Malevolent Effervescence

"What connects Hamas's recent parliamentary victory with the havoc that was wrought by Lebanese demonstrators over a provocative Danish cartoon, and with the recent release of a big-budget Turkish movie in which renegade American soldiers indiscriminately kill Iraqi babies? There is a dark spiritual effervescence that sputters out periodically from the Middle East in fits of mayhem stemming from a revenge fantasy that has been festering for 300 years. It gets couched in convenient "us" versus "them" diatribes to explain away failure, whereby the eternal enemy is the Christian West - besting the Muslim East for several centuries on the battlefield and in all walks of life, and actively subjugating it.

The three top terrorists in the world originally hail from America's three best regional Arab allies; Osama Bin Laden from Saudi Arabia, Ayman Zawahiri from Egypt, and Abu Musa'ab Al-Zarqawi from Jordan. These three countries typify the realist vision that attaches stability to autocracy. But seemingly, that is not enough to console restive jihadists. On the other hand, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, the three areas where George Bush's vision for democracy as the provider of enduring stability was supposed to initially take root, have been effectively ceded through the ballot box to political proxies that make common strategic cause with a dangerous bully to the east, Iran. Again, something went wrong in the calculus, leaving yesterday's pariahs in control of the destinies of these newly empowered nations.

So what is going on? Why is it that supposedly stable autocracies have produced the world's most determined terrorists, while when the relatively free people of the Middle East are given a chance to vote, they elect those associated with Iran's mullah-cracy?"
The Talisman-Gate