BEIRUT -- By the summer of 2002, U.S. President George Bush had firmly set his new course: "regime change" and reform in the Muslim and Arab worlds, and, where necessary, American military intervention to achieve it.
Hitherto, it had been assumed that the United States could not go to war in one of the two great zones of Middle East crisis -- Iraq and the Persian Gulf -- before it had at least calmed things down in the other, older and more explosive one, Palestine. But the American administration's neoconservatives had a very simple answer to that. The road to war on Iraq no longer lay through peace in Palestine; peace in Palestine lay through war on Baghdad.
It was all set forth, in its most comprehensive, well-nigh megalomaniac form, by Norman Podhoretz, the neocons' veteran intellectual luminary, in the September 2002 issue of his magazine, Commentary. Changes in regime, he proclaimed, were "the sine qua non throughout the region." They might "clear a path to the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."