In the long run the most important point is early in Derb’s essay: on the nature of Arab culture. If there are any readers of VFR who haven’t read the most-revealing book on this subject, I urge them to do so. It’s David Pryce-Jones’s THE CLOSED CIRCLE; AN INTERPRETATION OF THE ARABS. No matter that it was published in 1989; the subject hasn’t changed since then. It explains why the countries that have Arab majorities won’t become constitutional, limited-government polities. It’s more relevant to the Iraq problem than Bernard Lewis’s analyses, in my opinion, because it includes in its purview even those parts of the Arab world, such as Iraq, that haven’t gone in for religious fanaticism.