BEIRUT -- The United States has long divided Arab regimes into two broad categories: the friendly, pro-Western "moderate" ones and the less friendly, "radical" ones. Since Sept. 11, two key "moderates' -- Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- have undergone a drastic change of status in American eyes. Only arch-villain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein still earns fiercer criticism than they do.

The indictment does not come, officially at least, from the U.S. government, but from the political establishment. Scarcely a day passes without some member of Congress, editorialist, or academic contributing his bit to the sudden new Washington orthodoxy.

These false friends are charged not merely with being reluctant participants in the U.S.-led coalition against terror, but -- as the two countries whose citizens played the dominant role in the suicidal hijackings -- with a good measure of culpable responsibility for the whole phenomenon of Islamist fanaticism.

The root cause, they say, is the absence of democracy. "In (Saudi Arabia's) closed political system," typically opined the New York Times, "the only available outlet for criticism of government policies and corruption is Islamic fundamentalism." And the government itself was "tolerant of terrorism."

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, declared The Washington Post, had a policy of "deflecting frustration with the lack of political freedom or economic development" by "encouraging state-controlled clerics and media to promote the anti-Western, antimodern and anti-Jewish propaganda of the Islamic extremists."

Wrong, retort the regimes. "Democracy is not the issue," said Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa: Palestine is.

According to Mubarak, "Palestine generates over 50 percent of the causes of terrorism, and even when Palestine is not the cause, terrorism uses it for its own purposes." Besides, he said, "terrorism has nothing to do with freedom of expression," for "that exists in Egypt and most Arab countries"; it was Israel that "ignores the rulings of the judiciary, engages in mass murder and tosses human rights to the wind."

It would appear from these contrary standpoints, wrote a commentator in the leading Beirut newspaper al-Nahar, that "U.S. public opinion will be the arena for a battle that may be more important for the future of international relations than the one in Afghanistan, a battle about the question: Does terrorism come from democracy's absence in some areas of the Middle East, or from (U.S./Israeli) biased, unjust and terrorist policies in that region?"

To most Arabs, the idea that their regimes are "soft" on terrorism is barely credible. Indeed, they are clearly now tougher than ever, simultaneously arguing that if anyone was soft on it, till Sept. 11, it was the West itself.

"I told Western leaders," said Mubarak, "that they were upholding criminal, not human, rights" and "the day would come when the terrorists turned on them."

They may not like where the international campaign against terror has led -- to the blitz on a fellow Muslim country, Afghanistan -- but they are certainly using it as a cover to step up their domestic ones. In this they are doing precisely what Amnesty International feared they would when it warned that "while the world's attention is focused elsewhere, governments will increase their repression of opponents."

Through much of the 1990s, the Egyptian government was locked in savage conflict with indigenous Islamist terrorists. Militarily, at least, it defeated them. And after they declared a truce in 1997, it responded with a slight easing of its brutal repression, releasing several thousand detainees and bringing no more suspects before its Draconian military courts. Even so, no less than 12,000 remained in prison without trial. But after Sept. 11 it unexpectedly resumed its arrests and, in his capacity as "commander in chief," Mubarak ordered a massive renewal of military trials.

None of this, he contended, encroached on Egypt's democracy "by a speck." Others disagree. For them, it is not just judicial assault on terror, but an integral part of a general assault on civil, political and human rights that has been under way for years. This amounts -- said the Egyptian Human Rights Organization -- to a kind of "legislative violence" that, in security's name, continually reduces the space for the pursuit of legitimate demands in any legitimate way.

Not content with emasculating Parliament, parties, unions and professional associations, the government is now about to make fresh inroads into the independence of the country's 14,000 nongovernmental organizations, especially human rights groups, which have furnished some counterweight to the remorseless expansion of state power.

Since Sept. 11, Saudi Arabia has reportedly been making arrests among quarters deemed sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. But in a country that does not lay formal claim to democratic practice or recognize international definitions of human rights, this could mean anyone who simply criticizes the existing order from an Islamic point of view.

Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, now reproachfully recalls how Britain had granted political asylum to Mohammed al-Masari, the Saudi dissident who waged a fax and Internet campaign against the abuses of power in his homeland. "When we used to tell them that these people are terrorists," he said, "they used to respond that they were opposition forces."

Islamists are the main opposition in another "moderate" state, Jordan. Although they have never resorted to violence, King Abdullah, mainly worried about the domestic repercussions of the intifada, has dismantled yet more of his late father's so-called "democratic experiment" since Sept. 11. After suspending Parliament, and indefinitely postponing new elections, he has authorized a series of "temporary" laws culminating in a catch-all amendment of the penal code, making it an offense to disseminate information considered "defamatory, false, damaging to national unity or the reputation of the state, liable to incite crime, strikes or meetings that are illegal or disturb public order."

Not only "moderate" regimes do it. Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi is the head of one of the most secretive Middle Eastern despotisms, but in expressing unexpected sympathy for the U.S. antiterror campaign, he hopes to exploit it against his own adversaries. Warmly endorsing Washington's classification of the Libyan Islamic Combatant Group as a terrorist organization, he said London, "the capital of terrorism," should extradite three of its members who enjoy asylum there.

The imperatives of antiterror coalition-building have made it easier for "radical" Syria to disappoint those citizens who had thought the replacement of the late Hafiz Assad by his son Bashir heralded an era of political liberalization. The arrest of 10 dissidents before Sept. 11 provoked an international outcry; the blatantly political trial of two members of Parliament that opened last month has attracted little attention.

Except for loyalist officials, few people -- certainly not the Islamists -- would dispute the general American view of Arab regimes and the part their oppression plays in provoking the very terrorism they simultaneously combat. "Of course," said Ma'amoun Hodeibi, a grandee of Egypt's nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood, "losing your freedom attracts you to violence. This is the same whether you are Muslim or not."

Nor would they dispute the U.S. argument that regimes seek to appease the militants by competing with them on their own ground. The crazy result, said a moderate commentator in the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat, is that "the official Arab media organizations consider it their duty to adopt and propagate the extremists' ideas just as strongly as they call for the extremists' elimination."

But no Arab, secular or Islamist, accepts the American explanation for Islamist terror if that is the only one advanced. And they accept it even less if, for pro-Israeli reasons, it is only advanced, as it clearly is in some quarters, to contest and confute the other explanation on which both Arabs governments and their otherwise hostile publics perhaps do agree -- that the terror thrives on the anger, humiliation and deep sense of injustice that America's own policies arouse, especially in that most emblematic of arenas, Palestine.

You can't, Arabs say, have one explanation without the other. To be sure, if democracy were to break out in the Arab world, it would, or should, end the Islamist terror, both the domestic variety and the international one that grows out of it. For the people would then feel that their governments -- which might in many cases be heavily Islamist -- represent them and their interests. But without a radical change of U.S. policy, this democracy would not, of itself, diminish Palestine's role as a crucible of regional and international conflict, anti-Americanism and, ultimately, violence of another kind; on the contrary, it would almost certainly exacerbate it, since democratically elected leaders, unlike the dictators of today, would have to follow, rather than defy, the popular will.

So salvation, it is argued, can only come from the West and the Arabs in conjunction. "It is true," said a commentator in Jordan's al-Rai newspaper "that confronting terror calls for a comprehensive review of Arab and Islamic societies, but parallel to this and perhaps before it, the stark political problem of the Israeli occupation has to be resolved. Beyond U.S. President George W. Bush's declarations about a Palestine state, the resolution must include a Western admission of moral responsibility, vis-a-vis Arabs and Muslims, similar to the (German) admission of responsibility for the Nazi massacre of the Jews."