The struggle that most Americans call the war on terrorism will be won by Muslims and lost by Muslims at its now-distant end. The U.S. role must progressively shrink to shaping the battlefield for that contest rather than waging the war as an American-run enterprise.
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The next administration will need to pursue a revised strategy that puts Muslim governments and institutions on the front line of a civil war within Islam that the United States was drawn into on Sept. 11, 2001.
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Muslim governments that for more than a quarter-century ignored or sought to profit from the spread of intolerance toward non-Muslims can no longer pursue those options with impunity. The intolerance they countenanced or actively encouraged has metastasized into an all-consuming ideology of religious hatred that now threatens them as well.
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When kidnappers demanded as ransom that the French government change a law about religious attire in schools that affected the country's large Muslim minority, the leaders of that community quickly rejected that interference with their rights and duties as French citizens. Last week British Muslims went on television to plead for the life of a British hostage. Muslim clerics in Turkey and Egypt have asked for the release of fellow nationals as an Islamic duty.
As small and halting as they may be, such reactions represent progress over the moral and strategic blindness that prevailed in the region on Sept. 10, 2001.
But it is not enough for French or British or Egyptian Muslims to plead for lives to be spared because they share the nationality or the religion of hostages. Only by pleading for the lives of fellow human beings of whatever nationality or religion, and by depriving the hostage-takers of any shred of religious justification, can Islamic leaders purge their community of this illness.
