essential ally in progress toward liberty in their own lands" because the President now rejects "the entire philosophy of Middle Eastern diplomacy" wherein we have traded forbearance of Arab political misanthropies for stability and oil. Concludes Kelly, "This is radical, and it will produce radical results." William Kristol capped the beatification of the new approach with a paean to democratic peace theory applied to the Middle East. The President's "vision of a democratic and peaceful swath of the Middle East, from Israel through Palestine, Jordan and Iraq", he has written, "has now become the governing objective of the Bush Administration-and ambitious though it is, it is really the only realistic path to peace in the Middle East and to victory in the war on terror."

To proclaim this vision "realistic" truly joins the issue, for realists have always believed that considerations of the balance of power and resolve, more than the character of regimes, produce peace in regional subsystems. If administration principals really share Kristol's description, and the enthusiasms of Messrs. Hoagland and Kelly, then Gary Schmitt is right to argue that the debate between realists and neo-conservatives over the significance accorded to the character of states has been settled by the Bush Doctrine in favor of the latter. Perhaps not settled for long, though, for there are three problems with this approach that may cause its reconsideration-the first two very serious and the third even more so.

The first problem concerns the presumption that Arab democracy will equate to a "peaceful swath" in the Middle East. The truth is that semi-institutionalized populist democracies can make war more likely; that, specifically in the "transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less." This is particularly so in contemporary non-Western societies where democratization intersects with the recrudescence of identity politics to produce what Samuel Huntington calls the "democracy paradox": democracy facilitates the rise to power of groups that appeal to indigenous ethnic and religious loyalties that are likely to be anti-Western and-here is the paradox-anti-democratic in the not-very-long run. We have already seen this phenomenon at work in Muslim domains like Indonesia and northern Nigeria, and one example nipped in the bud in Algeria. We know that mainstream opinion in most Arab countries is more anti-Western than that of the regimes now governing them, so why, then, if that opinion comes to drive government policy-instead of merely complicating it, as it does today-should we expect peace to break out?

The second problem is that a successful campaign to bring democracy to the domains of rogues and villains really does presuppose either a major shift in U.S. attitudes toward the undemocratic ruling classes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and others that we have long called our friends, or a permanent condition of blatant diplomatic hypocrisy. If we do suddenly begin to act as though our long-time authoritarian allies are really enemies blocking the democratization of their countries (and with it the best guarantee of our protection from mass-casualty terrorism), we will, in effect, be choosing bad relations with ten mostly well-entrenched regimes, without any reasonable near-term prospect of replacing them with democratic governments. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, might not even be an option: How could we possibly isolate the impact of a democratic Iraq (and Palestine) from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, or from our relationships with their leaders?

The third problem is even more fundamental: Can we do it? Are Muslim, and particularly Arab, political cultures so malleable that within a generation or two we can transform most, or even some, of them into genuine liberal democracies? Perhaps we can. But perhaps in our desperation to achieve absolute security in a newly perilous world, we are distorting the social history of democracy and misreading the nature of the societies whose political virtue we mean to raise up. If this is the case, then we are in for much frustration, not to mention a misdirection of effort and resources, in the years ahead. Walter Lippmann once warned that it is a disease of the soul to be in love with impossible things, so it may repay effort to look more closely at this third problem.

The Difficulty of Democracy

Democracy is wonderful. What makes it wonderful, in part anyway, is that, like all we love or cherish, it is rare, fleeting or fragile. Genuine democracy, after all, is not a natural condition of social life but a refined achievement of it-so, clearly, believed Locke, Montesquieu and the American Founders after them. These were men who stood second to none in affirming the blessings of liberty, but they never assumed that all social and economic virtue depended on the adoption of a particular form of government-what Samuel Taylor Coleridge ruefully called the "talismanic influence" of government over "our virtues and our happiness." They saw things the other way around: that a particular form of government was the consequence of a people's social, moral and historical experience. As Rousseau summarized Montesquieu's essential argument: "Liberty, not being a fruit of all climates, is not within the reach of all peoples." Locke thought he knew why: "The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions." But most men did not, or could not, consult reason, and so to "turn [a man] loose to an unrestrain'd Liberty, before he has Reason to guide him, is not allowing him the priviledge of his Nature to be free; but to thrust him out amongst Brutes, and abandon him to a state as wretched, and as much beneath that of a man, as theirs."

The American Founders, Jefferson in particular, were more optimistic than their European forbears about the prospects for "an empire of liberty", but they knew that democracy required certain dispositional prerequisites that, while theoretically universal, were in practice very scarce. They remained scarce for a long time, too. Before World War I, democracy was limited to the English-speaking world, France, and a few other developing forms in Holland, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. After 1919, democratic experiments in Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland and elsewhere proved mostly ill-fated, which explains why no one in the first part of the 20th century equated the now evocative adjective "Western" with the even more evocative adjective "democratic." So how then, if democracy is so difficult and has obviously been so rare, do we explain the successive "waves" of democratization in the second half of the 20th century and the fact that, since the end of the Cold War, democracy has become a virtually unchallenged norm of political best-practice?

Some answer by questioning the credentials of new democracies. If one looks beyond the occasional election to empirically-grounded measures of political pluralism-such as those of Robert Dahl's polyarchy scale-one sees mostly illiberal, marquee, or "managed" democracies, where there are no mass-based parties and where the true locus of political authority is not subject to removal by electoral means. But others argue that a larger number of societies are simply doing the difficult more often and with greater sustained success. Increased urbanization and literacy, the power of the information revolution, the growing number of democracies that work in both political and economic terms, and the magnetism of American power are factors advancing the democratic revolution far more rapidly than even Woodrow Wilson would have thought possible. Attitudes are changing, they argue; social preconditions are being met-in other words, the trends are real.

Since optimists and pessimists alike understand democracy not as a dichotomous variable (i.e., that it either exists or doesn't) but a cardinal one (i.e., that it can exist to a greater or lesser extent), democracy can be both difficult and easy simultaneously: easy to desire and pursue, difficult to achieve quickly or in full. How one judges depends on the interests brought to bear on the subject-in other words, on the political context in which the argument is couched. There have been three successive layers of context in recent years.

The first of these contexts is of Cold War origin: If democracy were easy, then defeating Soviet Communism-rather than merely deterring and containing it-would be possible. Cold War idealists saw democracy expansion as a means of rollback and victory, a view embodied in the second Reagan Administration. Left-wing idealists reasoned that the relative ease of democratic development undermined the rationale for supporting "friendly tyrants"-U.S. Cold War allies of ill repute. Both wings favored "exporting" democracy, and both accepted the main predicates of democratic peace theory: that democracies make good neighbors, and that the ultimate implications of democratization for international security would be unambiguously positive.

Those who held democracy hard to do, realists in the main, tended to see the Cold War as a virtually permanent condition, one to be managed through traditional balance-of-power geopolitics and balance-of-resolve diplomacy. They regarded the export of democracy as very difficult, for they credited culture with composing a deeper layer of political inertia than idealists and liberals would admit. They wondered how universal Western political values really were or could become in a practicable timeframe. They defended most relations with friendly authoritarians as justifiable lesser evils. As to democratic peace theory, many admitted general tendencies but were skeptical of it as a law of history, particularly as applied to non-Western cultures where too little democratic experience existed from which to form a judgment.

A second context was post-Cold War, when the central question became not how the spread of democracy might undermine communism but how it could redeem communism's terrible legacy. Did the collapse of Soviet communism presuppose that all authoritarian socialist systems would become democratic? Were we at the End of History, or would some new form of the Nietzschean will to power arise? What was the relationship between democracy and market economics? In the first post-Cold War years of globalization, economic reform took pride of place for many. (The irony of the United States taking a materialist approach to democratization in the former "second world", after having just spent half a century battling the most wicked and dangerous form of materialism ever, should not go unremarked, but this is not the place to speak of it further.) But since democracy was not an all-or-nothing condition but a process, the progress of which often rested in the eyes of beholders, disagreement arose as to how democracy was faring in the former Soviet empire and elsewhere. As they gazed through neo-liberal, neo-conservative and realist prisms, each school saw the reflection of its own predispositions.

As a rule, however, optimists gained the upper hand in both Cold War and post-Cold War contexts. After all, superior ideas did do in the Soviet Union, didn't they? Old arguments that Confucian or caudillo political cultures made democracy impossible in East Asia and Latin America were proved wrong, weren't they? During the Clinton era, at least until the 1997 Asia crisis, it seemed self-evident that democracy and market economics advanced and reinforced one another without any obvious contradiction or downside. Doubters warned that democracy and market economics were revolutionary ideas which always caused havoc in societies unused to them, but even as evidence mounted that this was correct, such was the Zeitgeist that a defensiveness about this claim came as naturally as the claim itself. It is largely thanks to how the Cold War ended and the general trajectory of the past dozen years that democracy optimists have carried the day in the third context: that of post-September 11, 2001.

Three Differences

The stakes over the arguments about democracy seemed high during the Cold War, and nearly as high in the decade that followed. But to many Americans, those stakes seem small compared to what stands before us today. In the Cold War we faced an immense Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal; but the Soviet government could be reasoned with and deterred. Now we face suicidal fanatics who, with nothing earthly to lose, may be essentially undeterrable, and who may nonetheless devise ways to kill us as effectively as Soviet H-bombs would have been. That prospect is what recommends a strategy of pre-emption, and the imperative of bringing democracy to countries that incubate terrorists or provide support and sanctuary for their work. God help us, for this will be much harder to achieve than defeating Soviet communism.

It is, of course, perilous to generalize about the large and diverse number of Muslim political cultures, and even about the smaller and somewhat less diverse number of Arab ones. They are not all the same, and it is hard, too, to separate out the theological, historical and, what for want of a better word, the anthropological strands of these cultures (for Islam is a venerable civilization, not just a religion, its historical equivalent in Western history being not Christianity but Christendom). That said, there are few electoral democracies in the Muslim world (Turkey's is the most mature), and absolutely none in the Arab world. The risks of generalizing aside, can this really be a coincidence?

It isn't a coincidence. Arab societies lack certain dispositional prerequisites for democracy; let us mention just three: the belief that the proximate source of political authority is intrinsic to the society; a concept of majority rule; and the acceptance of all citizens' essential equality before the law. Without the first, the idea of pluralism-and of a "loyal opposition"-cannot exist. Without the second, a polity can be neither free nor liberal. Without the third, the idea of elections as a means to form a government is incomprehensible. These attitudes are second-nature to Americans; indeed, they help define what America is. So smoothly do these attitudes flow into our consciousness that we often assume that they are also second-nature to others. It is not so, however.

There are only two ways to conceive of the operable source of political authority: either it is intrinsic-"of the people, by the people, for the people"-or it is extrinsic (coming from God, or from some accepted imperial source outside the society in question). The first of these conceptions is the newer in human history, and for it we have Copernicus to thank. As John Donne wrote in "To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomie" (1611):

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it. . . .
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot.

It was not long after that the Glorious Revolution ensued, and that Thomas Hobbes and his successors took the final measure of the divine right of kings, dispatching it as they launched forth the era of modern social contract politics.

Not so within Islamic civilization, which has never recognized any intrinsic source of political authority. Islam is a radically monadic religion of divine revelation, and Islamic political culture has developed over more than 1,300 years wholly true to that principle. Divine, extrinsic authority cannot be disputed, so there is no logic to political pluralism as a permanent or ideal condition. Tolerance for any other set of social and political first principles amounts to heresy; tolerance of other private religious beliefs is conceived as virtuous forbearance, not as a recognition that truth might really be in dispute. A Saudi professor of Islamic law thus explained tolerance to a visiting journalist in these terms: "Well, of course I hate you because you are a Christian, but that doesn't mean I want to kill you."

A particular concept of political leadership flows from these predicates. A leader is someone who enunciates and spreads God's law. It follows that since there is only one God and He has only one law, there should only be one political structure (the caliphate) and one leader of it. Accountability is not democratic in the Western procedural sense, but organic in a religious communal will. Government is legitimate when it accords with a priori religious truth. This is why, as Bernard Lewis relates, the first Muslim jurists to observe the House of Commons at work at the end of the 18th century felt sorry for the British when they learned that the purpose of that large, noisy assemblage of "common" people was to make laws. The English, they later explained to their readers, "had not accepted a divine law and so were reduced to the expedient of making their own laws."

This model of leadership is still relevant to the more secular context of our own day. The explicit content of a priori truth may have changed (or not, as in Saudi Arabia), but the form remains the same. As William Brown, a former U.S. diplomat and Arabist, sums it up:

According to the liberal democratic norms of the West, political institutions are dedicated to enacting the wishes of a tolerant majority. In the Middle East the purpose of political institutions is to facilitate the constant unfolding or revelation of a popular consensus. . . . The Arab perceives a single community of faith and language that contrasts sharply with our emphasis on competing but mutually adjusting political factions. In the West, politics has a flavor of controlled conflict that the Arab regards as destructive to community.

Which brings us directly to the matter of majority rule.

If truth is intrinsic to a society and men are fallible, then political life must amount to trial-and-error attempts to find the best way to govern. If no one can invoke the authority of unquestioned truth, it follows that the majority should decide which path to follow, and which leaders to trust, until it comes time to take stock, vote again, and perhaps try another approach. We regard this as simple common sense, but most Arabs do not-and the reason is not obscure.

For thousands of years, most people-certainly most Middle Easterners-lived in villages of several dozen to perhaps a few hundred people whose organizing principle was usually that of the clan or tribe. They also lived, more often than not, in an insecure world where the dangers posed by other tribes, and the prospect of natural disaster and epidemic disease, were very real. This put a huge premium on preventing serious rifts within village society. While the variety of decision-making procedures in traditional societies is manifest in the literature of cultural anthropology, they all boil down to governance though consensus-building. Leadership was usually centralized and hereditary, but that did not necessarily make it despotic. A leader engaged in open-ended negotiation with the dominant, usually elder, males representing the main branches of the clan; problems were talked out, compromises and understandings reached, and in return all swore personal loyalty to the leader (bay'a in Arabic-a still current and meaningful term). This methodology of governance was absorbed into and sanctified by Islam, wherein a leader comes to his position through a consensus of elders (ijma) and remains in power through the acquiescence of the community (umma). A leader who breaks faith, it is assumed, will be rejected by the umma and replaced by a new standard bearer who will reconstitute a social consensus.

Now consider in this light the idea that a contender who wins 54 percent of the vote in an election should be given 100 percent of the power, while the person who wins 46 percent should end up with none. This strikes people used to consensus decision-making as not only illogical and unfair, but dangerous-an open invitation to civil strife should society come under pressure. This is why, by the way, when Hosni Mubarak or Bashir Asad wins 95 percent of the vote in an election-which we usually interpret as an empty act of egomaniacal perversity-it does not strike a typical Egyptian or Syrian as odd. It also helps to explain the result of a recent UN Development Program report on the Arab world, which shows that the Arab region "has the lowest value of all regions in the world for voice and accountability"-UN-speak for political participation and democracy.

Finally, equality before the law, which we commonly summarize as one man (and woman), one vote. This fundamental principle establishes the equality of all citizens as far as basic social status and political rights are concerned. Like nearly all traditional authority templates, however, Islam mandates inequality and hierarchy. Men are inherently "more equal" than women, the educated more than the illiterate, the noble or Sherifian more than the commoner, the pious more than the reprobate, the elder more than the youth. Theology aside, social custom in the Arab world is such that most people find offensive and absurd the idea that the vote of a 19-year old illiterate peasant woman should be equal to that of a respected 70-year old qadi. The presumption of natural hierarchy in society is neither a parochial nor a ridiculous view, merely a pre-modern one; it was, after all, true of typical Westerners only an historically short time ago.

The advancement of the social equality of women has special resonance in the Arab world. The emancipation of women, in legal and broader psychological terms, is the most revolutionary social change afoot in the Arab and broader Muslim world. Though its progress has been uneven within and among societies, it frightens many a male, for it threatens his social status and self-esteem like nothing else-and to these fears has recently been added a totally unexpected economic edge. In societies as different as those of Egypt and Malaysia, men's school curricula still stress religion, literature, law and the "old" engineering tracks; women, because they are considered too feeble-minded or otherwise vulnerable for such pursuits, have for decades been "shunted" into medicine, business administration and computer technology-imagined by men to be just glorified clerking, since it involves a typewriter keyboard. Guess what has happened? Exactly: as the world economy has become more integrated, the relative market value of female labor in most of these countries has soared, women have moved increasingly into the work force, and the structure of home life has been altered in consequence. It is difficult to describe to someone who has never studied such societies the magnitude of social stress these changes are causing. The last thing that most educationally inferior, insecure Muslim Arab males want is "democracy", which they associate with utterly frightening changes in the status of women. Rather, such fears have tended to drive many into the fold of traditional or fundamentalist religion, and no doubt these stresses also help explain the troubling rise in "honor" killings in recent decades.

Not only are liberal democratic attitudes toward pluralism, majority rule and equality before the law mostly absent from the Arab world, that world counterposes entrenched attitudes that are their antitheses: concepts of monadic political authority, consensus forms of decision-making and natural social hierarchy. We know that attitudes acquired and reinforced over centuries maintain a grip on the patterns of any group's social relations, for better or for worse, even long after the conditions that spawned them have disappeared; so it seems indeed a reach too far to expect Arab societies to become liberal democracies anytime soon--certainly not soon enough to supply us with help for the problem of apocalyptic terrorism. And though we certainly wish them well, there is little that even the best efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy; of the new White House Office of Global Communications, of Charlotte Beers marketing Uncle Sam as a brand name from the State Department, and of U.S. government-sponsored Radio Sawa, pumping out news in Arabic along with Jennifer Lopez and Lionel Ritchie music, can do about it.

These efforts, after all, are unlikely to change the contemporary Arab view of liberal democracy as an alien Western idea at a time when Arab societies are struggling to cope with Western-wrought modernity. They cannot erase the fact that most Arab societies tried but failed during the late 19th and 2Oth centuries to adopt Western ways to achieve wealth, power and respect, or erase the legacy of simultaneous envy and resentment created by that failure (explaining why many Arab youths who in the morning declare their enmity for the West in the afternoon express a desire to emigrate there). They cannot change the reality that societies which undervalue scientific education, restrict the flow of information, simultaneously educate and oppress women, maintain bloated public bureaucracies, avoid real privatization and free trade, and base economic relations on primordial affiliations of ethnic or religious identity will never be able to compete with the West, the states of East Asia or--most frustrating for them-- Israel. Nor can these efforts stem the rise of identity politics that is reducing the appeal of liberal democracy in much of the Arab world, or persuade the rentier elites who own and run that world to take an interest in resisting that trend. To put it mildly, then, Arab antipathy toward the West and Western ways, including democracy, is not mainly a public relations problem.

Does this mean that Arab democracy is an oxymoron? Of course not. Other cultures need not become Western in order to become democratic; it is vapid historicism to point to the cultural particularity of the Reformation and the Renaissance and then wave one's hands in despair over the supposed authoritarian fate of others. There is nothing "wrong" with Arabs, either cognitively or morally, and there is nothing indelibly "wrong" with Islam. There certainly are theological and cultural predicates for democracy within Islam--and they are neither minor nor obscure--should anyone wish to use them. Some do: there are genuine Arab democrats, and they deserve our support. The problem is that there are too few of them and, in the end, there must be widespread indigenous interest in democracy for help from abroad to "take."  Unfortunately, one will do best looking for such interest in self-exiled communities of Arabs in Europe and North America--or in Egyptian jails--for it is uncomfortable these days to be a democrat in Araby.

Forcing the Issue

SO WHERE does this leave us? Our attitude toward promoting Arab democracy should be likened to playing the lottery: it's no sin to wager, but it's unwise to rely for one's future on winning the jackpot. Meanwhile, the materialist approach--poverty alleviation--is a double-edged sword. Reducing poverty may help drain the proverbial swamp of terrorism's sympathizers, but it may simultaneously increase the number of apocalyptically-minded terrorists as the angry and upwardly mobile seek out means of personal empowerment and expression.

The same double-edge goes, potentially, for military action. A protracted and sporadically very bloody use of American force, particularly to the extent that it appears to be unilateral, may well generate more resentment and terror attacks over time. That some people still discount the potential for the counterproductive use of American military power is dismaying; such innocent bloody-mindedness ignores Raymond Aron's famous warning that "there are ways of conquering that can quickly transform victory into defeat." But it is even worse to use force without a commitment to victory within pragmatically defined limits. When the United States uses military power, as it must under current circumstances, it invariably elicits resentment and the chance of consequent violent reaction; all the more reason, therefore, to use force ruthlessly and conclusively, to kill or disable the vast majority of those who have conspired to murder Americans and are plotting to murder still more.

It bears special emphasis in this regard that definitions of "ruthless" and "conclusive" are not ours to make, but our enemy's. Westerners were much impressed with the technological virtuosity of the campaign in Afghanistan, but Al-Qaeda members and their sympathizers, most of whom lack the capacity even to understand the technical feats we achieved, were not. What they understand is that most of AI-Qaeda's leadership survived. They "understand", too, that the U.S. military used proxies to fight in Afghanistan because it feared direct engagement. They think this explains why the U.S. military does not attack AI-Qaeda strongholds in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. They "understand" that streams of bellicose public statements about Iraq, accompanied by no action, shows American timidity. So, they understand, does first denying and then apologizing for civilian casualties in Afghanistan. And in this fashion, too, they understand the American effort, to restrain India from attacking jihadists in Kashmir, and its w illingness to watch the Al-Qaeda-Hizballah liaison come to maturity in the Beka Valley.

Now, it is true, as many argue, that a hallmark of successful great power diplomacy is the knack for creating common security goods for one's allies, thereby to gather friends, forestall balancing coalitions and, in present circumstances, to maximize critical intelligence and police cooperation in the war against terrorism. It is less often remarked that another such hallmark, especially in wartime, is a capacity to inspire awe in one's adversaries. The Bush Administration has been widely criticized for its deficiencies on the first point--maybe too much so. It has not been criticized enough on the second. A more ruthless and time-compressed use of force, within a tightly circumscribed target set, would have served better over the past year than the so far inconclusive approach to a wide but ill-defined "enemy"--an abstract noun, no less--that we have followed instead. While the administration works to turn Arab countries into democracies, it will have plenty of time to make the appropriate adjustments.

Adam Garfinkle is editor of The National Interest.