-- as Americans called these people in the 1980s during their battle with the Soviets -- into an international figure. Osama may appear a sinister fanatic to the West, but to the Muslim world, in the favalas, bazaars and villages, he became an instant hero for taking on the `Great Satan'. Those who speak of dialogue and moderation are suddenly under immense pressure to keep quiet and lie low.Rather than to Huntington or Fukuyama, we should perhaps look to Hobbes for a metaphor in the last days of the millennium. Life is indeed a short, nasty and brutish existence for many people in Africa and Asia and even in Europe. Millions live in poverty, and injustice and tyranny in places like Palestine, Kashmir and the Balkans feed Muslim resentment.State terrorism has destroyed the lives of large groups of Muslims: up to 100,000 killed in Kashmir, Chechnya and in Bosnia. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been displaced, bombed, uprooted and dispossessed in Palestine, Lebanon, and, most recently, in Kosovo. Not all this violence had come from non-Muslims. Muslims themselves have been equally harsh to each other because of a leadership that has failed in compassion and vision. In Algeria over 50,000 have been killed during the 1990s in the most brutal manner possible; the dispossessed Kurds have been savagely persecuted by several Muslim states; Sunni Muslims have fought Shi'ites, and Iran and Iraq waged a bloody ten-year war that may have killed a million people. And from Karachi to Cairo, Muslim cities erupt into sectarian and ethnic violence at a moment's notice. Foreign visitors are often targeted at random.Now that the Muslim world, through Pakistan, has an `Islamic nuclear bomb' Muslim leadership matters more than ever. There is every likelihood of other Muslim nations joining Pakistan in the near future. The world will become an even more dangerous and unstable place.Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, have predicted...
