Since September 11, Thomas Friedman has been in fine form. In his New York Times column, he has composed a letter for George W. Bush to send to Osama bin Laden, urged Vladimir Putin to enlist the Russian mafia to rub him out and berated those who would use the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to raise questions about US foreign policy. In an October 5 column headlined, “Yes, but What?” Friedman wrote, “One can only be amazed at the ease with which some people abroad and at campus teach-ins now tell us what motivated the terrorists. Guess what? The terrorists didn’t leave an explanatory note. Because their deed was their note: We want to destroy America, starting with its military and financial centers.” Friedman reserved special scorn for those seeking to use the attacks to renew the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: “Have you ever seen Osama bin Laden say, ‘I just want to see a smaller Israel in its pre-1967 borders,’ or ‘I have no problem with America, it just needs to have a lower cultural and military profile in the Muslim world’? These terrorists aren’t out for a new kind of coexistence with us. They are out for our nonexistence. None of this seems to have seeped into the ‘Yes, but…’ crowd, whose most prominent ‘Yes, but’ states: This terrorist act would never have happened if America hadn’t been so supportive of Israel.”

Friedman is hardly alone in pushing this line. In Newsweek, for instance, Jonathan Alter blasted “Blame America Firsters” who have “repeatedly breached” the line “between explaining terrorism and rationalizing it.” Jim Hoagland, in the Washington Post, warned that the United States should not be inhibited from using “coercive power” in the Middle East by “excessive fear of reaction in the so-called ‘Arab street.'” The New Republic has repeatedly inveighed against what it sees as the capitulationism of the Yes, but-ers, and Christopher Hitchens in these pages kicked up a storm by arguing against “rationalization” of terror. “Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan?” he asked.

Against this backdrop, I was fascinated to read “Why Do They Hate Us?” Fareed Zakaria’s cover story in the October 15 Newsweek. Zakaria is a blue-chip member of the foreign policy establishment. A native of India who earned a BA from Yale and a PhD from Harvard, he served from 1993 to 2000 as managing editor of Foreign Affairs. A sort of junior Kissinger, Zakaria has never hidden his disdain for those naïve souls who do not share his hardheaded balance-of-power worldview. I recall attending a discussion group several years ago, when the Clinton Administration was still debating whether to intervene in Bosnia; Zakaria expressed world-weary impatience with those who argued for humanitarian intervention and nation-building.

I was thus surprised by his 7,000-word take on the current crisis. Zakaria devotes the first part of his article to an astute dissection of the failures of the Arab world. Today, he observed, almost every Arab country “is less free than it was 30 years ago.” Analyzing the causes of that decline, Zakaria described how young Arab men, often better educated than their parents, leave their villages in search of work and “arrive in noisy, crowded cities like Cairo, Beirut and Damascus.” Here, “they see great disparities of wealth and the disorienting effects of modernity; most unsettlingly, they see women, unveiled and in public places, taking buses, eating in cafes and working alongside them.” Surrounded by the shiny products of globalization but unable to consume them, and denied all outlets for venting their frustrations, these alienated young men have fed a resurgence of Islam.

That, in turn, has sparked a wave of what he calls “raw anti-Americanism.” In exploring the roots of this, Zakaria harshly scrutinizes US policies in the region. As recently as the 1960s, he writes, America was widely admired in the Arab world. Since then, however, “the daily exposure to Israel’s iron-fisted rule over the occupied territories has turned this into the great cause of the Arab–and indeed the broader Islamic–world. Elsewhere, they look at American policy in the region as cynically geared to America’s oil interests, supporting thugs and tyrants without any hesitation. Finally, the bombing and isolation of Iraq have become fodder for daily attacks on the United States.” Zakaria especially faults the United States for its “sins of omission,” including its failure to press Arab regimes to open up. In response to the current crisis, he goes on, the United States should adopt a long-term strategy on three fronts–a military effort, aimed at the “total destruction of Al Qaeda”; a political effort, stressing multilateralism, cooperation with the United Nations and a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and a cultural strategy seeking to help Islam “enter the modern world,” in part by pressing Muslim nations to reform.

This seems a far cry from Henry Kissinger. And, toward the end of his piece, Zakaria acknowledges his changing views: “I have myself been skeptical of nation-building in places where our interests were unclear and it seemed unlikely that we would stay the course.” In the current instance, he added, “stable political development is the key to reducing our single greatest security threat. We have no option but to get back into the nation-building business.”

Zakaria’s interest in nation-building and a peace settlement in the Middle East does not mean he’s rationalizing terrorism. On the contrary, he fully supports the current campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. His position shows that re-examining the US role in the region does not preclude taking a tough stand on terrorism. In fact, it can be argued that adjusting US policies in the Middle East–for instance, by resolving the Palestinian problem–could further the campaign against bin Laden by making it easier for Washington to keep its coalition together.

At least one other conservative has made an about-face similar to Zakaria’s. George Bush’s recent endorsement of nation-building in Afghanistan and his expressions of support for a Palestinian state show that he readily accepts the need to reassess US policies in the Islamic world. To the extent that there is a “Yes, but…” crowd, the President seems to be its leading member.