Before the United States stomps around the Muslim and Arab world any more, we should review some old history.

The historian Joseph Ward Swain ended his story of The Ancient World (1950) with the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Within a decade, the forces of Islam "conquered Syria, Palestine, Persia, and Egypt," he wrote, not stopping "until they reached the frontiers of India and China in the East and the Atlantic in the West."

There are lessons here.

First, to talk glibly of "Western culture" vs. that of Islam is to repress the knowledge that medieval Arab civilization was, as described by Swain, "one of the basic elements in the composition of western culture."

Second, European colonialism of the 19th century reasserted control by "a small aristocracy of Europeans and Europeanized Orientals [sic]" over what had been independent peoples, and people with the glorious past of the Empire of the Arabs, and more recent glories.

The direct colonial control of the 19th century was thrown off in the 20th. Indirect, neocolonial control will be resented, and foreign armies - especially if perceived as crusading, Christian armies - on the soil of Arabs or Islam will be resented greatly (and Jewish forces as well).

The first Arab/Muslim conquerors probably weren't particularly fanatical: They showed a high degree of religious tolerance. Jihadists in the 21st century are likely, for many reasons, to be more rigorous and thorough.

Intolerant varieties of Islam have developed and lately have spread. Globalization produces a pool of what Eric Hoffer in 1951 called "The Potential Converts" to mass movements, what he called The True Believer and defined as a "man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause."

People with a glorious past and hope for a great future do not take well to repeated humiliation. The more successful the U.S. military is in Muslim lands like Afghanistan and Iraq, the more resentment, and the greater the possibility of the explosion of modern "Orientals" against yet another round of invaders from their west.

This time, though, any jihads and crusades will be in a world hospitable to fanaticism and armed to the teeth - including nuclear weapons.

Some American humility would not only be a virtue, but a good idea for survival.

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Richard D. Erlich is a professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

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