In the current confusion in people's hearts and minds, perhaps it is worthwhile to offer our readers a different key of interpretation; indeed, several of them superimposed. The primary anti-American and anti-imperialist line posits that we are witnessing the confrontation between a world power and insurgent peoples. Yet while we have understood, in particular, that the current fight in Iraq goes (far) beyond the presence of the American contingent, have we grasped the nature of the confrontations that today are tearing apart the Islamic world? And have we thought about the underlying and nagging conflict that today is affecting the American political system with full force?
The first interpretation key: the fight between Iran and Saudi Arabia for hegemony over the Islamist movement.
With the decline of Nasserism, the Saudi monarchy and its allies, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, thought they were sitting pretty. The masses, formerly deceived by the communistic and authoritarian socialism of the nationalist military officers, would naturally return to the mosque and Sunni conservatism. On top of this, the unthinkable took place: the victory in Iran of non-Arab Shi'is who also lay claim to fundamentalism, but in their main component remaining turned towards a progressivism that sometimes went as far as pro-Sovietism. There is every indication that the political and religious dynamic today is encouraging Iran to favour its role as the organizing centre of the Shi'i movement regardless of the price to pay in its relations with Saudi Arabia.
The second key, in parallel with this confrontation, is the battle between secular modernity and fundamentalism that is in fact being waged throughout the Muslim world. For example, in Iran the laypersons and the moderate Shi'is often favour more peaceful relations with their neighbours, but others, for example those around Khatami, see themselves as uncompromising towards Al-Qa'idah, the Taleban, and more generally fundamentalist Sunnism, with the ulterior motive of thus proposing a pragmatic alliance to the Americans, in order to save the current Iraq. In the other camp are found fiercely secular Turkish military officers, very liberal Lebanese Sunnis, and even democrats who, despite everything, support Saudi Arabia's efforts to maintain sufficient pressure by the Sunni Arab minorities in Iraq on the Baghdad government.
The third key is less understood because it is more difficult to observe: the American one. In fact, at the heart of the American political system is an anti-Bush party, numerous, influential, and with the current president's father present in the very heart of his family. This American pacifist bloc is heterogeneous. It includes pacifists of the left resuming the anti-Vietnam demonstrations that marked their wonderful youth. But these forces would be nothing were there not, behind and in support, a powerful ''isolationist'' movement that has been awaiting its revenge for a very long time. The isolationist movement, in fact in the majority until December 1941, believes America should involve itself as little as possible in the affairs of the wide world and focus on the well-being of American society.
The isolationists do not claim to admire the targets of the interventionists. They content themselves with minimizing their danger. But these two groups would be nothing had they not found the support of a third one: the bulk of the CIA, and of a few other services, in particular the analysis department of the diplomatic service. All these people feel that the covert or open war that Saudi Arabia is waging against Iran is their war, as it is the war of the oil lobbies. Consequently, the decision made by George Bush, stemming directly from the very heart of this lobby, to take no account of and, in particular, to destroy the extreme Sunni Iraq that his own father had preserved in 1991, is not only praiseworthy but perfectly amazing.
Its only equivalent is John Fitzgerald Kennedy's rejection of the passionately Germanophile isolationism of his own father. These three wars, Sunni-Shi'i, moderates-fundamentalists in Islam, isolationists-interventionists in the United States, are now converging towards a sort of omega point.
Everything would have been so much simpler if the Shi'is had swung over to the fight against fundamentalism and if the Pakistani army and the Saudi elites had dropped their mask to join their fundamentalist bases, so close to Al-Qa'idah.
Everything would have been even simpler still if Bush had not needed so greatly the CIA, despite everything, and his own family, a little-known pillar of the Saudi-American alliance. But let us not lose hope: The time of crises is sometimes also that of clarifications.