I’m catching up after a three-day family wedding bacchanalia (in 90+ degree weather in black tie). Daniel Pipes had a column last week in the Sun decrying Reuel Gerecht’s hypothesis that if radical Islam is the geopolitical problem we face in the Middle East, it is also its own antidote; i.e., if the radicals are allowed to take power, they will so thoroughly alienate their own people that radical Islam will be discredited among Muslims themselves (as we’ve seen in Iran). I’ve been saying this for years, and have seen nothing yet, in Iraq or elsewhere, to make me change my mind. As an article on a slightly different subject in the new issue of The National Interest (not online yet) says, “Wherever religion is closely identified with the state, resentment of the latter almost inevitably comes to include the former.” The risks are obvious, but I see no other way of achieving a lasting solution.