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Originally Posted by Jack Moroney
Your focus is too narrow. First of all you talk about Arabs as a homogenous grouping-they are not, they are, have been, and for the foreseeable future seem to be more identified with their tribes than their "country" or any other political grouping. Second we are not looking to deal with "moderate" Arabs but moderate "Islamists" the bulk of whom are not Arabs at all. Personally I do not think that there is such a beast as a moderate "Islamist", there may however be folks who practice a version of Islam that is somewhat less "stringent" than what the Q'uaran directs. Sort of like the various tenets practiced throughout everyother religion. We do not need to boost the support of the US among moderate Islamists but eliminate support of Islamic Fundamentalism within the muslim community-that is the center of gravity for this entire effort.
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Nasser's message of pan-Arab nationalism was able to trascend tribalism and draw a broad following (so is the Islamist message for that matter), so the tribes may not be an impassable stumbling block in the same way that the perceived evils of democracy (embodied by Iraq) are. Second, by empowering secular Arabs you provide a visible alternative to the youth who might eventually become Islamists. Alternatively, it is not unreasonable to imagine an Islam-based government that is moderate (in the sense that it is not jihadist) in the same way that a seperation of church and state developed gradually in European history.
Whatever the case in the long-term, in the short term there's no hope of moderation by anyone as long as the US occupation is suffocating all arguments for anything but jihadism.