SEEDS OF WAR : What drives Islamic fundamentalists.

The same Islamic fundamentalism that inspires Osama bin Laden is shared by the two Muslim states that are the United States' most important allies in its war against terrorism. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ruled by the Wahhabi religious movement, which is at the source of modern Islamic fundamentalism. The military government of Pakistan is heavily under the influence of the same fundamentalist convictions that animate the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Ladin, accused leader of the group responsible for the September 11 terrorist outrages in New York and Washington, is a Wahhabi--one who believes that his religion has been betrayed. This Islamic reform movement originated in Arab resistance to Turkish rule in the eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century, it overturned the orthodox Hashemite dynasty of Saudi Arabia and took control of all the Arabian peninsula. Its leader then was Ibn Saud, and his puritanical and intolerant Wahhabi version of Islam became and remains the religion of Arabia.

It is officially intolerant of any other religion, enforcing a fanatically puritanical social order in which women are excluded from public life and primitive punishments are imposed for violations of traditional law. Mr. bin Laden's terrorist campaign is not primarily directed against the United States--which he expects eventually to collapse on its own, as a result of what the fundamentalists see as its decadence. Their aim is to unseat the Saudi Arabian elite that has permitted an "infidel" United States to install itself in the nation of the Islamic Holy Places.

This is why the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is so uncomfortable today. Washington is reluctant to talk about it because the United States is heavily dependent on Arabian oil, and the Saudi leadership is silent because it depends on American protection. Washington has heavy political and military commitments to Saudi Arabia, while it has turned a half-blind eye to the Saudis' promotion of their radical and utopian version of Islam among the Taliban in Afghanistan, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in Central Asia and Africa.

The same discomfort exists in U.S. relations with Pakistan, whose military government has not fully agreed to Washington's demands for military bases and cooperation against a Taliban regime that the Pakistani intelligence services themselves installed in power in Afghanistan.

The source of radical Islam today is Saudi Arabia. So long as Saudi oil riches subsidize Wahhabi influence and expansion, fundamentalism will have a firm financial and political base. Saudi Arabia is, at the same time, under attack from the radical and violent movement mobilized by the children of the Saudi elite--such as bin Laden. He is joined by recruits from an alienated (and often well-educated) generation of young Muslim elsewhere, declared enemies both of the United States and of their own allegedly corrupted national leaders.

When one writes about the internal complexities in the war against terrorism, and the nature and origins of the terrorist movement, some readers say this amounts to giving aid and comfort to the enemy by offering an explanation for what they do. They are thereby humanized. These readers seem not to want Islamic fundamentalist terrorism placed against a historical and cultural background, presumably because this constitutes an obstacle to seeing the enemy as simply a manifestation of evil. A critic in Chicago asked, "Are you trying to rationalize the murder of six thousand innocent civilians?" There is a difference in the language between "explain" and "rationalize," which I would have thought my readers understood.

There has also been an angry reaction to my argument that Americans must accept the consequences of U.S. policies that contributed to bringing us to this crisis. Nations, like individuals, pay a price for what they have, or have not, done in the past. The terrorists are taking revenge, in their minds, for harm done to them and their society by the United States.

In the case of a puritanical and literally reactionary movement, such as the Wahhabis, the influence of the modern secular world is itself harmful. The role of the United States as a modernizing force in global society is, in this worldview, criminal in itself. American critics of U.S. Middle Eastern policy often say that Washington is hated because it has supported dictatorial governments. These Middle Eastern critics hate the United States for the opposite reason: because it brings secular and liberal democratic ideas into the region.

America's support for Israel is not a primary issue for the bin Laden movement (even though American critics make much of it). It is a very important factor in opinion elsewhere in the Middle East, with particularly damaging effect among prodemocratic groups. The fundamentalists are concerned with the condition of Islamic society itself--its integrity, its purity, its future. This is why their fanaticism is deaf both to America's threats, and to reason.