A penetratingly astute observer of Arab politics is Fouad Ajami, an Arab-American of Lebanese origin.

Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, a regular contributor in the media and author of two of the finest books on the Middle East, The Arab Predicament and The Dream Palace of the Arab World.

In a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, Ajami provides a glimpse of post-Saddam politics in the Middle East, which he argues are beginning to move in the direction of freedom and democracy consistent with requirements of the modern world.

This region between the Nile and the Euphrates -- despite past accomplishments and present resources -- came to represent a closed circle, having inwardly collapsed under the tyrannical weight of authoritarian politics.

Ajami quotes a Kuwaiti merchant remarking to him, "George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami in the region" and, hence, shattering from outside the shell of tyranny in Iraq with regional consequences that would not have occurred from the inside.

Iraq's election in January was inevitably contagious, driving fear into the hearts of those who took for granted their right to rule without the consent of their people.

The events in Lebanon now erupting in response to the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri -- popular demonstrations expressing deep desire for freedom and the departure of occupying Syrian forces -- would not have transpired without American presence in the region and post-Saddam Iraq, despite its difficulties, is emerging as an example of new democratic possibilities for the Arab world.

We are now witnessing popular movements flexing their muscles in Syria, preparations for a contested presidential election in Egypt, demands for voting rights for women in Kuwait, Palestinians electing their leader following the demise of Yasser Arafat, and Saudi authorities willing to take first tentative steps toward representative government.

There is the unmistakable sense of a wind of change blowing through the region where, as Ajami writes, venturing "into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country."

But Democrats in the United States of the Howard Dean and John Kerry type -- with their left-wing coalition of the Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky variety, joined by their kissing-cousins in Canada and Europe -- cannot see beyond the smoke of a bloody-minded insurgency bent on preserving the charred remains of tyranny in Iraq and neighbouring countries.

The reason for such close-mindedness is rather simple. It is an effect of lacking in historical perspective.

When Martin Luther famously pinned his 95 theses on the church doors at Wittenberg in October 1517, the rumblings of protest within Roman Catholicism had already begun. Luther's act was a significant moment in events that convulsed Europe for the next two centuries in the struggle known as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; events that created modern Europe.

Similarly, the Arab-Muslim world has now been in the midst of a vast human convulsion with its struggle between reactionary forces resistant to change and those wanting their closed societies to become open to the modern world of democracy.

It will take some more time for this part of the world, for so long repressed primarily from within, to surface from its present convulsions into a relatively peaceful transition into the modern world.

Those bereft of historical perspective, however, will refuse to acknowledge a new, emergent Arab reality whose midwife, ironically, George Bush became by sending American soldiers to overthrow despotism in the same place civilization was born a long time ago.

The cover of this month's Atlantic Monthly has a Chinese sailor glowering at the reader next to a headline which reads, "How we would fight China: the next cold war". Yet, the magazine is one of America's more respectable publications, not generally seen as part of the lunatic fringe. If this is what passes for rational discourse among the American foreign-policy establishment - and there have been many others like it in "serious" journals and newspapers over the past year or so - then God help us.

The author of the article is Robert Kaplan, a minor player in the neoconservative fraternity. In measured, almost academic tones, he discusses the strategy of the coming military confrontation between the US and China as if it were inevitable.

"The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific - and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a US navy and air force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Chinese mainland," he writes. "It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long cold war, with a centre of gravity not in the heart of Europe, but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when marines stormed them in the [second world war]." So explain to us, Mr Kaplan, how is it that, 60 years after the war, the US navy and air force are unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland? He does not, of course. He takes it as read that the natural dividing line between the two navies - of countries separated by 9,600km of ocean - lies about 16km off the Chinese coast. He also takes it as read that the growing power of China must be "contained", as Nato contained Soviet power during the old cold war. And, in these assumptions, he is entirely representative of the people who run US foreign policy these days.

Never mind that the men ruling China are so uncertain of their grip on power that they would not dream of risking military clashes that would interrupt trade and kill the economic growth that keeps the masses quiet. In Mr Kaplan's view, any country that grows strong enough to challenge America's status as the sole superpower is automatically an enemy, and must be contained. "Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive - and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil," he writes. "China will be no exception."

What about America's own emergence as a great power, or Russia's, for that matter? It is just as often the case that a paramount power that is losing ground economically and fears demotion will gamble everything on a war, like the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914. Or, perhaps, the US now.

Few ordinary Americans would knowingly support the remilitarisation of international affairs and the launch of a second cold war merely to preserve America's position as the sole military superpower, but they will never be asked the question in those terms. Instead, they will be warned, by people like Mr Kaplan, of emerging "threats" and told that China must be "deterred". They will not be encouraged to ask: deterred from doing what?

Mr Kaplan is not some fringe lunatic. He is what passes for an intellectual among the neoconservatives who currently dominate American defence and foreign policy, and his ideas are fully shared by them.

But, like most of the people he hangs out with, Mr Kaplan lives in a fantasy world that runs on the rules of the 18th and 19th century great-power game. They understand very little about the realities of the 21st century world beyond the US borders. Mr Kaplan, for example, talks with perfect seriousness about "an ever-expanding European Union [that] becomes a less-than-democratic superstate run in imperious regulatory style by Brussels-based functionaries".

But these people are in charge of US policy now, and there is a significant risk that their fixation on a new cold war with China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

I recently read the international best-seller China, Inc., which discusses the imminent rise of China to superpower and possibly world domineering status. This book has shocked and inspired fear in some, and although I felt it was well researched and engagingly written, it omitted any distractions to this theme.

I have spent the past four years in the mainland teaching and doing business. China a great nation? The system is corrupt at every level and completely opaque. At one point, I almost began to believe that any woman would sell sex for money (in fact, there is a flimsy connection between sex and morality, a result of atheism). Ninety per cent of married men visit hookers regularly and it is common for college girls to spend weekends with businessmen to finance their appetite for fashion. If Mother Teresa was right that abortion represents the death of a woman's soul, what could it mean for China when most women have several abortions?

When I wanted to have prototypes of a furniture sample made at four major furniture factories and not one could follow a blueprint or basic design instructions, I gave up. The "boom" cities are an illusion, with 80 per cent unoccupancy rates in quickly erected buildings that will be condemned in 15 years. Glitzy government shopping malls and boutiques abound, but other than tourists, and shoppers from Hong Kong and Macau in Zhuhai and Shenzhen, no one ever buys anything. It is all for show. Most car production is procured through government purchasing schemes using loans from an insolvent banking system.

If you drink water from any lake, river or well in the mainland it will kill you immediately; water from the tap takes a little longer. And the polluted air is like toxic soup. Owing to the one-child policy and a strong cultural preference for baby boys, up to 100 million men may never find a wife and start a family. Millions of children grow up as pampered "little emperors". Walk down any street in any of the "miracle" cities and you will see the burgeoning hordes of unemployed. You can sense the rage as they seethe at the fat cats driving luxury cars with beautiful women inside dripping expensive jewellery.

Not one person I spoke with openly expressed a view that deviated from the government line. The death penalty is doled out for practically any reason. The glue that holds society together comprises empty promises, fear instilled in people in overt and covert ways, and the aggressive promotion of a blind ultra-nationalism apparently plagiarised from Peronist fascists.

China's recent past has been saturated with misery: foreign exploitation and mass drug addiction, instability and social insecurity, wars, civil wars, foreign invasion, disastrous social experiments leading to epic famines, collective insanity, and now disillusionment as communist ideology is replaced with wealth mania and the cruellest form of capitalism. China is a messed-up country lacking a soul whose Godforsaken masses are being exploited by avaricious western and Japanese business interests and its own pathologically insecure, prestige- and power-hungry aristocratic elite. Don't fear China. Pray for it.

LAYNE ZEILER, Tsim Sha Tsui