The west must address the roots of Islamic struggle
By Harlan Ullman
Thursday Sep 7 2006.
http://www.ft.com/

His approval ratings are dropping, violence in Iraq is surging and Republican control of Congress after the November elections is in the balance. Consequently, George W. Bush is taking his case for what is now called "winning the struggle between freedom and terror in the Middle East" on the road. In the coming weeks, the president will deliver a series of what he calls "non-political" speeches to persuade the public he is on the right track.

Dissenters and critics are scolded for ignoring Munich in 1938 and accused of abetting a new brand of the old appeasement that brought on the second world war. Mr Bush has adopted the neo-conservative description of the enemy as "Islamist fascists". One wonders if the enemy views us as Judeo and Christo-fascists? Regardless, the Munich analogy is wrong. Appeasement is not our main problem. More relevant is the summer of 1789 in Paris and the French Revolution.

Today, two powerful revolutions are sweeping the Arab and Muslim worlds. The first pits citizens demanding greater slices of political and economic pies against their autocratic governments. The second is the growing struggle between fundamentalism and modernism in determining Islam's future. The west is oblivious to these revolutions, to the forces causing them and to consequences that could be as profound as what happened in Paris more than two centuries ago.

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The roots of these revolutions are not conceptually different from the seeds for Hitler and his fascism and for the Soviet Union that were sown after the first world war by the refusal of the allies to rehabilitate the defeated powers. Desperation, humiliation, disenfranchisement and deprivation led to violence and revolution then and now.

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