This simplistic and demagogic narrative, however, overlooks that the Nazi threat was based on the military power of the most industrially advanced European state and that Stalinism was not only able to mobilize the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine.
In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism. Al Qaeda is an isolated, fundamentalist aberration. Most Iraqis are engaged in strife not on behalf of an Islamist ideology but because of the U.S. occupation, which destroyed the Iraqi state. Iran, meanwhile, though gaining in regional influence, is hardly a global threat; rather, it is politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that the United States must respond militarily to a wide Islamic threat with Iran at its epicenter is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No other country shares the Manichean delusions that the Bush administration so passionately articulates. And the result, sad to say, is growing political isolation of and pervasive popular antagonism toward the United States.
Our international interest calls for a significant change in direction. We need a strategy to end the occupation of Iraq and to shape a regional security dialogue. Both goals will take time and require genuinely serious U.S. commitment. The quest to achieve these goals should involve four steps.
First, the United States should reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time. Right now, the U.S. occupation, even though resented by most Iraqis, is serving as an umbrella for internal intransigence. Nobody inside or outside the Iraqi government feels any real incentive to compromise while the U.S. is keeping the situation more or less afloat.
A public declaration that the U.S. intends to leave is needed to allay fears in the Middle East of a new and enduring American imperial hegemony. Right or wrong, many view the establishment of such a hegemony as the primary reason for the U.S. intervention in a region only recently free of colonial domination. That perception must be discredited. If the president is unwilling to do so, perhaps Congress could by passing a joint resolution.
