• Mr. Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of the American Interest.

Associated Press  An opponent of Egypt’s President Morsi holds up a picture of Barack Obama and the American flag during a rally outside the presidential palace in Cairo on July 7.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Second, the struggle against terror is going to be harder than we hoped. Our enemies have scattered and multiplied, and the violent jihadi current has renewed its appeal. In the Arab world, in parts of Africa, in Europe and in the U.S., a constellation of revitalized and inventive movements now seeks to wreak havoc. It is delusional to believe that we can eliminate this problem by eliminating poverty, underdevelopment, dictatorship or any other “root causes” of the problem; we cannot eliminate them in a policy-relevant time frame. An ugly fight lies ahead. Instead of minimizing the terror threat in hopes of calming the public, the president must prepare public opinion for a long-term struggle.

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all “tohu wabohu,” chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey’s prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama’s best friend in the region, blames Egypt’s violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.

Unfortunately, it failed.

The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey’s AK Party and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the ‘moderate middle’ of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups. (more…)

By
• ERIC TRAGER Mr. Trager is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian educator, writer and literary critic. He was also a founding theorist of jihadism and one of the few intellectuals that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has produced in its 85-year history. Qutb’s ideas shaped the uncompromising approach to governance that led to Mohammed Morsi’s recent ouster.

Born in the Egyptian village of Musha in the southern governorate of Asyut in 1906, Qutb was raised in a religious, politically active home with strong nationalist tendencies. He was educated at Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, the same university that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna had attended, and he worked as a teacher for the Ministry of Education after graduating in 1933. Qutb, who had reportedly memorized the Quran by the age of 10, initially took to the secular culture of Cairo’s literary scene. But then he spurned both democracy and secularism, embracing instead a zealous moralism.

In 1950, after spending two years in the U.S. on a government scholarship, Qutb returned to Egypt. His antagonism toward the West had hardened. America, and indeed much of the Arab world, embodied what he called jahiliyya, a Quranic term that connotes apostasy, immorality and evil. Thoroughly radicalized, he formally joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953. A year later he was arrested, along with other Brotherhood members, during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s crackdown on the group. For the next 12 years, until his execution in 1966, Qutb slid further toward militancy, formulating his distinctive brand of Islamism, which advocates violently toppling non-Islamic governments and replacing them with puritanical Muslim theocracies. His life and voluminous writings have inspired generations of terrorists, including al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose own writings frequently quote Qutb.

But anthropologist James Toth thinks Qutb wasn’t all that bad. In “Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual,” Mr. Toth generously casts his subject as a “complicated” figure whose religious beliefs were “reasoned” and “credible.” He dismisses the common portrayal of Qutb, in which he is “totally consumed by hatred for the West,” as an “Orientalist” trope to rally public opinion against Islamism. He insists that Qutb’s vision constitutes “a viable alternative to a Western-derived modernity.” (more…)

Sufian Abu Zaida is a well-known Palestinian nationalist who worked closely with Yasser Arafat and sits on the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the ostensible legislative branch of the Palestinian Authority’s ostensible ruling party. Though he spent years in Israeli prison on terrorism charges, he has long been considered a relative moderate for his participation in various peace initiatives.

These days Mr. Abu Zaida is an unhappy camper, but not because of the Israelis.

“Honestly, no one ever dreamt we would reach this situation of concentration of authorities and senior positions in the hands of one person,” he wrote about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a recent op-ed published on several Palestinian websites.

“The President today is the President of everything that has to do with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. He is the president of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the State of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority. He is the president of the Fatah movement and general leader of the [security] Forces. And as the legislative council is now suspended, he issues laws and has practically replaced the council.”

Mr. Abu Zaida goes on to complain of the pervasive toadyism among Palestinian ministers and officials, their “impotence and fear” in the face of Mr. Abbas’s every decision and appointment. “One of the main reasons that made President Abbas a natural candidate after President Arafat passed away is that many had thought Abbas’s management would be different than Arafat’s,” he notes. Yet now the president “holds authorities that Arafat in all his greatness and symbolic importance didn’t hold.”

Oh, well: Just another aging strongman in another squalid Mideast dictatorship. What else is new? It isn’t going to keep John Kerry—a fool on a fool’s errand—from making his sixth visit in as many months to try to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It won’t keep the Palestinian Chorus from its weekly hymnals of pity and cant. (more…)