WASHINGTON: On a warm spring day in 1983, I stood across from what had been the seven-storey US embassy in Beirut and watched as rescuers picked through tons of mangled steel , torn concrete and glass shards - the rubble left by the first Muslim suicide bomber to strike an American target. Tenderly, rescuers put bits of bodies - more than 60 were killed in the lunchtime bombing - in small blue plastic bags.

Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Muslim world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.

The stakes in Iraq - for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor - are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies.

The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive 'The Pictures'.

And the costs are not merely the billions from the US treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.

The stakes are instead how the final phase of the 'modern era' plays out. That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Muslim world - ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life.

The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change.

But now, whatever America's good intentions may have been, that historic moment may be lost for a long time to come. Over the past dozen years many factors favoured transformation in the world's most volatile region.

The buzz among students at Tehran University, editorial writers in Beirut and Amman, the leading human rights activist in Cairo, a feminist leader in Rabat, intellectuals in Lahore and teen-age girls in Jakarta has increasingly been about democratic reforms and how to achieve them. New public voices, daring publications, occasionally defiant protests in widely diverse locales gave shape to an energetic, if somewhat disjointed, trend.

Thanks to satellite dishes, shortwave radios and the Internet, Muslims have longingly watched societies from South Africa to Chile to the former Soviet republics shed odious ideologies and repressive regimes. Many haven't wanted to be left behind; they've wanted much of what we've wanted for them.

And despite the initial flirtation with fiery versions of political Islam after they emerged a quarter-century ago, Muslims of vastly diverse cultures and languages, in areas stretching from North Africa through the Arab heartland into Asia, ended up rejecting the ideas propagated by Iran's "mullahcracy" in the 1980s and the Taliban's intolerant theocracy in Afghanistan of the 1990s.

The recent patterns of regional change - education, a new middle class and a demographic bulge heavily favouring the young generation - have pointed societies in another direction. In the end, the quest for genuine freedoms either left many militant movements on the margins or forced them to join the mainstream.

In a globalizing world, Muslims are also increasingly conscious of common ground with the West, often more than Americans. The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us.

Their jihad - or struggle - has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.

Whether the US-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the modern era's final phase.

The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Muslim world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. For now, America's ways have been discredited for many beyond America's borders.

With emotions so raw and expectations unquenched, I am now anxious about what will fill the vacuum. Disillusioned by what they see as the failure of the world's superpower to provide protections, Muslim societies in search of change may turn inward for sustenance and direction. There are few alternatives.

Their own governments - several of them America's allies - have banned, imprisoned or exiled genuine opposition. And that may not only widen the gap with the West, it could also spur an intense clash of civilizations, a prospect I had until very recently rejected. With the shared quest for empowerment, I thought it could be avoided.

The unintended consequence of the Iraq experience could well produce a third generation of militants - who will launch a conflict whose tactics, targets and goals will be even more amorphous.

Their conflict will be more than an intensified or expanded 'war on terrorism'. And, I fear, we'll be groping for a long time to figure out how to counter it - and how to get back to finishing that final chapter of the modern era. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.