History teaches us that an entire nation or group of people can suffer from some dangerous delusions and often pay a terrible price for it. One need only cast a look back at the last century when Germans believed they were the “Master Race” and the Japanese believed their emperor was a living god and the conquest of Asia was their destiny.

For the span of more than a generation, Russians believed that Communism was the perfect economic and social system. Millions of them died in Soviet gulags as the result. Millions more have died in Red China thanks to its adoption of this evil system.

Now we are experiencing the mass delusion of Middle Eastern Arabs and some of their fellow Muslims around the world that Islam’s destiny is to dominate and rule the entire world. Despite a long history of defeat and despotism, fundamentalist Islam now poses the greatest threat to freedom worldwide.

In the wake of the latest terror bombing, we must ask, who do Middle Eastern Arabs blame? The answer is America and the Jews.

In his book, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq, its author, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, provides a vivid look into the mind of the Middle Eastern Arabs who compose the core of al Qaeda. It explains a great deal about why 9-11 occurred and why America has literally been forced to exert its military power in that region of the world against those who are waging a religious war -- a Jihad -- in the name of Islam.

Ahmed, a British-born author of Bangladeshi origin, is described as “a human rights activist, political analyst, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development.” His previous book was The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001. His latest book is published by New Society Publishers, a Canadian publisher, primarily of books on extremist environmental issues.

Ahmed has long been involved in Islamic affairs and is a former researcher at the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, a non-governmental organization.

Let us examine, however briefly, some of his views. He begins by saying, “Such an analysis, of course, is not an attempt to justify such appalling terrorism -- but simply to scientifically discover the political, economic and historic policies on the part of the United States and the West that may have cultivated the extreme psychological grievances that inspire terrorism.” Thus, neatly, Amed ignores Islam’s central theme that it must dominate the world with the Koran’s seventh century belief system. Instead, he shifts the blame for the Arab Islamic psyche to the actions of the West.

Ignoring fanatical, fundamentalist Islamism, his book asserts that the Middle East’s long history of religious intolerance, total lack of human rights, and now its Islamist Jihad, are really America’s “pretext of fighting against international terrorism” and is “in reality” its attempt “to expand and consolidate its global pre-eminence in accordance with longstanding strategies that have been contemplated and elaborated over a period of decades.” Great Britain’s “process of decolonization” was, in Ahmed’s view, really “covert colonialism” or simply “neo-colonialism.”

Moreover, the entire half of the last century, when America and its allies stood its ground against the Soviet Union and international Communism, was merely the expression of its need “to manufacture a global threat that would provide justification for military interventions designed to expand the US empire.”  In short, the Cold War that ended when the Soviet Union collapsed, was not about its threat to freedom, “but the crushing of popular, indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment of US control over strategic regions.”

Thus, “the international terrorist threat, following on from the 11 September terrorist attacks, is being used to justify the US drive ‘to rule the world,’ implementing plans and strategies that were formulated quite independently (i.e., long before those attacks).”

Little attention is given to the reasons for “those attacks” which began in the late 1970s when Iranian Islamists overthrew the Shah and took US diplomats hostage for 444 days, nor any of the subsequent attacks on our embassies and military personnel around the world, culminating with the destruction of more than 3,000 lives on 9-11. Apparently, none of those attacks have anything to do with our decision to invade Afghanistan to eliminate the Taliban or Iraq to rid the region of its worst dictator. Apparently, Libya’s decision to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, after acknowledging its role in the bombing of a Pan Am commercial jet in 1988, is simply another example of the US intention to rule the world.

I cite this to provide an essential insight to the “Arab” mind. In its worldview, nothing that has occurred in the Middle East since the end of the Ottoman Empire after WWI has anything to do with its endemic despotism, lack of human rights, lack of progress in the provision of education, freedom, or the development of an economic structure based on anything other than oil. Islam is never blamed for any of this and Islam is the primary reason for all of it.

Let it be said that, yes, the British and French did carve up the Middle East following WWI, creating new nations by simply drawing lines on the map convenient to their colonial intentions. The existence of Middle Eastern oil, then and now a great prize, had much to do with this. Even though Ahmed acknowledges that the Middle East is home to some of “the most repressive and undemocratic” nations in the world, this is not attributed to Islam, but rather a CIA objective that “established close working relationships” with “regimes from Morocco and Jordan to Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

Never mind that the US was unable to protect the Shah of Iran from being overthrow by radical Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who, in turn, established their own repressive and undemocratic regime. Nor that it has been able to find any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only now is the US government reluctantly acknowledging that Saudi Arabia has been financing and advancing the most extreme form of Islam, Wahhabism, and is responsible for much of the terror extant in the world.

Our alleged goal of world domination or at least that of the Middle East doesn’t appear to have been very successful. Indeed, a measure of its failure is the fact that we have had to expend billions of dollars to put our military in harm’s way to end the repressive regime in Iraq and rebuild that nation. Americans, never a patient people, cannot wait to pull our troops out of there, but we will be there for a long time to come. By the end of this book’s shoddy analysis, the author has launched into a series of fanciful conspiracy scenarios about the US and Israel.

Did the US support the House of Saud or dictators like Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran in the past? Yes. Did we have a choice at the time? No. Did the United Nations do everything in its power to keep Saddam in power? Yes. Did France, Germany, and Russia do the same? Yes.

I have written that the era of an American Empire has begun and, in this, Ahmed would surely agree. What he does not see, nor the millions of the Middle East and other Muslims around the world, is that it has been forced upon us because we have endured decades of their failure (and their attacks) to embrace the modern world and its values.

We did not invade Iraq until after it attacked Kuwait. We did not invade Afghanistan until after 9-11. We did not invade Iraq until after years of United Nations resolutions failed to bring about cooperation in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Was Iraq intent on being a nuclear power? Yes. Did it have WMDs? Yes. It used them during its eight-year war with Iran and on the Kurds and other Iraqis. Are the Iraqis better off without Saddam in power? Yes. Would Iran and Syria benefit from a regime change? Yes.

If you read Ahmed’s book, you will find an apologia for Saddam and others throughout the Middle East based entirely on the theory that control of its oil demonstrates the United States conspired to bring about his war on Kuwait and other calamities too numerous to cite.

This isn’t history. This is the endemic paranoia of the author and millions of Middle Eastern and other Muslims. It is upon this fantasy upon which the terrorism aimed at America and its allies is based. It is a very dangerous fantasy with very real consequences if it is not utterly destroyed.

Just as Communism and National Socialism proved to be a failure and the self-delusion of nations such as Germany and Japan brought about their destruction, the madness of fundamentalist Islam is driving the events of this new century and will continue until it is defeated. This isn’t a conspiracy. It is a defense of western civilization and of freedom.

Alan Caruba is the author of Warning Signs, published by Merril Press. His weekly commentaries are posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.