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should permit and religious duty entail. In simplest terms, many Muslims resent occupation by armed infidels.
    Resolving that disagreement—and by extension repairing America’s negative image in the Islamic world—poses monumental challenges. An obvious first step might be to stop engaging in behavior that Muslims find offensive, like stationing infidels in their midst. Yet for members of a national security elite committed to the proposition that positioning American troops on foreign soil solves problems, acknowledging that such deployments may actually exacerbate them requires stores of honesty and self-awareness they do not possess. It’s like asking a boxing fan to acknowledge that the “sweet science” is no science at all but an artifact of primordial savagery.
    The substantial numbers of vocal Americans who do not themselves buy the ideological argument deployed to justify U.S. intervention in the Islamic world—that our conception of freedom (including religious freedom) is ultimately compatible with theirs—encourage Muslims to reach precisely the same conclusion. In that regard, the supporters of Jerry Boykin and the supporters of Osama bin Laden are of a like mind. Together, they ensure that further reliance on armed force as the favorite tool in the toolbox of U.S. policy will only compound the errors that contributed to 9/11 itself and have marred the post-9/11 era.
    GEOGRAPHY: INVENTING THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST
    During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States twice intervened in ongoing European wars, dispatching its citizen-soldiers to prevent Germany from dominating that continent. Today, with war in Europe all but unimaginable, the United States acquiesces in a defanged Germany moving inexorably toward a first-among-equals position within the European Union.
    During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States twice sent its citizen-soldiers to fight in East Asia, first to prevent a communist takeover of South Korea and subsequently to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Neither of these wars proved popular. So beginning in the 1970s, the United States opted to accommodate rather than oppose the major East Asian communist power, the People’s Republic of China. At least for a time, this proved very popular indeed with many American entrepreneurs and most American consumers.
    Beginning in 1980, however, Washington’s decades-long preoccupation with Europe and East Asia began to give way. With the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in January of that year, the Persian Gulf took its place alongside the Fulda Gap and the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a place that mattered. Imperceptibly at first, but then with increasing speed over the course of the next decade, the U.S. strategic center of gravity shifted away from the twin poles of Western Europe and East Asia and toward the Greater Middle East (GME).
    Religion and culture rather than traditional geopolitics determine the GME’s boundaries. The region is nothing if not expansive. Extending from western Africa to the southern Philippines, it stretches across eleven time zones and encompasses several dozen countries, each containing a Muslim majority or a large (and invariably restive) Muslim minority.
    The region derived its original strategic significance from the presence of valuable resources (primarily but not exclusively oil) and the crucial transit routes (sea-lanes and pipelines) necessary to transport those resources once extracted. Although competition among great and middle-sized powers first drew in the United States, well before 9/11 Washington had found new grounds for considering the GME important. Resources remained a key consideration, but so did the perception that the region had become an incubator of radicalism and a source of instability. Violence joined oil as the GME’s principal export.
    In response, beginning with the Carter administration, the United States embarked on a series of