THERE IS SOME IRONY, though not of the pleasant sort, in the fact that last week's suicide bombing in Riyadh occurred shortly after it was announced that the remaining American troops would be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia. This move was designed to remove one of the grievances held by Al-Qaeda and its ilk. But Washington seemed to overlook the fact that no matter what happens with the troops, 40,000 American civilians remain in the country.

Perhaps these, too, can be evacuated (though only at the cost of crippling the Saudi monarchy). But what about the Americans in Kuwait? Or Indonesia? Or, for that matter, Britain? Pretty much all of the estimated 3.8m Americans living abroad are inviting targets for terrorism. So are the 291m at home.

There is nothing that the US and its allies can do to mollify Islamist terrorists.

Their fundamental objection is not to this or that policy; it is to the very existence of a modern, secular West, whose leading champion is the United States.

Since appeasement won't work, the West must seek victory. But how? The obvious, if ambitious, answer lies in transforming the Middle East, the breeding ground of this particular brand of savagery. And that is precisely what the Bush administration has set out to do.

In the administration's view, we are in a war, and, while a few battles (Afghanistan, Iraq) have been won, the conflict is far from finished. This is not a war like the second world war that will be won entirely on the battlefield.

The first and most pressing priority is to develop an alternative to the dictatorships that paralyze development in the Arab world. Iraq presents the best opportunity to achieve that goal--but only if the occupation proves as effective as the war that preceded it.

So far, the outlook is far from positive. The Bush administration did astoundingly little planning for the post-war environment. The result is violence and chaos. To its credit, the administration fairly quickly recognized that things were off course and brought in the tough-talking former diplomat Paul Bremer to replace the soft- spoken former general Jay Garner as viceroy.

But tangled lines of authority remain a problem: Bremer promised last Tuesday that U.S. troops would start shooting looters, only to be contradicted the next day by U.S. generals. This is symptomatic of a larger problem: the American military's deep reluctance to undertake peacekeeping, which it views as sissy's work.

American generals complain that they don't have enough troops to police Iraq even though they have more than 160,000 allied soldiers, including 45,000 in Baghdad.

Contrast this with the heyday of empire, when there were never more than 79,000 British soldiers to guard all of India, which is 10 times bigger than Iraq.

Yet even as the coalition struggles to transform Iraq, it cannot lose sight of its neighbors. Iran and Syria are two of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the world and both are said to be acquiring weapons of mass destruction--chemicals and germs in the case of Syria; nukes, chemicals and germs in the case of Iran.