An Excerpt From Question and Answer of Condi

9-11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton asked the million dollar question today to National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice:

"There are a lot of very, very fine -- 2 billion Muslims. Most of them, we know, are very fine people. Some don't like us; they hate us. They don't like what modernization does to their culture. They don't like the fact that economic prosperity has passed them by. They don't like some of the policies of the United States government. They don't like the way their own governments treat them.

And I'd like you to elaborate a little bit, if you would, on how we get at the source of the problem. How do we get at this discontent, this dislocation, if you would, across a big swathe of the Islamic world?"

"RICE: I believe very strongly, and the president believes very strongly, that this is really the generational challenge. The kinds of issues that you are addressing have to be addressed, but we're not going to see success on our watch.

We will see some small victories on our watch. One of the most difficult problems in the Middle East is that the United States has been associated for a long time, decades, with a policy that looks the other way on the freedom deficit in the Middle East, that looks the other way at the absence of individual liberties in the Middle East.

And I think that that has tended to alienate us from the populations of the Middle East. And when the president, at White Hall in London, said that that was no longer going to be the stance of the United States, we were expecting more from our friends, we were going to try and engage those in those in those countries who wanted to have a different kind of Middle East, I believe that he was resonating with trends that are there in the Middle East. There are reformist trends in places like Bahrain and Jordan. And recently there was a marvelous conference in Alexandria in Egypt, where reform was actually was on the agenda.

So it's going to be a slow process. We know that the building of democracy is tough. It doesn't come easily. We have our own history. When our Founding Fathers said, We the people, they didn't mean me. It's taken us a while to get to a multiethnic democracy that works.

But if America is avowedly values-centered in its foreign policy, we do better than when we do not stand up for those values.

So I think that it's going to be very hard. It's going to take time.

One of the things that we've been very interested, for instance, in is issues of educational reform in some of these countries. As you know, the madrassas are a big difficulty. I've met, myself, personally two or three times with the Pakistani _ a wonderful woman who's the Pakistani education minister.

We can't do it for them. They have to have it for themselves, but we have to stand for those values.

And over the long run, we will change _ I believe we will change the nature of the Middle East, particularly if there are examples that this can work in the Middle East.

And this is why Iraq is so important. The Iraqi people are struggling to find a way to create a multiethnic democracy that works. And it's going to be hard.

And if we stay with them, and when they succeed, I think we will have made a big change -- they will have made a big change in the middle of the Arab world, and we will be on our way to addressing the source."

The so-called "source" are the hearts and minds of the Arab people. These are people who have been lied to and indoctrinated with hate about our nation's peoples and our values. The fight we encounter in the Middle East will not be won with either guns or butter, but rather in who does the better job -- the U.S. or Al Jazeera -- in persuadiing the "Arab Street" of what's best for them. Modernity or the Stone Age? Because American tolerance for attacks on our homeland will only extend so far -- remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki?