By Tom Plate

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair came calling on President Bush, America's foremost Iraq war ally raised with Washington the tender issue of repairing badly damaged relations with America's old-Europe friends.

That's not bad advice at all, of course. The views and indeed friendship of Paris and Bonn are important to have, especially over the long run.

But had it been the prime minister of Malaysia or the president of Indonesia showing up at Camp David last week, our Texas Methodist president would have been exposed to a profoundly different perspective.

For living in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, not to mention Tehran and Cairo, are a lot of devout Muslims.

Across the region, the followers of Allah are extremely potent domestic political factors.

This fact creates a religious dimension to this war even though that's the furthest thing from the mind of the invading coalition. Unwittingly, however, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has stepped into centuries of roiling history involving clashes between East and West. And so the worry in Asia, especially among America's supporters, is that the Bush administration may have saddled itself with a lose-lose strategy.

To lose the war to Saddam, of course, would be unthinkable; but victory inevitably will be twisted by Muslim radicals — hard-core fundamentalists or ultra-conservative revivalists, not to mention venomous terrorist groups — to make the case that colonialism has returned to their neighborhood in force and with a vengeance.

The unwanted consequence of that propaganda line could be to vault Islam's worst elements into positions of power and influence, leaving the vast middle ground of moderate and reformist Islam behind in the dust. The American occupation of Iraq, no matter how short-lived, would be rhetorically book-ended with the Israeli occupation of Palestine for incendiary political effect.

An Islam more or less united against the United States would be a force far more awesome than Iraq, even on Saddam's worst day. Already fiery speeches in mosques from Egypt to Pakistan are calling for a jihad.

Such Islamic reverberations could trigger corresponding tremors in the United States, where Islam is perhaps the country's fastest-growing religion, soon to eclipse Judaism in numbers. The Islamic community has been cooperating responsibly with the FBI in fighting the domestic war on terrorism and reaching out to Christian religions. Even so, it is continually the target of ethnic profiling and hate crimes, more than ever now as emotions over the war heat up.

Defusing a potential Islamic bomb of worldwide anti-U.S. hatred is as important as locating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That can be done only if Bush himself takes the lead, as he did poignantly but briefly a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, when he directly addressed the Islamic Center in Washington. With evident feeling, the president praised the Islamic community's contributions to American life and excoriated perpetrators of anti-Islamic hate.

The remedy to the rise of anti-U.S. fundamentalism is not to lose the war to Iraq, of course — but to win the peace that will follow. This means America must do everything possible not to alienate the hearts and minds of Islam.

Diplomatically, winning back Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta is as important as mending fences with Bonn and Paris.

Domestically, America must be munificent as well as meticulous in its dealings with its 6 million or so Muslims. The Blair vision covers only part of the globe.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.