Democracy and the Islamic concept of legitimate rule are inherently incompatible. It's time that the democracies faced up to the fact that an "Islamic Republic" is a contradiction in terms. The jihadis certainly have. Abu Musab al Zarkawi himself has stated this in no uncertain terms. The sole "Islamic Republic" on the planet, Iran, where the theocratic establishment is legally empowered to decide who may and who may not run for office in a democratic election and to over-rule the President and the Parliament has demonstrated this over a long period of time.

The root concept of democracy is that a government's legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed and the election of its officers and representatives by one form of choice by its citizens or another, and that laws, or even constitutions, may be changed or amended by some form of popular will.

But in the Islamic concept of governmental legitimacy, legitimacy derives from adherence to the Koran, the final, immutable Word of Allah, as revealed and dictated to Mohammed. And the Koran therefore cannot be amended or superceded or changed by any secular democratic process.

That is why Zarkawi and those who believe as he does, whether they approve of his tactics or not, are against "democracy" itself. According to this quite sincere and widespread belief, only an Islamic government is legitimate in the eyes of Allah, and democracy itself, where the ultimate authority to write, amend, and change laws and constitutions resides in the governed--where the popular will can over-ride the strictures of the Koran--is an open door to apostasy.

There can be democratic states with overwhelmingly or majority Muslim populations like Indonesia and Malaysia and even a democratic state that chooses at any given time to adopt Sharia as its legal code, but a state that bases its legitimacy on the Koran rather than the consent of the governed as expressed in an electoral process cannot be a true republic or a democracy.

This is what the so-called "War on Terror" is really about--two widely and sincerely held but incompatible beliefs in the very nature of legitimate governance itself. And given acceptance of the core Islamic postulate, the Islamic concept of legitimacy is just as rigorously legitimate as the democratic one.

So this is a jihad in the strictest Islamic terms, and a jihad does not necessarily have to involve a clash of arms, only a battle of ideas, ideals, and beliefs; a pacifist jihadi is not necessarily a contradiction in terms.

And when George W. Bush declares that his goal is to transform the Middle East into a series of democratic states, what Muslims hear is a declaration of a Western Holy War against the Islamic concept of a legitimate state, a Christian "crusade"--a word that Bush himself has thrown around promiscuously to dire consequences--against the Koran, against the Word of Allah itself. A Holy War to justify imperialist conquest goes back to the original Crusades, the Christian occupation of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian enclave state in what is now Lebanon and parts of Syria.

What is more, the Islamic concept of governmental legitimacy is not that of a series of completely sovereign Islamic nation states, but that of an overall government of the Umma, the Muslim community; a theocratic Caliphate something like Medieval Europe, where Kings themselves were vassals of the Pope, the ultimate authority, both religious and political, as God's spokesman on Earth, from whom all legitimacy flowed.

And this was more or less the situation which pertained during the Golden Age of Islam, which Osama bin Laden and others openly not only seek to restore, but in their theoretical fantasies wish to see extended over the entire world.

This is the political goal of the enemy.

And the "terrorists have a stepwise strategy to realize it: First, eject the American military from Saudi Arabia, already accomplished, leaving the Saudi royal family to its own military and security resources, and by extension drive American forces and influence from the Middle East entire, giving them a freer hand to overthrow individual governments and replace them with Islamic rule.

Second, or simultaneously, overthrow the Saudi and Pakistani governments, replacing the former with an Islamic government of their own and setting up a Pakistani government controlled by sympathetic elements of the military and the intelligence apparatus, of which there are plenty, as witness no less than 11 attempts to assassinate the current military dictator Pervez Musharraf.

Once in control of the Saudi oil revenues, these can be used to buy not only nuclear warheads but delivery systems from an allied and impoverished Pakistan. They will then control a dominating portion of the West's oil supply (and the oil can always be sold to China instead) and they will have their own nuclear umbrella against American invasion, under which they can dominate the Middle East and proceed to establish their new Caliphate.

Collaterally, another goal is to discredit democracy as a system of government in the eyes of the Umma, in Africa, where Islam vies with Christianity, in the Third World in general, economically disadvantaged by the democratic West's "globalization," and even in Europe, particularly in France and to a lesser extent in Germany, where there are large Muslim populations who see themselves as
second-class citizens.

Further, After 9/11, Osama bin Laden openly declared that one of the major goals of the attack was to erode the civil liberties and political freedoms that made American democracy an admired model in so much of the world despite the predatory economic policies of its multinational corporations through "globalization" and the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. To convert the United States into the political "Great Satan" it had not truly been before.

Gorbachev declared that he would do a terrible thing to America. He would deprive it of an enemy. Bin Laden did something worse. He made the United States the enemy of much of the world.

In this his staunchest ally, witting or not, has been George W. Bush.