AFTERWORD 351wielded such clout in the United States since the 1970s. Tariq Ali wrote a
book after 9/11 titled The Clash of Fundamentalisms, suggesting that this
tension between Islam and the West boils down to a religious argument be-
tween fundamentalist extremists. If so, however, the two sides don't present
opposing doctrines. Christian fundamentalists don't necessarily disagree
about how many Gods there are; they just don't think that's the question.
Their discourse revolves around accepting Jesus Christ as one's savior
(whereas no Muslim would ever say "Mohammed is our savior"). So the ar-
gument between Christian and Muslim "fundamentalists" comes down to:
Is there only one God or is Jesus Christ our savior? Again, that's not a point-
counterpoint; that's two people talking to themselves in separate rooms.
The fact that the Muslim world and the West have come to the same
events by different paths has had concrete consequences. After 2001, U.S.
strategists acted on the premise that the climactic terrorist act of modern
times somehow fit into the framework of power politics among nation-
states. After all, that's what European wars had been about for many cen-
turies. Even the Cold War came down to a confrontation between blocs of
nations, the warring entities lined up along the ideological fault line ulti-
mately being governments. In the immediate aftermath of9/11, therefore,
the Bush administration looked around, over, past, through, anywhere but
directly at the specific terrorists of that day, in its quest to find the govern-
ment behind those men. Reflexively, U.S. strategists-and many analysts
in the Western media-sought an adversary of the same genre, the same
class, the same type the country had confronted in earlier wars.
Thus it was that, after a brief initial incursion into Afghanistan and a
transitory obsession with Osama bin Laden, the Bush team zeroed in Sad-
dam Hussein as the mastermind and Iraq as the core state responsible for
terrorism against Western citizens, the state whose conquest and "democ-
ratization" would put an end to this plague. But after Saddam Hussein had
been captured and hanged, after Iraq had been fully occupied, if not sub-
dued, terrorism showed no real sign of abating, whereupon U.S. govern-
ment strategists shifted focus to Iran. And depending on what happens
there, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a host of other nations
await their turn as designated chief "state sponsor" of terrorism.
With its policies deeply rooted in the Western narrative, the United
States has prescribed democracy and sponsored elections to remedy local