Until that September 11, 2001, the two men most responsible for popularizing the idea of a clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, were regarded as curiosities by mainstream national security and foreign policy experts. Their Ivy League credentials and access to prestigious publications such as Foreign Affairs, and the edgy radicalism of their theories, guaranteed that they would generate controversy, and they did. But few took their ideas seriously, except for a scattered array of neoconservatives, who, in the 1990s, resided on the fringe themselves. The Lewis-Huntington thesis was hit by a withering salvo of counterattacks from many journalists, academics, and foreign policy gurus.  

Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book The Clash of Civilizations amounted to a neoconservative declaration of war, wrote that the enemy was not the Islamic right, but the religion of the Koran itself:

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.

What followed from Huntington's manifesto, of course, was that the Judeo-Christian world and the Muslim world were locked in a state of permanent cultural war. The terrorists--such as Al Qaeda, which was still taking shape when Huntington's book came out--were not just a gang of fanatics with a political agenda, but the manifestation of a civilizational conflict. Like a modern oracle of Delphi, Huntington suggested that the gods had foreordained the collision, and mere humans could not stop it.

Huntington acknowledged--without mentioning the role of the United States--that Islam had been a potent force against the left during the Cold War. "At one time or another during the Cold War many governments, including those of Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Israel, encouraged and supported Islamists as a counter to communist or hostile nationalist movements," he wrote. "At least until the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states provided massive funding to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist groups in a variety of countries."  But he had a neat explanation of how the alliance between the West and the Islamists unraveled. "The collapse of communism removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each the perceived major threat to the other," he wrote.  "In the 1990s many saw a `civilizational cold war' again developing between Islam and the West."  Huntington, who is not an expert on Islam, observed a "connection between Islam and militarism,"  and he asserted: "Islam has from the start been a religion of the sword and it glorifies military virtues."  Just to make sure that no one could miss his point, he quoted an unnamed U.S. army officer who said, "The southern tier"--i.e., the border between Europe and the Middle East--"is rapidly becoming NATO's new front line."

Huntington quotes his guru on matters Islamic, Bernard Lewis, in order to prove that Islam presents an existential threat to the very survival of the West:

`For almost a thousand years,' Bernard Lewis observes, `from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam.' Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice.

How exactly the weak, impoverished, and fragmented countries of the Middle East and south Asia could "put the survival of the West in doubt" was not explained. But it was a thesis that Bernard Lewis had been refining since the 1950s.

Lewis, a former British intelligence officer and long-time supporter of the Israeli right, has been a propagandist and apologist for imperialism and Israeli expansionism for more than half a century. He first used the term clash of civilizations in 1956, in an article that appeared in the Middle East Journal, in which he endeavored to explain "the present anti-Western mood of the Arab states." Lewis asserted then that Arab anger was not the result of the "Palestine problem," nor was it related to the "struggle against imperialism." Instead, he argued, it was

"something deeper and vaster":

What we are seeing in our time is not less than a clash between civilizations--more specifically, a revolt of the world of Islam against the shattering impact of Western civilization which, since the 18th century, has dislocated and disrupted the old order. ... The resulting anger and frustration are often generalized against Western civilization as a whole.

It was a theme he would return to again and again. By blaming anti-Western feeling in the Arab world on vast historical forces, Lewis absolved the West of its neo-colonial post-World War II oil grab, its support for the creation of a Zionist state on Arab territory, and its ruthless backing of corrupt monarchies in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.  In his classic 1964 book, The Middle East and the West, he repeated his nostrum: "We [must] view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a clash of civilizations."  Lewis explicitly made the point that the United States must not seek to curry favor with the Arabs by pressuring Israel to make peace. "Some speak wistfully of how easy it would all be if only Arab wishes could be met--this being usually interpreted to mean those wishes that can be satisfied at the expense of other parties," i.e., Israel.  Instead, he demanded, the United States should simply abandon the Arabs. "The West should ostentatiously disengage from Arab politics, and in particular, from inter-Arab politics," wrote Lewis. "It should seek to manufacture no further Arab allies."  Why seek alliance with nations whose very culture and religion make them unalterably opposed to Western civilization?

Over several decades, Lewis played a critical role as professor, mentor and guru to two generations of Orientalists, academics, U.S. and British intelligence specialists, think tank denizens, and assorted neoconservatives, while earning the scorn of countless other academic specialists on Islam who considered Lewis hopelessly biased in favor of a Zionist, anti-Muslim point of view. A British Jew born in 1916, Lewis spent five years during World War II as a Middle East operative for British intelligence, and then settled at the University of London.  In 1974 he migrated from London to Princeton, where he developed ties to people who would later lead the fledgling neoconservative movement. "Lewis became [Senator Henry] Jackson's guru, more or less," said Richard Perle,  a former top Pentagon official who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, was the most prominent advocate for war with Iraq in 2003, and who is a long-time acolyte of Lewis's. Lewis also became a regular visitor to the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, where he developed close links to Ariel Sharon.

By the 1980s, Lewis was hobnobbing with top Department of Defense officials. According to Pat Lang, the former DIA official, Bernard Lewis was frequently called down from Princeton to provide tutorials to Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessments, an in-house Pentagon think tank.  Another of Lewis' students was Harold Rhode, a polyglot Middle East expert who went to work in the Pentagon and stayed for more than two decades, serving as Marshall's deputy. Over the past twenty years, Lewis has served as the in-house consultant on Islam and the Middle East to a host of neoconservatives, including Perle, Rhode, and Michael Ledeen. Asked who he drew on for expertise during his tenure as CIA director, James Woolsey says, "We had people come in and give seminars. I remember talking to Bernard Lewis."  

Although Lewis maintained a veneer of academic objectivity, and though many scholars acknowledged Lewis' credentials as a primary-source historian on the history of the Ottoman empire, Lewis abandoned all pretense of academic detachment in the 1990s. In 1998, he officially joined the neocon camp, signing a letter demanding regime change in Iraq from the ad hoc Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, co-signed by Perle, Martin Peretz of The New Republic, and future Bush administration officials, including Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim. He continued to work closely with neoconservative think tanks, and in the period after September 11, 2001, Lewis was ubiquitous, propagating his view that Islam was unalterably opposed to the West. Two weeks after 9/11, Perle invited Lewis and Ahmed Chalabi to speak before the influential Defense Policy Board, inaugurating a two-year effort by neoconservatives to prove a nonexistent link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Chalabi, a friend of Perle's and Lewis's since the 1980s, led an exile Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and Chalabi was responsible for feeding reams of misleading information to U.S. intelligence officers that helped the Bush administration exaggerate the extent of the threat posed to the United States by Iraq.

Less than a month after Lewis and Chalabi's appearance, the Pentagon created a secret, rump intelligence unit led by Wurmser, which later evolved into the Office of Special Plans (OSP). It was organized by Rhode and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. "Rhode is kind of the Mikhail Suslov of the neocon movement," says Lang, referring to the late chief ideologue for the former Soviet Communist party. "He's the theoretician."  It was Rhode and Feith's OSP, under neocon Abram Shulsky, which manufactured false intelligence that blamed Iraq for ties to Al Qaeda. And it was the OSP which created talking-points papers for Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other top Bush administration officials claiming that Iraq had extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, long-range missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and a well-developed nuclear program.  Chalabi's falsified intelligence fed directly into the OSP, from whence it ended up in speeches by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top Bush administration officials. On the eve of the Iraq war, Lewis, who was close to Cheney, had a private dinner with the vice president to discuss plans for the war in Iraq,  and, in 2003, Lewis dedicated his book The Crisis of Islam "To Harold Rhode."