Here’s another excerpt from John Kerry’s book A Call To Service that presents an approach to fighting terror and building democracy in the Middle East that’s unlike anything I’ve heard either candidate endorse on the campaign trail :

To appreciate fully the imperative of diplomacy in today’s world requires a deeper sense of the nature and source of the threat we face. While we must remain determined to defeat terrorism, it isn’t only terrorism we are fighting, it’s also the beliefs that motivate terrorists and the conditions that make those beliefs possible.

If you look at the countries stretching from Morocco through the Middle East and beyond — broadly speaking, the western Muslim world — what you see is a civilization under extraordinary political, economic, and cultural stress. According to Freedom House, there are no full-fledged democracies among the sixteen Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa. Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar are making progress, but Israel remains the only Middle Eastern democracy. Political and economic participation by Arab women remains the lowest in the world. More than half of Arab women are still illiterate. Public education in most of these nations is still tainted by distortions and ethnic and religious hatreds.

These countries are also among the most economically isolated in the world, with very little trade and investment and Little income apart from the oil royalties that flow to the ruling elites. They generally don’t trade with one another; most of them don’t trade with Israel, the Middle East’s economic dynamo; and they don’t trade much with the rest of the world, other than in oil. Since 1980 the share of the world trade held by the fifty-seven member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has fallen from 15 percent to just 4 percent.
. . .
With a landscape marked by political oppression, economic stagnation, staggering unemployment levels, lack of education, poverty, refusal to integrate women into the workforce, and rapid population growth, is it any wonder these Islamic countries are recruiting grounds for terrorists?

While we must obviously continue to hunt down and destroy terrorist networks harbored in the Middle East and demand cooperation from every regime in the region, we need more than a one-dimensional war on terror. We must engage in a smarter, more comprehensive, and more far-sighted strategy for modernizing the greater Middle East. It’s no more ambitious — and no less necessary — a task than the rebuilding of Europe that we undertook at the end of World War II.

Reopening Middle Eastern economies is an especially urgent priority. If we aren’t proactive about stimulating nonpetroleum trade with and within the region, the situation is likely to get worse, not better. For one thing, existing U.S. trade preferences for countries in Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and South Africa may divert and diminish what little trade we already have in the Middle East.

We should act quickly to expand the kinds of tariff-free trade policy we extended in the African Growth and Opportunity Act — which doubled manufacturing exports to the United States during the last three years — to the greater Middle East. To qualify, these countries should agree to drop their economic boycott of Israel, end all support for terrorists, and respect basic worker rights and environmental principles, as Jordan did in the bilateral trade agreement with the United States negotiated by the Clinton administration. That United States-Jordan agreement expanded Jordanian exports to the United States from sixteen million dollars to four hundred million dollars almost overnight, creating forty thousand jobs. It would be wonderful to see that kind of economic growth flourish next door in a peaceful and senate Palestinian state that would send goods, not suicide bombers, to Israel.
. . .
As majority-Islamic countries outside the Middle East have demonstrated, there’s no inherent conflict between faith in Islam and growth in trade. In Europe, Turkey, Albania, and Bosnia have actively sought economic integration with the West. In Southeast Asia, other majority-Muslim nations like Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia are large exporters and active members of the World Trade Organization.

The urgency of building a modern economy in Iraq should provide the impetus for a regionwide effort, led by the United States and supported by international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, to liberalize regimes and reform economies. Our long-term goal must be to help these countries build senate institutions, their best chance for peace and prosperity.

While I’m sure this approach would probably enrage Kerry’s supporters on the far-left, it’s heartening to see that at least one candidate realizes that the sexism, poverty, political oppression, and lack of education are making the scourge of Islamist terror much, much worse. This sure as hell beats the current administration’s plan to keep blowing people up and hope the problem goes away.