There’s a quote from former President Bill Clinton in today’s New York Times that pretty much explains every presidential election from 1968 on. Here it is: “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right”. The one exception came in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, but of course in 1980 the electorate showed him to be the exception that proves the rule (and showed it with a vengeance). Lots of insecurity out there from way back.

I’ve been reading some of Thomas Friedman’s columns in the Times lately. Not bad. He focuses a lot on the Muslim world, as a lot of people have since Sept. 11, 2001. In one column, he wrote a mock letter from George W. Bush to leaders of the Muslim world, saying that if they don’t start discovering the social benefits of free speech, critical inquiry, women’s rights, representational government and limitation of authority, there is going to be a war between our civilizations. Good liberal that I am, I really don’t want to admit that he’s right. I hate to agree with this, but unfortunately I do. In another column, Friedman sees some hope that there will yet be a “Muslim Reformation” that will unlock Islam from the darkness that seems to have befallen a once great religious and cultural tradition. He focuses on the student protest movements now going on in Iran.

About all we can do is to hope that the vehement efforts to crush these protests will spread their sparks to Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Africa, Pakistan and Indonesia. Paraphrasing Friedman, Al Qaeda is another tumor from the cancer that now wracks the world of Islam. We in the West are forced to fight its symptoms, but its only cure must come from within. Let’s hope that our leaders spend almost as much effort in supporting the cure as in trying to fight the symptoms. A civilizational war won’t do anyone any good.