This is a war of civilizations all right. Not one chosen by the supine and corrupt monarchies and republics that make up the world of Islam. But a war thrust on them by a conquering, macho United States.

And what are the hapless targets of this war, the stars of the Islamic firmament, doing to meet this challenge? Either lining up with the US, bowing ever deeper to the ground to appease it, or, where they have any misgivings about US policy, too afraid to speak up.

The Spaniards can displease the Americans. So can the French and Germans but not those actually at the receiving end of this new crusade. Total bankruptcy, moral and intellectual, has distinguished the world of Islam in other epochs, especially throughout the 20th century, but perhaps never so much as at present.

Israel murders Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and what do Muslim potentates do? They just squirm uncomfortably because each act of Israeli aggression does nothing so much as shed blinding light on their impotence.

George Bush, in a dramatic policy reversal, gives Ariel Sharon the go-ahead to permanently annex key portions of the West Bank and negates the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland. Not content with these laurels, Israel ratchets up the provocation and assassinates Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi, Yassin's successor as Hamas leader.

Egypt's President Mubarak says, "Today there is hatred of the Americans like never before in the region." Jordan's King Abdullah "postpones" a meeting with George Bush. Saudi Arabia expresses surprise at Bush's concessions to Israel. That's about it.

Bitterness and rage may surge through the Muslim street but not through the palaces of Muslim potentates, the distance between ruler and ruled never being more profound. Parts of the media - Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya - are doing their job, correctly reporting what's going on. If the Americans had their way they would shut them down.

Don't for a second be taken in by the notion that Washington loses sleep over democracy's absence in the Muslim world. No absence suits the US finer because, from Morocco to Indonesia (barring only Malaysia), it keeps a prized collection of incompetent and unrepresentative rulers in power, most of them - although, mercifully, not all - pliant instruments of America's will.

This mutually beneficial arrangement protects the status quo, keeping the toothless incompetents in power and, at the same time, ensuring the flow of cheap (Arab) oil to the West.

The Middle East's biggest fiction is that the US is an honest broker between Arabs and Israelis. Muslim rulers know this to be fiction yet feign ignorance because fecklessness makes them incapable of searching for alternatives.

Osama bin Laden has been turned into a bogey, given more credit than he deserves. Between them Bush and Sharon have been far more effective than Al Qaeda in procreating violence and terror.

Osama bin Laden recruits those who are inclined to use terror as a political weapon. But the philosophy of violence flows not from Osama's preaching but from US highhandedness and Israeli perversity. Osama bin Laden and his comrades exploit a situation already existing. They haven't created this situation. The prize for that goes to the US and Israel.

Before the killings of Yassin and Rantissi Palestinian illusionists still clung to the hope that the US-sponsored roadmap held out the prospect of a viable Palestinian homeland.

After these killings even moderate Palestinians are convinced that it is useless engaging in a dialogue with someone like Sharon because Palestinian moderation, far from eliciting the same response, makes Israel more rigid and overbearing. Now Hamas doesn't need anyone's sermons to recruit more followers to its cause.

A more cynical and self-serving bunch, more shortsighted, too, than George Bush's inner coterie of neo-con warriors is hard to imagine. The invasion of Iraq conceived and pushed by them had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or terrorism. Or WMD, the great excuse for going to war. It was a pure exercise in imperial muscle-flexing aimed at fortifying American hegemony and reshaping the Middle East closer to Israeli wishes.

Iraq was also driven by the fantasy that its invasion would be a cakewalk. Partly this turned out to be true. For it took the US military three weeks to reach Baghdad and destroy the Baathist regime.

The subsequent occupation, however, has turned into a disaster, kindling memories of Vietnam. Far from reinforcing American hegemony, the Iraq adventure has exposed, in a way few people could have imagined, the limits of American power.

Horace observed long ago that brute force "bereft of reason falls by its own weight". It also moves the gods to anger. Precisely this is what we see unfolding in Iraq: brute force floundering about without the benefit of reason and good sense. And contributing to its own defeat and downfall.

America is consoling itself with lies and cliches dating back to the Vietnam conflict. It has "liberated" Iraq and is bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Those resisting it are "terrorists". The so-called Sunni triangle is a hotbed of Saddam era diehards and holdouts. Moqtada Al-Sadr represents only a minority of the Shia population.

None of these pathetic excuses diminishes the fact that the Americans are being hit from all sides and are safe nowhere, not even in Baghdad's Green Zone where Proconsul Bremer is holed up in his beleaguered headquarters? If this is what a minority is doing to the American occupation army, what would happen if the majority takes up arms?

This may not be worse than Vietnam but it is more significant than Vietnam. In Vietnam the US was at its innocent best, convinced it was stemming the tide of communist expansion. Convinced also that Vietnam's fall to communism would have a domino effect in South-East Asia and further afield. The belief may have been misplaced but there was no doubting the righteousness.

Iraq, by contrast, was mischief and unholy motives writ large on America's heart from the start. The Americans weren't invading Iraq to make Iraq and the wider Middle East safe from Osama bin Laden. They were using the war against terrorism as an excuse to mount a war unconnected with terrorism.

Where Vietnam was about moral certainty, Iraq was about imperial hegemony, oil and Israel. Vietnam became evil. Iraq was evil from the start, power lured by arrogance into enacting an imperial drama in a 21st century setting.

If Iraq had indeed turned out to be a cakewalk, world peace would have been threatened. For, the war party in Washington made no secret of its ambitions. After Iraq, next target Syria, then Iran.

In secret cabals the neo-cons even spoke of regime change in Saudi Arabia, some thanks for half a century of unstinting Saudi cooperation. After the fall of communism there seemed to be no limits to American arrogance.

That is, not until Iraq. For once the adjective 'heroic' is not misplaced. Truly heroic, the resistance of the Iraqi people is teaching the US a hard end-of-history lesson, that it can't have everything its way.

It's also a reminder to the rest of the world that there is a time and place for the use of overwhelming force. Divorced from reason and good sense, it can be resisted. And indeed must be resisted.

Iraq's fight is thus not its fight alone. It is not a struggle confined to Sunnis or Shias or even Muslims as a whole. It is a beacon of hope and light for all those who believe that America's ugly face, that once shone bright in Vietnam, is bad for the US itself and a threat to the rest of the world. It is also another vindication of the Maoist dictum that all imperialists are paper tigers.

If I were younger, or possessed of more spirit, I would leave my desk and, without caring two hoots for Osama bin Laden, go and fight in Iraq.

Email: ayaz.amir@dawn.com.