But the Cold War went differently in the Islamic world. In Afghanistan, U.S.-armed mujahideen drove out the Soviets, but also begat the Taliban and al-Qaida, groups quite different from Poland's Solidarity.

Even after U.S. forces threw the Taliban from power and established an Afghan democracy, a man named Abdul Rahman was threatened with prosecution and execution for the crime of converting to Christianity. He fled Afghanistan -- for Rome.

In nations where Islam is the dominant religion, conversion remains a one-way street. Non-Muslims may convert to Islam, but Muslims may not convert to any other religion. Freedom of conscience, the very core of liberty, is not merely denied, it can be a capital offense.

Nonetheless, President Bush's policy holds that the long-term key to countering the threat of fundamentalist Islam is to import our secular democratic political processes to the Islamic world -- as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq. In defense of this policy, he has ridiculed those who express doubts that these secular political processes alone can transform those cultures.

"We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare," Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union Address. "Yet it is mistaken and condescending to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government."

Did someone produce a National Intelligence Estimate -- like the one on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- advising the president this was so?

When President Bush met Pope Benedict last week, they discussed the fate of Iraq's Chaldean rite Catholics. Targeted by Muslim terrorists and unprotected by Iraq's Islamist -- yet democratically elected -- government, Chaldeans are fleeing a land where their ancestors kept the faith for 2,000 years.

In the clash of civilizations, the current strategy has the wrong side retreating.