344 DESTINY DISRUPTED
transformed Iran into an "Islamic Republic" ruled by the most conserva-
tive clerics oflran's orthodox Shi'i ulama.
Next to go were the secular modernists of Afghanistan. Their demise
began with a seeming triumph for an extreme version of the secularist im-
pulse. A coup by a tiny group of Afghanistan communists smashed the dy-
nasty Nadir Shah had founded in the 1920s. Every member of that clan
who could not escape was killed. Then the Soviet Union invaded and took
direct control of the country. But the leftward swing of the pendulum was
momentary and meaningless; it only triggered an overwhelmingly more
massive tribal and religious insurgency. The eight-year, anti-Soviet guerilla
war that followed totally empowered the country's Islamist ideologues. Not
only that but the rural Afghan resistance attracted Islamist zealots from
around the Muslim world, including jihadists from the Arab world and De-
obandis from Pakistan, all of them sponsored by Wahhabi money from the
oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gul£ Among the many who tasted first
blood in these battlefields of Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.
In fact, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Islam's secular
modernists saw their power erode almost everywhere. In Algeria, the secu-
lar government came under siege by the Islamic Salvation Party. In Pales-
tine, the secular PLO gave way to the religious ideologues of Hamas.
Islamic Jihad, another militant group rooted in religious ideology, gained a
toehold in this region as well. In Lebanon, a series of devastating Israeli in-
vasions emptied the Palestinian refugee camps along the southern border,
destroyed Beirut, and drove the PLO to new headquarters in Tunis, but
this only spawned the radical Shi'i political party Hezbollah, which ended
up as the de facto ruler of the country's southern half and proved itself just
as committed to destroying Israel as the ousted PLO.
In Syria and Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood {and its offshoots) fought a
grim war with the Ba'ath Party, a war that went largely unnoticed in the
West. The Ba'ath governments could not eradicate these Islamist insur-
gents despite horrific measures such as Syrian president Hafez Assad's
1982 massacre of nearly all the people of a good-sized town called Hama.
Saddam Hussein, the ruler oflraq, was a Sunni secular modernist and a
sworn enemy of radical religious Islamism. In 1980, directly after Khome-
ini took power, Hussein invaded Iran. Perhaps he considered the country
ripe for the picking due to its internal turmoil; perhaps he had his eye on