There is no evidence to show that Iraqis were overwhelmingly secular under Saddam. Public opinion polls were banned by his regime. A more reliable indicator is a confidential 2004 poll, the results of which were eventually leaked, conducted for the International Republican Institute (IRI), an offshoot of the U.S. Republican Party. Seven out of 10 Iraqi respondents said that Sharia—i.e., the Islamic canon—should be the "sole basis" of Iraqi law, and the same proportion—70 percent—preferred the idea of having a "religious state," with only 23 percent preferring a "secular state."

The elections to Iraq's transitional Assembly in January 2005, and to the subsequent Parliament, have underlined the veracity of the IRI survey. In the parliamentary poll, the secular Iraqi National List won only 9 percent of the seats and the secular Kurdistan Alliance, 17 percent.

WHY RELIGIOSITY GREW—Egypt is the country where the Muslim Brotherhood, the region's oldest political party, was established in 1928. By inflicting a swift and humiliating defeat on the Egypt of President Abdul Gamal Nasser, who was wedded to Arab socialism, in June 1967, Israel delivered a near-fatal blow to secular Arab nationalism. In their hour of downfall, most Egyptians attributed the Israeli victory to the Jewish devotion to their religion and turned to Islam for their own spiritual succor. Though outlawed, the Muslim Brotherhood began gaining in popularity.

When Anwar Sadat, known for his earlier sympathies for the Brotherhood, succeeded Nasser in 1970, the pressure on the Brotherhood eased. Since then, the failure of Egypt's pro-American president, Hosni Mubarak, to narrow the gap between the rich elite and the impoverished masses has provided the Brotherhood with an environment in which its slogan "Islam is the solution" has acquired increasing appeal.

Taking an overview, it is fair to say that both Arab socialism and American-style capitalism have failed to deliver the goods to the bulk of the Egyptian population, which seems ready to try the Third Way of Islam.

The Palestinian case is altogether different. The 38-year-long military occupation of Palestinian areas by Israel has spawned a politics that has no parallel anywhere else in the Arab world. Because the Palestinian state is not fully formed, ordinary people are able to exercise direct pressure on the leadership. Fatah, the governing party, which has proved corrupt and inept in administering the Palestinian entity, has seen its standing wane. By contrast, Hamas, with its history of providing free social services to the needy, is not tainted by corruption or cronyism. The ruling Fatah movement has suffered from tensions between local leaders and those who spent many years abroad before returning after the 1993 Oslo Accords. The leadership of Hamas is almost wholly local.

As a strategy to turn the Palestinians against Hamas, the sanctions imposed by the Bush administration are proving counter-productive. The Palestinians are blaming Israel and America, not Hamas, for their deepening misery. In the words of Gary Sussman, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University: "When people fight sanctions, it becomes a national project." The suffering public rallies around its government. This is what happened in Iraq in the 1990s under the U.N. sanctions.

ZEROING IN ON IRAQ—Iraq's elected representatives have adopted a constitution that, for all practical purposes, has turned the country into an Islamic republic. An article in the constitution states that Sharia is the fundamental source of Iraqi legislation. Another article says that no Iraqi law shall violate the undisputed principles of Islam. Both Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki and his predecessor, Ibrahim Jaafari, are leaders of the Islamic Daawa Party, committed to establishing an Islamic regime in Iraq.

These salient facts go unmentioned by officials of the Bush administration in Washington and Baghdad. If officials say anything at all about the Iraqi constitution, they express sympathy with the Sunnis' criticism of its federal provisions, which would affect the Sunnis adversely.

It was only after the intervention by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghanistan-born Sunni, that Shiite leaders agreed to a "review" of the constitution's fairness. Once the new cabinet had been installed, on May 20, the Bush administration rushed to mention that Iraq's Parliament would review the constitution within the next four months to address the Sunnis' objections.

Sunnis fear that the existing Kurdistan Autonomous Region (KAR) in the northeast and the incipient Shia Autonomous Region in the south and southeast will garner the revenue from the oilfields existing in these areas, and leave the oil-less Sunni-dominated central and western Iraq penurious. It is unlikely that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, with 130 seats in the 275-member Parliament, will agree to overturn the federal provisions in the constitution.

By now, sectarian or ethnic identity has superseded the Iraqi national identity. The Iraqi Kurds have refused to compromise the KAR's quasi independence to the extent that it is the Kurdish militia that guards Iraq's border with Iran and Turkey, and the regional government refuses to let national troops enter the three provinces constituting the KAR.