Q. America just won't leave Islam alone. You Americans quit intervening throughout the world to hurt Muslim nations!
A. The great killers of Muslims these last decades have been other Muslims � whether in Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Palestine, or Lebanon. Indigenous theocracy, homegrown statism, and traditional autocracy � not Israel or the United States � have impoverished the masses of the Middle East. The United States has intervened out of its own self-interest, but also with the result that Muslims have been helped, rather than hurt � in Kuwait, among the backwaters of Iraq, in Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. Our great fault is that we have supported illegitimate regimes, out of an understandable fear that their overthrow might produce something like the past reign of terror in Iran and Algeria, rather than Jeffersonian democracy. Still, promotion of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan may be our only chance of salvaging a viable Middle East policy � and therein thwarting the fundamentalists, as well as the corrupt and illegitimate Arab moderates who are alike now enemies of democracy. Israel has about as much to do with the poverty in Cairo or the undernourished babies in Baghdad as does life on Mars. What exactly is your question?