For the Bush administration, there's no evil like Arab-Muslim evil. It pays lip service to the junior-varsity version found in North Korea, but its heart isn't in it. The Middle East is the bull's-eye of evil. Bush persistently insisted that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were connected even though they had no relationship and loathed each other: They're both evil, and they're both Muslims. Ergo, they're both equal representatives of Muslim evil, and both must be destroyed.

For obvious reasons, this view of the Middle East is profoundly informed by the Bush administration's passionately and unprecedentedly pro-Israel stance, which Bush announced to a baffled National Security Council at his first meeting. ("Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things," Bush said, explaining why he was going to let Sharon do whatever he wanted.) The Iraq war was not fought "for" Israel, although removing a threat to Israel's existence and weakening the Palestinians were seen as important benefits. But the administration's mind-set simply assumed that America's interests and Israel's are identical -- an obviously false position that became much easier to sell to the American people after 9/11, and that was aided by the taboo against raising any criticism of Israel. Bush and his policymakers saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as an asymmetrical war driven by issues but as a battle between Israeli good and Palestinian evil. And that moralistic, ahistorical assessment carried over into their views of the Arab and Muslim world, and clearly informed the decision to invade Iraq.

To this day, to raise the inconvenient fact that the Arab and Muslim world have legitimate historical grievances against the U.S. -- even though no grievance, however great, could justify 9/11 -- is to invite charges of appeasement, if not treason. Yet it is precisely a knowledge of history, and a lucid analysis of its consequences, that is called for now. We are dealing not just with one individual and his followers, but with a region and a deeply religious culture that has boiled over, and boiled over in such a horrific way that it is understandable that many Americans have followed Bush in seeing that region and that culture as evil, fanatical, and medieval. Osama bin Laden is surely all those things, and he and his followers must be captured or killed. But the larger Arab world, which shares his grievances, is not merely fanatical or medieval. It has real and just grievances, which we must try to understand and, if possible, ameliorate. The Iraq war has done precisely the opposite.

To be sure, the Arab world desperately needs to clean its own house. The 2003 Arab Human Development Report -- a far more important document than any bin Laden video or disgusting, blasphemous snuff film hawked on the streets of Baghdad -- points out that the region is economically backward, politically unfree, poorly educated, and repressive towards women. With commendable honesty, the 26 Arab scholars who authored the report refuse to blame the West -- the region's favorite whipping-boy -- for these shortcomings. And these factors -- and some perhaps having to do with Islam itself, a religion "programmed for victory," as the scholar Malise Ruthven has noted -- help to explain the virulence of Muslim rage.

But they don't explain all of it. There are real, legitimate issues that have brought Arab and Muslim blood to a boil, and that explain why even pleasant taxi drivers and shopkeepers in Lebanon or Egypt, who denounce 9/11 as appalling and contrary to Islam, still say they understand it. Unfortunately, those issues cannot be honestly or fully raised in America's political dialogue, because they all ultimately circle back to a single subject: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that subject is a third rail. No major American politician, and few journalists, dare touch it. It is the elephant in the room that everyone has to ignore.

This is not just a bizarre situation, it is a dangerous one. We are locked in a struggle whose stakes are incalculably high -- not because any Arab or Muslim state could ever threaten us militarily, but because if we continue on the course we are now on, which is to essentially make the United States indistinguishable from Israel in Arab and Muslim eyes, we will end up living in their nightmare, a fortress nation surrounded by a sea of hatred. Which I'm sure is not a fate that any of my Israeli or Palestinian friends would wish on their worst enemy. This is our situation -- and yet we cannot discuss the single issue that is most critical to resolving it.

Certain aberrations in a nation's behavior can be explained only by ideological conviction. The ideology that inspired Bush's bizarre Iraq adventure, indeed his entire "war on terror," is a specific view of the Arab-Muslim world, one deeply informed by both an unreflective, stark, almost Biblical response to 9/11 and by an extreme pro-Israeli bias. It finds its scholarly expression in the work of Bernard Lewis, employs tactics that mirror those of the hard-line Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was put into practice by a peculiar group consisting of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, cynical political Machiavels, idealistic-unto-blindness liberals, hardcore supporters of Israel's Likud Party and born-again Christians. Although few Middle East experts or academics subscribe to it, its bumper-sticker simplicity has made it easy to sell to an angry and uninformed public.

This view can be summarized thus: The Islamic world is enraged at America and the West not because of American foreign policy, namely, our complicity with Israel in its 37-year occupation of Palestinian land and our oil-driven coziness with various Arab despots (whose number once included none other than Saddam Hussein), but because of what Bernard Lewis called "a feeling of humiliation -- a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors." Muslims hate America because our very existence is a constant reminder to them that they have failed. Unable to deal constructively with their shortcomings, in large part because Islam has been historically antithetical to secular pursuits like science, the Muslim world turns on the West and seeks to lay it low. Nietzschean ressentiment smashed the airplanes into the twin towers.

What should America do, faced with an enemy whose only "grievance" is our very existence? (Or, to cite Bush's dumbed-down, flag-waving version: "They hate our freedom.") Here Lewis' views dovetail with those of Vladimir Jabotinsky, pre-state leader of Revisionist Zionism and the intellectual father of Israel's Likud Party. Jabotinsky believed that the only way to deal with the Arabs -- whose nationalism he in fact respected -- was with force. Jabotinsky famously advocated building an "Iron Wall" between Jews and Arabs. In similar fashion, Lewis argued that radical Muslims had come to regard the United States as a paper tiger and that only brute force would get their attention.

(Hesitant pro-war liberal Thomas L. Friedman, probably the most widely read American commentator on the Middle East in the world, made the same argument before the war, although he added that it was essential that the United States also nurture Arab moderates and broker a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Friedman is bitterly disillusioned with the Bush administration, which does not explain why he ever had any illusions about it in the first place, or why he was willing to roll the dice on a war that stood a high chance of catastrophic failure even if America had done everything right.)

Not surprisingly, Lewis urged the United States to invade Iraq, where he said U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. Also not surprisingly, Lewis' views were extraordinarily influential with the Bush administration, which invited him to speak at the White House. The Wall Street Journal wrote that "the Lewis doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy." As one of the world's eminent scholars of Islam, he provided opinions that gave intellectual respectability to the Bush administration neoconservatives and Cold Warriors who pushed the Iraq war.

Like most grand theories, Lewis' contains considerable truth. Arab-Muslim backwardness, coupled with religious fervor, can indeed lead to a sense of murderous humiliation. Religion plays a far larger role in civic life in Muslim countries than it does in the West (ironically, Bush is doing his best to reverse that trend), and under the right set of circumstances, passions that might have been channeled into secular pursuits can only find outlets in holy rage. The burning anger of Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamism, derived from his pious horror at what he perceived as the decadence of 20th century America. (In addition to being outraged by America's loose sexual mores and spiritual vacuity, he was also troubled by the attention that the residents of Greeley, Colo., paid to their lawns.) It was not just the Israeli-Palestinian crisis (and, he now says, the Israeli bombing of Beirut) but the presence of infidel American forces on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home of the Prophet, that pushed Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 attacks. To deny that there is an element of the "clash of civilizations" -- the term was originally coined by Lewis, not Samuel Huntington -- in the confrontation between Islamists and America would be myopic.

But Lewis' view is fatally flawed, because it radically underestimates the importance of history. His Islam is a medieval world preserved in amber, outside of time. In the dialectic between nature and nurture, it's all nature, no nurture. Religion and "civilization" are absolute; the West's long and sordid history of colonizing and exploiting the Middle East, and its responsibility for open wounds like the Palestinian tragedy, are downplayed. His optimism about the aftermath of the invasion was a logical consequence of these views.

Lewis' message was what the Bush administration wanted to hear. And just as it has ignored critical voices on any of its policies -- Bush and Karl Rove decided early on that a pose of Papal Infallibility worked best -- it ignored the numerous dissenting voices that warned of trouble ahead.

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