I respectfully disagree.

No amount of trade or free markets will change the minds of Muslims.

They already have the one truth they need, it's from God, our entire existence is a lie.

A lie I might add that is offensive to God.

Therefore, they have no other recourse but to kill us or force us to submit.

This is how Islam has always been, how it will always be. Until we offer concrete proof that their God is a lie (by kicking their asses conclusively).

VDH has an article up at his website detailing that thought; Islam's rejection of our Western society is based on their devoutness. Trade and living in the West and University admissions (Atta studied in Hamburg) won't matter in the least.

God already told them to kill us.

Jim, if 100%, or even 30% of the Muslim world felt as you suggest, recent events would look a whole lot different than they actually have.

May I humbly suggest that finding a way to keep the 80% from feeling like the 20% is a helluva good use of resources?

A.L.

I do believe we're in the late process of realizing what we have to do now that we're embroiled in ME politics.

Kaplan today - good hindsight from a wapo editorial:
'Imperfect these rulers clearly are, but to think that who would follow them would necessarily be as stable, or as enlightened, is to engage in the kind of speculation that leads to irresponsible foreign policy. Recall that those who cheered in 1979 at the demise of the shah of Iran got something worse in return. The Saudi Arabian royal family may be the most reactionary group to run that country, except for any other that might replace it. It is unclear what, if anything, besides the monarchy could hold such a geographically ill-defined country together.'

Jim,

> No amount of trade or free markets will change the minds of Muslims.

I respect your opinion, but I think you're conflating radical Islamists with Muslims in general, which is an easy enough mistake to make (the falafel vendor who pays rent, goes to his mosque and raises his family may not make a lot of headlines, eh?). Perhaps you don't know too many Muslims.

In a certain sense, the radicalization of Islam is a recent (measured in a few decades), reactionary response to Western ideas/affluence, and the allure and subversive danger that these products pose to their cultures. How else to explain the attempts to manufacture IslamoBarbie dolls and IslamoColas in the Middle East? Why else are the Qutbists and Salafists and theocrats so determined to restore the glory of Islam (even if only apocalyptically), save in reaction to its current military/economic/cultural weakness?

Though this front in the battle of hearts and minds may not get a lot of attention, the enemy seems to be well aware of the threat posed by Western goods and the often subversive ideas of liberty (particularly for females and youth), that they invoke. How else to explain honor killings in the West - that given the option, some young women would rather live as Western Muslims than as chattel? This is a weakness worth exploiting, IMO.

What has made us change our view of muslims in the last 20 years ? The brave freedom fighters in Afghanistan that threw the Russians out but later became the taliban and al Queda. How could this transformation have been better controlled. Sometimes I wish that Afghanistan, where I lived for 6 months 1976-7, was still the problem for Russia and not the USA

Joe, Marc,
Free trade is a great idea, unfortunately we're already pretty much free trading with all the petro states in the ME, including Iran, as oil is an entirely fungible trade item. I'm not aware of any of the oil states having large tariffs on imports from the West.
Israel and the US are pretty much free traders except for the socialist protections Israel continues to use for certain industries.
Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestinian controlled areas and Pakistan have nothing to trade except drugs and Islamofascism.
Iraq will eventually have a free market economy for more than oil and, I'm certain, will face no trade restrictions unless the nut-case isolationist Repubs gain control, or their equally protectionist, almost, fellow traveler Donks. Then, all bets, for all countries will be off, and the Barak's of DC will ensure we return to supporting local dinosaurs like Ford and GM with taxpayer dollars to the corps. themselves and the UAW.
As far as the "Sumis of the world" are concerned, let's look at the current Bush visit to India.
Taking on the attributes of the Anglosphere, as India has done and CA is doing, is the surest way to arrive at a free trade relationship with the US.
Mike
BTW, While I hope you're correct Marc, I think your 80/20, or even 70/30, breakdown is way optimistic.

Hey -- Free Trade for the Arab world: this is Bush's policy (sorry for length of post but perhaps this is useful info). His big vision, which is being successfully realized, is to create a broader "middle East Free Trade Area" -- MEFTA -- by 2013, including the US as the hub. We already have Free Trade Agreements with Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain (soon to take effect), Oman (signed but yet to be approved by Congress), and the UAE (with whom we are in tough but forward-moving negotiations). (Note that Egypt wants in on the deal and is furious that the US won't engage in FTA talks with it until it improves its human/electoral rights situation.) In addition to being a huge spur to political as well as economic reform, MEFTA can be seen as a brilliant end-run around the Saudis' international jihad operation, offering an alternative way for these countries to interact with the world -- by joining the 21st rather than the 8th century. The Saudis tried to block MEFTA by insisting that no member of the Gulf Cooperation Council negotiate an FTA separately with Washington, but, as noted above, the Saudis were rebuffed (and that dissing spurred them to join the WTO, which they did last December, long after most Gulf states did, so as not to be left completely behind). Note also that all this has implications for Israel. These countries are entering FTAs with the US with the explicit assumption that these will all be rolled into MEFTA within a few years, and Israel will be a full member of MEFTA. Already, just to join the WTO these countries have had to pull back somewhat from even the lip-service they give the Arab boycott of Isreal, and as they join FTAs with us, they must distance themselves even more from the boycott, no matter how "popular" it is at home. This is all a very healthy dynamic -- and of course now terribly endangered by the ports hysteria.

Back when I was a fixer, I would always get a lecture cuz I took too long, to fix a "simple" and "obvious" flaw in the machinery, even though in truth I had prolly the best downtime percentages (In average that is true) and it is because I would always "start from zero" I would take the machines back to the point of zero like motion, I would power everything down, and then I would restart and interupt the system before the first function. Shutting down and starting up takes a lot of time, more than the actual fix, but doing this, and then cycling one by one thorough the system made it clear that I had fixed everything, or seen what was gonna be the next thing needing fixing.

That is what happened, when there was a combined action against the US and it's economy, by a "small" (which I don't believe) but significant and dispersed portion of the Muslim world, we needed to zero our policies with those nations. If you look at what happened after the attacks, our first trusted ally was Norther Alliance, but they never did have command and control aspects of our efforts. We identified one thing that was right in the Northern allinaces, and we found more things that were wrong, and more that were right. When fixing a system it is very complex, and incremental, in both the ability of the fixer (the US) to identify what is wrong, and time for the fixer to finaly fix that thing that is wrong.

It isn't just spending money, it is the ability to control comerce, and the military can do that, and to identify the good kind of commerce, the SD (Stated Department) is supposed to do that, and DHS, CIA, FBI and other entities is supposed to identify the security of that commerce. Systems are complicated enough when you are working with a simple maching made up of only a few thousand moving parts, imagine the complexity of working with the billions of peple who are all layered with several other complexities. It might only take 40K a year to make an average muslim wealthy, but to FIX that muslim to be on our side? that takes religion politics, strength, humility, and every other overt human characteristic.

This isn't just a matter of troop NUMBERS, or trad NUMBERS, or amount of money sent to a given nation in NUMBERS, it is a very difficult and often intuitive decision.

(BTW, I wasn't much of a fixer, good at what I did. Collumnists are collumnists, you don't have to worry about complexity, just the "nuance" of the question)

Mike -

You're fundamentally wrong when you say that "Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestinian controlled areas and Pakistan have nothing to trade except drugs and Islamofascism."

Pakistan is a large textile-producing country, and when we had the chance to lower tariffs on their cloth, we didn't.

Egypt exports finished clothing.

Jordan, Syria and Palestine don't have export markets - but I wish like hell they did, and have supported a charity called Shurush which provides microfinance to Palestinian businessmen.

A.L.

"The business of America is business." (For a guy who never said anything, he sure said a mouthful.) We today, forget this at our peril. Free trade is the engine of economic prosperity throughout the world. If you don't agree, look at "Smoot-Hawley" and remember the disaster it created by turning 1929's market crash and recession, into a world-wide economic depression; and the tryanny it unloosed in varous parts of the world costing untold millions of lives.