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"This is part of our goal in Iraq. Democracy and Western ideals of secular law are generally incompatible with the Koran and other writings of Islam."

I'm not so certain as to just how true this is, as I've been scrolling through various screeds by Sayyid Qutb and other ideologues that led up to Osama bin Laden and I'm honestly struck by how recent a phenomenon a lot of the beliefs that we now associate with Islam now are. For example, the idea of jihad as being a non-state enterprise that anybody can engage or this whole notion of "shopping around" for fatwas to justify one's activities with a religious seal of approval.

Traditionally, Islam has viewed jihad as being a state enterprise that is issued forth by a nation's ruler (either a caliph acting as a spiritual descendant of Mohammed or a monarch acting under the Muslim form of the divine right of kings) and that is probably the best way to run any kind of a system - states are generally *far* more conservative in waging wars than non-states, especially assymetrical ones, because there is so much potential loss for them. And the fatwa shopping appears to have been a direct result of the loss of a sane theological executive in Islam in the form of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and the British decision to hand over a good chunk of the Arabian Peninsula to the al-Saud clan and their Wahhabi surrogates.

Keep in mind that when Wahhabism first cropped up in the early 1800s it was primarily the religion of bandits because its Trotsky-esque "smash the state" view that everything had been corrupted after the death of Mohammed and needed to be purified all over again through violence - a perfect justification that helped the sand raiders of ancient Arabia transform themselves from common thugs to into Holy Warriors(TM). When they finally took Mecca, they smashed all of the Sufi shrines and symbols of Ottoman authority because they saw themselves as being part of a utopian revolution - the same thing that the communists did in Russia and China, abeit from a secular perspective.

The Ottoman military slapped the Wahhabis down and drove them back into the desert, where they wouldn't re-emerge for another century or so until World War 1. And after destroying the Ottoman Empire, the Europeans basically put the wolves in charge of the hen house throughout the Muslim world, and not just in regards to the Wahhabis - the Alawites who form the core of Syria's Baathist Party are the descendants of the same people who were lapdogs to the French back in the colonial days.

In other countries where Wahhabism is either a minority or has been forcibly contained (Morocco, Tunisia, Indonesia, ect.) most of the population is fairly open to Western values and the like. One might ask the question, as John Derbyshire over at the NR's "The Corner" has, as to why, if Wahhabism is so popular in countries like Saudi Arabia or Sudan, does it require such an enormous police state to maintain itself?

"Difficult, but it must be done at least to the extent they are not an active threat to all other civilizations and they turn back inward."

I think that process has already begun and that the destruction of al-Qaeda and the fall of the Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia as well as the NIF tyrants in Sudan will hasten it swiftly. Keep in mind that in 1941 Shintoism was the key threat to Western civilization. Japan is still a majority Shinto/Buddhist (many Japanese consider themselves to be members of both faiths) today as it was in 1941, but they are far from being a threat to Western civilization. I see little reason why the same end-result could not occur within Islam.

"In the end, perhaps the best we can hope for is more of the same; royal families, heavy handed state fascism or military rule. They have heretofore been the successful working models of Muslim states. Islam is not a religion that lends itself at all to republican principles."

Well, if the general population in any one country wants a king they can have them - I would certainly rather monarchies like those in Jordan or Morocco to the "modern" one-party states that hold sway in Libya, Sudan, Syria, and formerly Iraq if it comes to that. However, Indonesia is now a fledgling democracy which, while dealing with problems not unlike those of Mexico, seems quite open to republican principles. Pakistan was formerly a democracy and if the Wahhabi influence can be broken there could easily be one again. The same goes with Turkey or the millions of Russian Muslims who have taken full advantage of the freedoms that have followed the fall of communism in the old Soviet Bloc. The same could easily be said of Indian Muslims.