If Arab citizens were to ask the questions, they would place the accusers -- the West -- in the seat of the accused.

The peoples of the Arab and Western worlds must engage in a real dialogue to attain an understanding of the human issues which are of mutual interest to both.

As recent efforts in Bosnia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and now Iraq attest, state building has become a growth industry.

Even the Bush administration, once highly resistant to US involvement in such missions, is now willing to engage in state-building projects based on the recognition that failed states and rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction pose the main security threats to the international community.

This article examines several cases in which major powers and international institutions have sought to prop up or rebuild a weak or collapsed state.

In the short run, the Second Gulf War has been a great success for United States arms.

Critics charge that, over medium and longer time frames, President Bush's new National Security Strategy and its call for preventive military action to forestall "rogue states" that seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction risk embroiling the United States in an open-ended series of adventures that could overstretch the nation's capabilities and ultimately undermine the very national security that the strategy is supposed to safeguard.

Deep political fissures have opened in the West.

Contending visions of the future have arisen on each side of the Atlantic.

America, driven by its outsize military and economic strength, has developed a unipolar, hegemonic vision of the future. Europe pursues its own self-sustaining union of nation states that points towards a pluralist world order that is multipolar, balanced and multilateral.

The future of the West, and perhaps of the world, will depend on whether these two visions can accommodate each other sufficiently to establish a harmonious balance.

By cleverly deploying both its hard power and its sensitive side, the European Union has become more effective -- and more attractive -- than the United States on the catwalk of diplomatic clout.

With the transfer of power to a new interim Iraqi government on June 28, the political phase of US occupation came to an abrupt end.

The transfer marked an urgently needed, and in some ways hopeful, new departure for Iraq. But it did not erase, or even much ease at first, the most pressing problems confronting that beleaguered country: endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society.

Some of these problems may have been inevitable consequences of the war to topple Saddam Hussein. But Iraq today falls far short of what the Bush administration promised. As a result of a long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition occupation has left Iraq in far worse shape than it need have and has diminished the long-term prospects of democracy there. Iraqis, Americans, and other foreigners continue to be killed.