Recently, there has emerged a cadre of high-profile individuals from the Greater Middle East who, unlike Chalabi, have turned against Islam and embraced their lives in the West. In doing so, they have adopted views strikingly similar to some of the more hawkish factions in U.S. politics.
Recent elections in Bahrain and Egypt are being criticized for all the usual reasons. Authoritarian regimes — one a monarchy, the other a quasi-military dictatorship — cracked down on the media and the small opposition forces that challenged them in the run-up to the polls, eventually holding ballots with little or no monitoring.
The storming of the Red Mosque is not the victory that General Pervez Musharraf and his supporters in Washington proclaim. Rather, it represents the abject failure of the Pakistani president’s policies. The shaky military junta seems to have few answers to the central question of containing religious extremism in the sect-ridden Pakistani society. With a growing number of citizens challenging the authoritarian system, U.S. support for Musharraf is more and more out of touch with Pakistani reality.