No one pauses to suggest what the region would now look like with Saddam reaping windfall oil profits, 15 years of no-fly zones, ongoing corruption in Oil-for-Food, the bad effects of the U.N. embargo, Libya's weapons program, and an unfettered Dr. Khan. If a newly provocative Russia is willing to sell missiles to Iran's crazy Ahmadinej(ih)ad, imagine what its current attitude would be to its old client Saddam.
Or perhaps, as in the 1980s when over a million perished, our realists, who seem fond of such good old days of order and stability, could once again encourage an unleashed Saddam, with Uday and Qusay at his side, to be played against Iran for a (nuclear) round two. How sad that those who once fallaciously argued that the fascist Saddam was the proper counterweight to the fascist Iran now ignore that the genuine corrective is a democratic and humane Iraq.

With Darfur, I think that because it is an intra-Muslim conflict, it is not as clearly religiously-motivated as say, Khartoum's genocidal war against Sudan's Christians. The fact that the Darfur conflict is getting far more press than the atrocities committed against Sudan's animists and Christians indicates that the media is more comfortable with an "ethnic" conflict between Arabs and Africans than with an Islamic jihad against non-Muslims. So, you are right, Jaime, when you say that the liberal-left agenda is not comfortable in criticizing political acts motivated by Islam.

Radical Islam is globalization for losers. It appeals to those left out of modernization, industrialization and prosperity, particularly to young men desperate for order, meaning and pride amid the chaos of globalization. Radical Islam provides it, but at a terrible price.(...) As Fareed Zakaria writes in "The Future of Freedom," until the 1970s most Middle Easterners "practiced a kind of village Islam that adapted itself to local cultures and to normal human desires. Pluralistic and tolerant, these villages often worshipped saints, went to shrines, sang religious hymns and cherished art - all technically disallowed in Islam." This indigenous form of Islam was bulldozed by urbanization and radicalization. The Iranian Revolution was a harbinger of the transformation toward a more "universal" Islam that was also more doctrinaire; "Islam of the high church as opposed to Islam of the street fair," Zakaria writes.

"The fundamentalists have defined their adversaries: modern society, women, and non-Muslims. Therefore, the coalition opposing them may include secular democratic political forces, women's empowerment organizations, minorities, and global human rights organizations which promote freedoms and fight discrimination against minorities.