Whether it is the Israeli, sorry the Israel, Lobby, the Cheney Gang or Obama's new "smart power" team, all of the above are interventionists no matter how you slice it. All too are playing a great game that is hurting a whole lot of people (including themselves) that they are sadly miscalculating.

Cole talks about engagement and many of the comments I have seen do not lose sight of the fact that engagement can definitely take the form of soft or hard power. Historically, with our love and propensity for weapons, the US, along with the prompting of others (Cheney and the lobby), likes the hard stuff.

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Thanks to Saskia Sassen for her canny comments.

Her idea of a fluid and world-spanning frontier where the US encounters the Muslim world has a great deal to recommend it. I was struck when I first read about the US colonization of the Philippines how much it was an extension of the Old West. Many of the same army units involved in the Indian wars, many of the political figures concerned with the situation at the Western frontier, ended up in Manila. The first major US military encounter with Muslim fighters in modern history was there. Psy-ops against Muslim opponents using humiliation and pork products were pioneered then and later forgotten. When George W. Bush spoke of how he envied the US troops in Afghanistan the "romance" of their endeavor, you wonder if he was also thinking of the Old West and the games of his childhood (as Tom Engelhardt suggested)..

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As I was reading not only the post but also some items in Cole's book it struck me that we are seeing a new frontier emerge in the encounter (not clash!!) of the US and the larger muslim world. Let me say that this is not the language Cole uses. This is me working off some of his history of the present.

I want to emphasize the formation of a frontier zone -a no man's land where the rules of engagement are not established, and where those who interact may bring very different notions about rules of engagement. Each historical frontier is specific -whether the "Far West" of the old Americas, or my argument that today's global cities are a post-colonial frontier space. And so is this emergent frontier zone between the US and the Muslim world, a frontier that spans the globe, involving yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and other critical countries in the US "War against Terror", and all kinds of other countries who have participated in one way or another in the fighting of the last several years. But this frontier space also consists of thick localizations in cities and neighborhoods in the US, and in several European countries, and beyond.

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There is something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the question of Zionist influence in American politics that, if you bring it up, dominates the discussion ever after. I stand by my theory of an unprecedented alliance of the Cheney oil interests with the Neoconservatives in getting up the Iraq War. I wonder if Lee Raymond being at the American Enterprise Institute isn't part of a similar phenomenon. But anyway, it is a couple of pages in the book. Doubters should please read the footnotes carefully.

So, mine is a book of nearly 300 pages, and while it does advert to such issues, it isn't about that but rather NATO (including US) engagement with the Muslim world. In fact, one rationale for not spending so much time on Israel/Palestine is that they are not a NATO sphere of operation.

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I'm going to order Juan Cole's book today. I have the typical American understanding of the Muslim world --pretty small--and admire the engagement and seriousness that Cole has brought to this issue again and again. That's why I'm addicted to his blog.

But let's talk about the Israel lobby and the Iraq War. Reading MJ's synopsis, I find Cole's view unpersuasive. I don't think the oil companies had any interest in the Iraq War. Saudi Arabia didn't want it. Just ask Chas Freeman, the former ambassador, who vehemently opposed the war. Realists hated this war. John Mearsheimer was for the Gulf War out of an American interest that included oil, Saudi Arabia was for that war. Both were against the Iraq war.

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As I wrote earlier, Juan Cole's "Engaging the Muslim World" is one assumption-transforming book.

Take the Iraq war. There are two schools of thought. One says that the Cheney oil gang manipulated us into Iraq to get their hands on the oil forever. The other argues that the Feith/Perle neocon crowd did it to take out Israel's powerful enemy.

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Unless you have a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies -- and maybe even if you do -- you will learn from Dr. Cole's book.

Essentially, Cole visits each area of Muslim-Western conflict and explains (1) how we, as Americans, probably see it and (2) why and how we are wrong.

And, the sad truth it, that rubric works. I know considerably less about the Muslim world than I think I do. And most of what I do "know" is based on propaganda. In short, we Americans view the Muslim world entirely from our own point of view. Every nation, government, insurgency or movement within Islam is appraised based on its respective attitude toward America (and Israel).

Are they with us or against us? Even liberals (like myself) tend to view the Muslim world that way. And, surprise of surprises, that approach produces distortions.

Think of the hard-headed types who went gaga over Qadaffi because he promised to drop his (probably nonexistent or rudimentary) weapons program and desist from backing anti-American terrorists. As soon as he did that, we all loved him and to hell with all the innocent Americans he killed on Pan Am 103.

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I, for one, welcome Cole's book. It talks about engaging people and understanding them for who they are not who we believe them to be. There are plenty of people that feel Americans are not the principled people we think ourselves to be mostly because our government is implementing policy in parts of the world where they don't care to do their homework therefore the implications for the people are highly destabilizing. See Afghanistan.

At the beginning of his term, President Obama declared that he was ready to engage the world. He should be looking to people like Cole to help him understand the nuances and implications of rhetoric, postures and policies his Administration is proposing to implement. Denigrating anyone is usually counterproductive and this type of approach, which the Administration seems to be vacillating with toward Iran, will only create more apprehension on their part causing what Cole calls "American Anxiety."

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My new book is a series of case studies in US and NATO relations with a Muslim country or movement, and I feel vindicated that I chose well. I talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which are in the headlines as the book appears in bookstores. These areas in particular pose dilemmas for the Obama administration, and I have a lot to say about how we got where we are and how we might get out of the serial morasses bequeathed us by eight years of Bush-Cheney.

I believe that the United States and its NATO allies are destined to have more and more to do with the Muslim world over the coming decades. Some estimates of world population growth suggest that it will level off about 2050 at 9 billion or so. Nearly a third of humankind at that point may well be Muslim (the proportion is more like one-sixth to one-fifth today). Muslims will be the labor pool of the 21st century. And while we all wish that we could wean ourselves from fossil fuels in only ten years, likely a majority of our energy will still be being generated by them in 2050. The deepest known reserves of petroleum and natural gas are in Muslim-majority regions such as the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. As the shallower reserves elsewhere run dry, or as the populations of those countries with limited reserves begin using these resources themselves, industrialized nations will become even more intimately intertwined with the Muslim producers. Ironically, these hydrocarbon producers may also be the ones who have the capital to partner in trying to move to solar energy, the only real solution to the crisis (and one that should be attractive to the Muslim world, which has a disproportionate amount of sunlight and deserts).

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Escalation in Afghanistan, drawdown in Iraq, instability in Pakistan, dialogue with Iran; relations between the United States and the Muslim World are at a height of complexity and intensity. This week at Book Club, we will be joined by Juan Cole who will be discussing his new book Engaging the Muslim World. Cole hashes out where we are, where we've been, and what the future could like in relations between the the United States and the Muslim World. Juan Cole is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of the blog Informed Comment.

He will be joined by Patricia DeGennaro, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute; Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University; Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and MJ Rosenberg, regular Cafe contributor.