Corruption

Radical Islam, I think, has been able to sustain itself because of the corruption of Arab governments. If the people trust - at least modestly - their governments, I imagine, it would be pretty easy to quell the surge of Fascist radicals. But because so many countries, Saddam's Iraq, Syria, Palestinian Authorities, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are essentially illegitimate and don't have the trust of the citizenry, Radicalism is able to fester and play off of widespread grievences. This is the problem with "containment" as a policy as opposed to "regime change."

Iraq is the test case. If the new Iraqi government is perceived as a) illegitimate or b) impotent we will again see the rise of fundamentalism. Right now, it seems to me to be mostly impotent. But some of the Sunnis still believe the government to be illegitimate, as well.

There's an interesting article I linked to before from Foreign Affairs that argues we need to solve the "political" problem of a communal civil war before we'll be able to resolve the security problem. That is, we need to get the Sunnis to feel as though we are not siding with the Shiite and Kurds and that the new Iraqi government will not be used to exact revenge for years of Sunni domination. The argument goes that we actually don't need to "win" hearts and minds (old Vietnam language, relevant to a people's ideological civil war), but in fact, merely need to help set up a government that adequately balances power amongst the factions such that each faction agrees that committing to a stable government is more of a benefit than duking it out to see who can control the central government.

We should not allow any single faction to have too much support or get too cocky with respect to their abilities to WIN a civil war and be able to reasonably guarantee that a new government will not be used as a tool to marginalize a sect.

Difficult, not impossible.