Paran Balakrishnan: Clashing with the wrong foe

ran.jpg'>MY WORD!Paran Balakrishnan / New Delhi August 28, 2004Is this a Clash of Civilisations raging outside the walls of the Imam Ali Ali mosque in Najaf? Are the steel-helmeted US soldiers and their rag-tag foes picking up where the Crusaders and later the Ottoman armies left off centuries ago?

That would fit the sweeping theories earnestly put forward by Samuel P Huntington, author of the weighty Clash of Civilizations: the Remaking of World Order. The Harvard professor spelt out his extreme beliefs back in 1996, when Osama bin Laden was a name known only to intelligence agents who kept an eye on the Arab world.

The crumbling of the Twin Towers was still five years away when Huntington launched his scathing broadside against the Muslim world. Were his words spookily prescient or were they a tragically lucky hit? Either way, he never minced his words.

He has consistently argued the world