Diff'rent strokes.
Isn't it annoying when someone says something similar to what you believe, but goes too far and makes a mess of it! Just such a thing has happened to me recently with the case of Robert Kilroy-Silk. Due to a secretarial error, an article that he wrote several months ago was re-published in the Sunday Express the week before last. Whereas before, the article appeared in the context of a discussion about whether Arab states were justified in having hostility towards the US, this time the article appeared in isolation and was altered by the newspaper to refer to Arabs individually rather than Arab states.

Kilroy-Silk made some mistakes in his piece, the most shocking of which was grouping Iranians (Persians) with Arabs, but his message contained a germ of truth. Many people have supported him in his dispute with the BBC because they feel he has expressed something that needed to be said: that Arab states have failed. Their economies are poor. Their societies produce little in the way of culture that most of us in the non-Arab world buy and their main diplomatic and commercial importance comes from pure luck: the possession of oil. The lack of proper democracy means that resources are not applied to the broadening of education or infrastucture for the many. In most states, the division of wealth is far less equitable than it is in the liberal democracies of western Europe, North America and Australasia.

This matters. In particular it's important because the chasm between the West and the Arab world is the main cause of the current wave of terrorism. Not everyone has grasped this. Last week I watched the BBC's Question Time and was dismayed to see that in the middle of a discussion about the usefulness of air marshalls on hijacked flights, someone in the audience made a remark about the need to address the 'root causes of terrorism'. He then went on to talk about poverty. Sadly this got a round of applause from certain members of the audience.

How can such ignorance persist? The majority of the hijackers on September 11 2001 came from wealthy Saudi families. They were not poor. Osama bin-Laden had a personal net worth of something in the region of half a billion dollars. What poverty were they talking about?

What has happened here is that audience members projected their own values on other people and ended up sympathising with a point of view that doesn't exist. When confronted by the fact that people were prepared to kill themselves in order to attack others, many people think that they would only do this under the most terrible provocation. It therefore follows to them that some awful provocation must have happened.

But it's not like that. There is resentment in the Arab world towards the West. It has a little to do with Israel. It has a little to do with the US's close relations with the Saudi princes who have sucked the country dry. But the main cause of the resentment comes from the chasm between the Islamic world's expectations of its own international significance and the reality of its relative unimportance.

Islam is a revealed religion. Its followers believe that they have the most recent word of God from the last messenger. The result of living the Islamic way of life is supposed to be the bliss of living as God intended we should. Islam is a social code in addition to a relationship with mankind's alleged creator.

And that's all very fine and dandy in isolation. The problem occurs when certain devout Muslims notice that in diplomatic, military, economic and cultural terms their nations are miles behind the West with no sign of catching up. "How can this be?", they ask.

One answer is to believe that the West has been seduced by the devil and is being rewarded in material terms in return for the sacrifice of its citizens' souls. That was the view of the Ayatollah Khomeni who led the 1979 revolution in Iran. That is why the US was called 'The Great Satan'. There are many in the West who believe that this term was justly applied because of Western actions in Israel, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. They are wrong. They are merely projecting their own values onto another society.

Muslim fanatics believe that their societies are being punished by God for not following the strict word of God. What they cannot grasp is that in most causes their societies are hindered because they have followed the word. It's no surprise to us in the West that their societies suffer when they neglect the education and equality of women, place religious teaching as the equal of scientific enquiry and dismiss democracy.

Since the revelation of the word of God to Muhammed, the West has acquired another even more recent way of life: Liberal Democracy. The new Western 'religion' includes such heresies as secular government, equality for women, democratic elections every four or five years and full freedom for banks to charge interest on loans (strictly forbidden in Islam). The results are there for all to see.

It's like swimming. There are several styles: the Breaststroke, the Backstroke, the Butterfly and the Crawl. All move you through the water, but if you want to win a freestyle event you have no choice but to use the Crawl, even if you prefer the Breaststroke.

The West has the Crawl. The Arab nations have the Breaststroke. We will always beat them and some of their people will always hate us for it. Unless change is implemented, the chasm will grow wider and wider, especially if dependence on Arab oil is reduced.

And that's the real motive for what the US did in Iraq. The Neo-con agenda is to create a liberal democracy in a region of the world where anti-US resentment was incubating attacks like those on September 11 2001.

Iraq was the most secular country in the region, thus giving the project the greatest chance of success. The exact same thing was done to Japan after the war. A nation of suicide bombers (then called Kamikazi pilots) and women oppressors who believed in their own racial superiority and right to govern neighbouring states in a "co-prosperity sphere" was transformed in less than a decade to a democratic, roughly capitalist country. Attitudes take longer to change than laws, but 60 year later Japan is a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours, making huge contributions to science and culture.

The same is required in the middle east. Either we see this though or they kill us.

Blair understands this and was never a poodle in endorsing Bush's desire for regime change. It's his own gut feeling too, as stated in a little-reported article in the Telegraph of 14th July last year:

Click here!