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.