OPINION: In the summer of 2002, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, issued a stern warning to the BBC: a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East".
As I wrote at the time: "He's missing the point: That's the reason it's such a great idea."
I thought about Mr Moussa a lot this past week. I was invited to speak at the United States Naval Academy's foreign affairs conference, a great honour for a foreigner. I wasn't the star attraction - that was Condoleezza Rice - and I was merely a warm-up act, like the unfortunate Irish tenor who opened for Elvis when my dad saw him at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1956.
Anyway, I was struck by a phrase in Dr Rice's address that I don't believe I've heard her use before. She was talking about the fourth plane on September 11th, Flight 93, the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania en route to destroy either the Capitol or the White House. If it had reached the latter, that would have been the "money shot" that day, the centre of US power reduced to rubble.
What happened on 9/11, said Dr Rice, was an attempt to "decapitate us". If not for quirks of flight scheduling and al-Qaeda personnel management, the headlines would have included "The vice-president is still among the missing, presumed dead" or - if they'd got really lucky - that the presidency had passed to the president pro tem of the Senate, octogenarian West Virginia Democrat, porkmeister and former Klansman Robert Byrd.
In other words, if you're wondering why this administration's approach to terrorism is so focused on regime change, it's because the terrorists came so close to changing America's regime. They've since managed to change Spain's. So why should the traffic be all one way? About two weeks after 9/11, I came to the conclusion that almost anything was better than Mr Moussa's much-vaunted "stability": the fetishisation of stability was a big part of the problem.
Falling for the Moussa line would give us another 25 years of the ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and Hamas, another 40 of the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, another 70 of Saudi Wahhabism. Even another 20 years of Mubarak doesn't have anything to commend it. All "stability" means is that the most malign Middle Eastern tyranny - Saudi Arabia - is also the wealthiest, and thus able to export its toxins around the world via the madrassahs it's built in Pakistan, South Asia, the Balkans, and North America.
Washington apparently reached the same conclusion - that anything was better than the status quo. Or as Thomas Friedman put it in the New York Times this weekend: "President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen Middle East chessboard up in the air." That's why Mr Moussa is so discombobulated. The Arab League (set up in a typically devious move by the British which, just as typically, backfired on them) was the pre-eminent body of regional stability. Its most recent meeting, scheduled to be held in Tunis, had to be scrapped because of irreconcilable divisions between the old-school thug regimes and the more enlightened members who wanted better relations with America and Britain.
Now it's Chris Patten and the Eurocrats' turn to be discombobulated. In supporting Ariel Sharon's planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, President Bush said last week it was time to recognise "realities on the ground" and "unrealistic" to expect a return to the armistice lines of 1949.
What this means is that, after half a century of formal neutrality on the issue, the US has stated the obvious: the "sensitive issue" of the Palestinian "right of return" is "sensitive" mainly because it's a lot of hooey that's never going to happen.
Tough, but that's the reality on the ground. If 55 years doesn't sound a long time to you, that's the entire history of the Republic of Ireland. Since Mo Mowlam has become fond of parallels between the Irish question and Islamic terrorism, look at it this way: imagine if every time the Northern Ireland "peace process" got going, London insisted that the South's return to dominion status within the Commonwealth had to be on the table.
I've never been to Gaza but I have mooched around the West Bank and, compared to such nascent nations as Slovenia or East Timor, it's all but impossible to detect evidence of any plausible nationalist movement. Everywhere you go, you see the glorification of the martyrdom movement and the Jew-killing movement, and evidently those are such a hit that "Palestinian nationalism" has withered in their wake, except insofar as, when all the Jews are gone, what's left will by default be "Palestinian".
Ariel Sharon has decided that one cannot negotiate with a void, a nullity - and even sentimental European Yasserphiles might, in their more honest moments, acknowledge that the only way the Palestinians are ever going to get a state is if they're cut out of the process. So the Israelis have built their wall, and what's left over on the other side will either be a new state, the present decayed Arafatist squat, or an ever more frustrated self-detonation academy. But it will be up to the Palestinians to choose, because they'll be the ones living with the consequences.
Bush has gone along with Sharon because it accords with his post-9/11 assessment of the Middle East: the biggest gamble can't be worse than Mr Moussa's "stability". Indeed, the Israelis' new Hamas Assassination Of The Month programme usefully clarifies the bottom line: a high rotation of thugs is better than the same thug, decade in, decade out.
Poor Mr Rantissi, killed this weekend, seems unlikely to get the glowing send-off from European obituarists they gave to his predecessor.
In Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria and elsewhere, the old Middle East is dying, and what replaces it can only be better.