Terrorism | Islam and the West

Time to get over anti-Islamist paranoia

ANDREW J. BACEVICH says “the big story of Muslim self-determination is likely to continue unimpeded” and lead to the rollback of American hegemony over Muslim societies. In his Washington Post piece, the historian recalled that when the British Empire was collapsing, it could turn over its “imperial responsibility” to the United States. But Americans today, he adds, see “no readily available sucker to to whom we can hand off the mess we’ve managed to create” in the Middle East.

I’ve long admired Professor Bacevich’s insights and agree that there doesn’t seem to be any takers of America’s “imperial responsibility” in Muslim societies. But I do see a whole lot of “suckers” jumping in to clean up “the mess” created in much of the Muslim world by American and European hegemons during past decades and centuries. They’re the same revolutionary youths who are liberating themselves from American hegemony as much as domestic autocratic tyranny. And they’re struggling to reform colonial-era institutions that they see stifling their societies‘ natural growth and evolution from their indigenous, Islamic roots.

For years I have been discussing Muslim affairs with young and not-so-young Muslim activists, ideologues and plain folks in the East and the West. A large majority of them don’t share the views of the so-called “Islamic extremists” such as the Salafis and Al Qaeda. Many maintain, however, that Muslim guerrilla groups, known in the west as “terrorists” and “extremists,” have waged the “necessary” struggle to liberate Muslims from tyranny and subjugation. The history of the Protestant Reformation and other ideological movements shows that the extremism associated by the early phases of those movements tapered off when the conditions that bred them changed. In contemporary Muslim societies, those conditions are political suppression and foreign aggression and domination.

A majority of Muslims in post-colonial societies also don’t identify with Westernized Muslim elites. Quizzed closely, they typically say that they would just want to live as Muslims, adhering to basic Islamic laws and values; and want their societies modernized fast. Moderates such as supporters of the Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia and the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East believe in peaceful and democratic methods of Islamizing their societies. Extremists such as the followers of the Taliban and Harkat al-Mujahideen in South Asia and the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in the Middle East have few qualms using force to achieve their goals. But both Islamist categories want to change or modify the alien institutions and cultural patterns in Muslim countries.

They remind me of the Brazilian statesman, philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. He argues that ideational and social change that brings fulfillment in life isn’t possible without freeing men and women “from their institutional chains,” or the “context” that creates the pernicious social, economic and political institutions. Unger taught Barack Obama at the Harvard Law School, but waged a media campaign last summer against the president’s reelection.

The professor says Obama and most Democrats are busy “humanizing” the Republican agenda, instead of trying to change the context, or the sources, of the economic and political malaise paralyzing America. Unger argues that “all that the Democratic Party has offered, at least since the presidency of [Lyndon] Johnson is a sugarcoating, a dilution, a humanization of the Republican program.” He calls the paradigmic shift he’s proposing “the second way.”

Few of the Muslim intellectuals and activists I have come to know appeared to have heard of Unger, but they echo his thesis nonetheless. They’re calling for conceptual and institutional change in their societies and polities. They denounce, or just ignore, Western-style secularism, the Western concept of privatizing religion, the colonial-era legal framework, and so forth. And they say they would want new institutions (about which most only have vague ideas) to build modern, progressive Muslim societies. Those societies would be based on the key Islamic values of social justice, charity and brotherhood.

The popularity of Islamist guerrilla groups in the Syrian civil war is the latest manifestation of the appeal of Islamic values among everyday Muslims. Earlier, Iranians, Turks, Iraqis, Egyptians, Tunisians and other Muslim peoples have demonstrated their preference for social and political orders based on Islamic principles.

The Islamic reassertion has spurred a lot of American paranoia about Muslims in America and Muslim countries. The Obama administration wouldn’t even give arms to Syrian rebels fighting the murderous Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which it wants overthrown, because Islamist guerrillas there have turned out to be the most effective and popular fighting force and could dominate the post-Assad Israeli society. “I am very concerned,” the president said in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Friday, “about Syria becoming an enclave of extremism.”

For many Americans, Muslims struggling to usher in what Unger would call a “second way” are “terrorists” by definition and need to be resisted or hunted down. The Shari’a, or Islamic law, has become a dirty word in American media and public discourse, even though most of the Muslim world lives under it, even under secular, pro-American governments.

In the United States, many innocent, law-abiding Muslims have been under surveillance since 9/11 in case they’ve any form of contacts with Muslims suspected of terrorist proclivity. American law denies Muslims designated “enemy combatants” by the administration the right to be tried in civil courts under American law. Mosque building creates public hysteria in many neighborhoods.

The atmosphere is reminiscent of the McCarthy-era hysteria about communism, which swept up American conservatives and liberals alike. The icon of American liberalism Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota joined the right-wing Republican Senator John Marshall Butler of Maryland to get the notorious Communist Control Act of 1954 passed by the Senate. Other liberal Democratic senators who supported the Butler-Humphrey bill included John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Paul Douglas of Illinois, and Wayne Morse of Oregon.

What makes America work, however, is Americans’ sense of pragmatism. The paranoia about the Other usually evaporates when they fail to prevail against it. After a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race, the United States realized by the late 1960s that it can’t defeat international communism, after all. And lo and behold, the rabidly anti-Communist President Richard Nixon did a U-turn and began normalizing relations with the Soviet Union and China.

Today, America – even with its military might, costly nation-building projects and candy distribution among Muslim children — has all but lost the ground war against Islamist guerrillas in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can now see that its drone war in several Muslim countries can’t stem the spread of Islamist militancy. Al Qaeda, which had hunkered down in Afghanistan, and other militant Islamist groups have spread to large swaths of the Middle East and North and West Africa. Last week, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer pointed out that beginning with the Iraq war, “the bitter enmities between Al-Qaeda and other Salafist and Sunni Arab nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even mergers.”

Sooner or later, I expect the United States — and the West — to do a U-turn in their confrontation with Islamism. Meanwhile, Islamist and other Muslim groups are changing “the context” of the evolution and modernization of their societies, and Islamic-Western relations.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration should, on a second thought, decide to begin the process. If not, I believe one of his successors to the American presidency will.

◆ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts the blog Islam and the West.

John Kerry: Same old same old

WELL, JOHN KERRY doesn’t have it, either!

I was curious to see if the new secretary of state’s “major speech” at the University of Virginia might finally signal a “change” in foreign policy, which President Obama had promised Americans during his first presidential run. Sadly, it didn’t.

John Kerry’s recipe to meet U.S. foreign policy challenges appeared to have been copied from the neoconservatives’ play book: trade, aid and democracy. All these have been tried. They didn’t work.

On international trade, the U.S. trade deficit has ballooned under Bush and Obama. With China, America’s most important trading partner, it has reached an historic high of $315 billion.

The United States has poured tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, promoting secular education and bolstering security and military forces in countries that are breeding terrorists. The idea, floated by fertile neoconservative minds, is that young Muslim men are turning to terrorism because of poverty and joblessness and anti-Western hatred engendered by madrasah education. Despite America’s prodigious aid programs during the past decade, terror is winning America’s “war on terror.” Al Qaeda used to be holed up in Afghanistan’s Hindukush Mountains. It’s now spreading dramatically — so are other terrorist groups — in South Asia, the Middle East, North and West Africa, and elsewhere. After fighting its longest war in history, the United States is getting ready to flee Afghanistan without realizing Obama’s repeatedly proclaimed vow to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taliban.

Kerry’s other proposition, i.e. helping build democracy abroad, is based on another pie-in-the-sky neoconservative mantra, namely that democracies are peaceable and buddy-buddy with one another. I wonder how the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could have failed to notice that democracy is transforming secular, and – with the exception of Iraq – pro-American regimes into Islamist ones that care less about American democracy or American interests? Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey are among the examples.

Nobody would, of course, doubt Kerry’s sanity, but he apparently plans to defy Albert Einstein’s caveat against “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” But why?

The main source of the secretary of state’s predicament is not himself, but his boss. For all his soaring rhetoric, Obama came into the White House as a clean slate in international affairs. He didn’t – and still doesn’t – have a vision of his own about America’s relations with the world. Most naive and perilous has been the president’s lurch toward the right-wing foreign and defense policy aficionados who had helped create the mess abroad and whom he now expected to clean it up.

I was aghast to see him fill his key defense, intelligence and foreign policy posts with such right-wing diehards from the Bush administration as Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, John Brennan, James Jones, Dennis Ross, and others. Hillary Clinton also is a dyed-in-wool establishment figure. Her traditionalist worldview was highlighted in, among other issues, her unwavering support for the disastrous Iraq war, which she has persistently refused to call a mistake. I was hoping, in vain, that the president would bring over to his administration such progressive and resourceful minds as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Aaron David Miller, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Ann Marie Slaughter and Robert Unger. His nomination of Chuck Hagel for the defense secretary post seems to have been an aberration. I would be surprised if the forward-looking and (still) morally inspired former senator from Nebraska can withstand the pressure of jingoism permeating in the administration.

No wonder the Obama administration, in international affairs, looked like a third, and now probably a fourth, Bush-Cheney administration. Noam Chomsky aptly described the Democratic president as a “moderate Republican” who is a “reactionary” on civil liberties issues. It’s because Obama lacked, not only a grounding in foreign affairs, but the moral courage and commitment to break out of America’s outmoded foreign policy establishment.

◆ Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West.’.

Obama’s sermon on extremism

President Obama told the U.N. General Assembly that Muslims must shun “extremism” and exercise “tolerance” for their adversaries. He was referring to the violence-prone protest rallies that the American film “Innocence of Muslims” has triggered in many Muslim countries. The amateurish video shows the Prophet Muhammad in pornographic poses and other demeaning postures.

Some Muslim societies are indeed honeycombed with anti-American and anti-Western extremists. The problem is, you can’t eliminate a vice while nursing it. Obama and many other Americans don’t seem to recognize America’s role in stirring Muslim extremism.

Muslim extremism and violence against America are fairly recent events. During the era of European colonialism, the Muslim world admired the United States for not colonizing a Muslim country and even criticizing European colonialism. In 1957 I was a schoolboy in what is now Muslim Bangladesh. I remember folks cheering America in front of a television set after hearing the news of foreign troops withdrawing from Egyptian territory. I learned much later that the Eisenhower administration had led the U.N. effort to force Israel, France and Britain to vacate the Suez Canal area they had occupied the previous year, following Egypt’s nationalization of the canal.

Systematic Muslim violence against America was rare until 1979. That year Iranian revolutionaries attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage. Through this indefensible action, they were venting their rage over the overthrow of their democratic government by the CIA in 1953 and the installation by the U.S. of a murderous monarchy they had just overthrown. Ever since, Muslims have resorted to anti-American protests and violence with greater frequency in response to American policies they see trampling Muslim interests or dignity.

I attribute the current spike in anti-Americanism among Muslims to three main reasons. First, the post-Cold War generation of Muslims are better educated and far more politically conscious than their forebears, thanks to the quickening pace of modernization and globalization. These Muslims have very little tolerance for foreign domination, and domestic political repression, for that matter. Secondly, during the last two decades, the United States has waged three major wars against Muslim countries: Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan.

These American-led invasions and the prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have enraged Muslims everywhere. Thirdly, modernization has, strangey as it many seem to many Westerners, imbued Muslims with greater appreciation of their own cultural values. Yet America and the West continue to seek to impose their liberal value system on Muslims societies, infuriating many Muslims. Western defense of the film “Innocence of Muslims,” the Danish Muhammad cartoons, the novel The Satanic Verses, etc., are classic examples of this cultural aggression. All these anti-Islamic materials have turned much of the Muslim world into a hotbed of extremists and terrorists.

Through the 1980s and 1990s U.S. administrations tried to tackle Muslim terrorism through legal tools, covert operations and torture by client governments. Then came 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists who hijacked aircraft to attack America were Saudis. The core cause of this horrible crime, as I learned during visits to Saudi Arabia, was the 1991 deployment of U.S. troops on that “land of Muhammad.”

America was unhinged by 9/11. Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of the crime, it plunged into a devastating war with Iraq, which had nothing to do 9/11; and a pointless one against Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, a foreign group, planned the attacks on the United States. Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims have perished in the two wars, which have spread anti-Americanism among Muslims as never before. And they have proliferated Muslim guerrilla groups committed to rolling back American hegemony over Muslim societies.

These guerrillas have forced the United States to pull out of Iraq without achieving any of its strategic objectives. In Afghanistan, they have frustrated U.S. efforts to defeat them, compelling Washington to plan the withdrawal of most of its troops from that country by 2014.

One would have hoped that the Obama administration would take a serious look into the colossal failure of its formidable military machine to suppress Muslim militancy. Instead, the administration has lurched into a reckless, illegal and counterproductive drone war in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The Predator and Reaper drones are purported to be targeting terrorists. As I learned during two research trips to Pakistan’s tribal areas, local CIA informants all too often report their own adversaries or people simply venting anger at America as Taliban “terrorists.” The result: an unmitigated disaster.

A group of American academics has just put out its findings from nine months’ research of America’s drone wars. Barely 2 percent of the drone victims were known militants, said the 146-page report. Clive Stafford Smith, head of a charity working in Pakistan, told them that Pakistan’s “entire [tribal] region is being terrorized by constant threat of death from the skies.” People’s “way of life is collapsing,” he continued. “Kids are too terrified to go to school. Adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups.”

The first step toward dousing Muslim hostility to America would be to review the U.S. policy and attitude toward Muslim societies. As long as Americans continue to their aggressive policy toward Muslim countries and tolerate the demonization of Muslims and their faith, as the video “Innocence of Muslims” represents, sermons about virtues of tolerance and vice of extremism would be greeted by Muslim youths with hoots of “hypocrisy.”

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington, who hosts the blog ‘Islam and the West.’

U.S. policy threatens Pakistan’s stability

Book Review: Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; Fall 2011

By Mustafa Malik

THE QUESTION once again: Is Pakistan a ‘failed state’ that’s going to bite the dust?

Anatol Lieven is among the latest authors to try an answer. His book Pakistan: A Hard Country is a broad and detailed survey of the security, economic, social, political and ecological challenges facing Pakistan. But he argues that a greater threat to Pakistan’s security is posed by the United States and India.

India has been Pakistan’s archenemy, with which it has fought three wars, two of them over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, or Kashmir for short. Muslim Pakistan (including what is now Bangladesh) was carved out of British India in 1947 on the principle – agreed to by its Hindu and Muslim leaders and the departing British colonial power – that the subcontinent’s Muslim-majority territories should become the independent state of Pakistan. The rest of British India would be the independent Hindu-majority India. Pakistanis believe that India, which occupies two-thirds of the Muslim-majority Kashmir, is violating the foundational principles of the partition of the subcontinent.

Lieven analyzes, extensively, Pakistan’s serious economic crises, never-ending ethnic and sectarian strife, and growing water shortages. He considers the problem potentially the gravest threat to Pakistan’s survival. He demonstrates his best insights on the question of Pakistan’s stability, especially whether terrorism is going to undo the problem-ridden state.

A professor at King’s College in London, Lieven examines four kinds of terrorism roiling Pakistan. First, the Pakistani Taliban and allied groups are crossing over to Afghanistan and fighting the U.S. and NATO forces there. Secondly, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa wage campaigns of violence in India to vent their rage at the Indian occupation of Kashmir, and most Pakistanis approve of their action. Thirdly, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, which belong to the majority Sunni Muslim sect, are striking Shia Muslim targets in Pakistan. Finally, the Taliban, Jaish-e-Muhammad and other militant groups are also attacking Pakistan’s military forces and civilian institutions because they have branded the Pakistani military and civilian government America’s “slaves” for joining the U.S. “war on terror” against militant Muslim groups in Pakistan.

Embarrassed by this kind of criticism, which is also widespread among the Pakistani public, the Pakistani government and army brass, as well as the United States, are arguing that Pakistani military forces are actually defending Pakistan against these militants. They cite militant attacks on Pakistani installations. Americans add that these militant assaults, together with economic and other problems, threaten to make Pakistan a “failed state.”

The author agrees that militant violence has been a major part of the bloody mayhem Pakistan is going through in the anti-terror campaign. “By February 2010,” he points out, “according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan as a result of terrorist attacks, Taliban executions, military action or drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.”

But Pakistanis view America as the source of the whole phenomenon of terrorism and social turmoil in their country. The Taliban didn’t begin to organize and Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Pakistan before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. “Before 9/11,” Lieven quotes a Pakistani activist as saying, “there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan, our society will sort itself out.”

In reality, despite their violence, the Anti-American and anti-Indian militant groups enjoy wide support among military ranks and the public. And the Pakistan army, the author says, “has been forced into alliance with the US which a majority of Pakistani society – including soldiers’ own families – detest.”

Most Pakistanis have been anti-American because of America’s support for Israel, perceived hostility to Islam and invasion of Iraq and, especially the neighboring Afghanistan. Afghanistan provides Pakistan its “strategic depth” again India, and Pakistanis are always leery about foreign hegemony over Afghanistan. Also, Pakistan is the home of twice as many Pashtun as live in Afghanistan, who are fighting to expel NATO forces from that country.

Many Pakistanis recall the massive American aid and arms supplies to Afghan Mujahedeen in their struggle to roll back the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and they “see Afghan Taliban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against [the U.S. and NATO] occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.”

The Taliban’s violence against Pakistani military and other institutions are, however, resented by many Pakistanis. Educated Pakistanis become outraged when they see the Taliban forcing their puritanical form of Islamic religious and moral code on Pakistanis, meting out brutal punishment to villagers for violations of that code. Yet most Pakistanis don’t consider them or their violence a threat to the stability of the state.

The author argues that terrorists can’t destabilize the Pakistani state “unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand.” By indirect U.S. action, he apparently means U.S. drone attacks on militant targets and other American anti-terror operations within Pakistan. He quotes a 2009 cable from then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to the State Department, warning that U.S. drone and other attacks on Pakistani targets “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governing crisis in Pakistan.”

Significantly, the author also mentions the possibility of Pakistan being destabilized by direct U.S. invasion, maybe in collaboration with India. He doesn’t explain how and why America may invade Pakistan, but warns of its dire consequences. No conceivable gains “could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s collapse, and for the disasters that would result for Pakistan’s own peoples.”

On the question of possible U.S. invasion of Pakistan, Lieven echoes the fears of many Pakistanis, which some of them shared with me during research trips through Pakistan. Among them were a retired army colonel and a political activist. The retired army officer, whom I interviewed on condition of anonymity, said that “the hue and cry [in the United States] about terrorists stealing our so-called Islamic bomb” has been a “ruse to take out our nuclear weapons and facilities.” He recalled that in the mid-1980s Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the government of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to join Israel on an operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. He feared that if Mossad now revived its scheme, “it may have a partner” in New Delhi.

Muhammad Sirajul Islam, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) activist and resident of Karachi, voiced the same concern and added that the United States and Israel have never reconciled with “what they call our Islamic bomb.”

The roots of Pakistan’s belligerency and warfare with India lie in the dichotomy of self-image between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. In undivided British India, Hindus were three-fourths of the population, Muslims making up most of the other fourth. Hindus in general resented Muslims’ separate cultural niche and their demand for constitutional safeguards for their political representation and economic interests.

Without such safeguards, Muslims argued, “the brute majority” of Hindus in a majoritarian democracy would relegate them to permanent Hindu subordination. The Hindu leadership didn’t agree to the Muslim demands, and Muslims forced the partition of the old country to create a Muslim state. Most Hindus were furious at the partition, and some continue to nurture their hostility to the Muslim state.

Since partition, India has assumed a hegemonic posture on the subcontinent, to which Pakistanis isn’t reconciled. This historic Muslim-Hindu animus has been at the root of Pakistani-Indian hostility.

I’m more optimistic than the author about Pakistan’s future and its relations with the United States and Pakistan. I see Washington beginning to realize that its goal of eliminating Muslim anti-American militancy through military means is a pipe dream. Already, that realization has led to the Obama administration’s decision to begin pulling out American troops from Afghanistan, without being able to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taleban, which President Obama had vowed to do. The administration also has all but given up on getting the Pakistan army to root out Taliban and Al Qaeda groups within its borders. In frustration, Washington has suspended a third of its annual aid package ($800 million) to Pakistan.

The United States is likely to better appreciate Pakistan’s strategic importance once it no

longer has boots on the ground in Afghanistan and anti-American militancy continues to percolate in South Asia.

The belligerency between Pakistan and India has already begun to abate. For one thing, Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent as of itself has made a large-scale Indian invasion of Pakistan almost inconceivable. Secondly, the unrelenting secession movement in the Indian-held Kashmir and India’s cool relations with Muslim Bangladesh, which it helped create, would make New Delhi extremely wary of a cataclysmic military campaign against the hornet’s nest of Muslim Pakistan. In Kashmir, India has tried all tricks to suppress the 22-year-long Muslim uprising and has to come to terms with the Kashmiris’ aspiration for some kind of self-determination.

Thirdly, my research has revealed that the memories of wars and the partition of the subcontinent, which have bred much of the India-Pakistan hostility, are fading among both Pakistanis and Indians. The generations that were most traumatized by those hostilities have mostly departed from the political scene. The lingering tensions between the two states, albeit much diminished, are now fueled by the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the army and some militant Muslim groups in Pakistan. The new generations of Pakistanis and Indians are more interested in peace and business between the two countries.

Thus while official bilateral trade between Pakistan and India amounts to only about 1 per cent of their respective global trade, Pakistani towns and bazaars, especially near the Pakistan-India border, are flooded with Indian goods. Indians’ interest in Pakistani music and literature, and the popularity of Indian movies and music in Pakistan, among other things, signal an inexorable trend toward normalization of relations between the two countries.

During its five millennia of their recorded history, peoples of the subcontinent have alternated many times between periods of relative harmony and hostility. While the boundaries between their states are likely to endure, the dark period of their mutual hostility spawned by the 1947 partition appears to be yielding gradually to new era of relative political, trade and economic harmony.

•Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog site Islam and the West: http:/islam-and-west.com/

Help Arab uprisings, U.S. interests

(Published in the Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2011)

By Mustafa Malik

Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world.

One of the West’s best-known historians of Islam, Lewis has echoed what many American intellectuals and politicians are saying in private. And sometimes in public. Democracy, they argue, brought Hamas “terrorists” to power in Palestine and has given Hezbollah “terrorists” a lock on the Lebanese government. Democracy has replaced Iraq’s staunchly secular and anti-Iranian — albeit autocratic — regime with a pro-Iranian pseudo-theocracy. And in Turkey, an anti-Israeli government rooted in Islam has replaced an ultra-secularist and pro-Israeli ruling establishment through free and fair elections.

Ironically, Lewis had personally lobbied former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and democratize it and other Arab societies. Many Americans supported that campaign. The new drive to sit out Arab democratic upheavals is also shared by many Americans, especially politicians and pundits. Among them Nicholas Goldberg, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“It would not be beneficial to the United States for the Middle East to be democratic,” Goldberg wrote. Democracy would replace the current pro-Western Arab governments, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with anti-Western Islamic regimes. That would force the West “to pay a fair price for petroleum, which would shake the foundation of the [Western] economic system.”

Both the Arab democratization campaign of the last decade and today’s opposition to Arab democracy have a common goal: resisting Islamic forces from seizing the reins of government. Both are based on a dire misperception, i.e. that Islam-oriented regimes would necessarily endanger U.S. or Western interests.

It’s a tribute to the West that most of the Muslim and non-Muslim societies that once fought hard to throw off Western colonial yoke have adopted or are pursuing Western political institutions – political parties, elections, parliaments, press freedom, and so forth. Yet these societies remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and heritage. In fact the post-colonial Muslim and non-Muslim generations in the East are showing greater appreciation of their indigenous traditions than did their forebears who were brought up under Western colonial rule.

Thus in Muslim countries such as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan, Westernized ruling elites have given or are giving way to political forces rooted in Islam. In others such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, political parties anchored to native traditions are on the rise and forcing the adaptation of their Western-oriented state laws to native traditions.

Islam is the bedrock of Muslim social and cultural traditions. Indigenization of a Muslim society’s political process means its adjustment to Islamic values and lifestyle. Decades of Western cultural and military campaigns have failed to stem this trend. Western antipathy or indifference toward Arab pro-democracy movements wouldn’t do it, either.

But the very concern that Islamic political activism would threaten Western interests is also unfounded. Sure, anti-Americanism is agitating many Muslim minds, and it sometimes triggers terrorism. But contemporary Muslim anti-Americanism has been spawned by the American invasion, occupation and domination of a host of Muslim societies, not by Islam.

At all events, if mighty imperial armies couldn’t suppress anti-colonial movements in earlier times, today’s feckless and tottering Arab autocracies can’t ride out the greatest Arab populist upheaval in a millennium. (The Arab nationalist movement of the early twentieth century was confined mostly to military and political elites.)

The Arab spring has given America and the West an opportunity to protect their interests in that region by cultivating the revolutionary forces that are going to shape the policies and agenda of tomorrow’s Arab states.

The Obama administration needs to drop its policy of supporting some Arab pro-democracy movements and ignoring others. It should adopt a bold and principled policy of defending and aiding all populist Arab struggles. Democratic or populist governments in the Persian Gulf may ask the West to “pay a fair price for petroleum.” A fair price would be cheaper than the high price that could be demanded by governments alienated by American apathy or indifference toward the struggles that would have brought them to power.

♦ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He conducted field research in a host of Middle Eastern and South Asian countries as a senior associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.