THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: The Hail Mary Pass

On Thursday there will be a regional conference in Egypt to discuss stabilizing Iraq, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will represent the U.S. President Bush should go instead and give this speech:

I want to take this opportunity to speak to the Arab and Muslim nations gathered here today and to the world at large. I begin with a simple message: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I rushed into the invasion of Iraq. I honestly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I was wrong, and I now realize that in unilaterally launching the war the way I did, you all feel that I breached a bond of trust between America and the world. Not only did that alienate you from us, it made us less effective in Iraq. We had too few allies and too little legitimacy. I apologize — sincerely.

I’m most sorry, though, because my bungling of the war has prompted all of us to take our eye off the ball. I messed up the treatment so badly that people have forgotten the patient really does have a disease. Now that I’ve apologized, I hope you will stop fixating on me and look closely at what is happening in your backyard: the forces and pathologies that brought us 9/11 are still there and multiplying.

Friends, we are losing in Iraq. But whom are we losing to? Is it to the Iraqi “Vietcong” — the authentic carriers of Iraqi nationalism? No, it is not. We are being defeated by nihilistic Islamist suicide bombers, who are proliferating across the Muslim world. We are losing to people who blow up mosques, markets, hospital emergency wards and girls’ schools. They don’t even tell us their names, let alone offer a future.

Look at the past two weeks: On Thursday, at least nine Iraqi soldiers were found dead after a suicide car bomber rammed a checkpoint. Two suicide car bombers crashed into a Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Zamar. A day earlier, a suicide bomber killed four policemen in Balad Ruz. Two days earlier, nine U.S. soldiers were killed by a pair of suicide attackers driving garbage trucks packed with explosives. A few days earlier, five bomb attacks killed nearly 200 people in Baghdad. On Monday this week, a suicide bomber blew up a funeral in Khalis, killing at least 30.

That’s 12 suicide bombers in a little over a week. And it’s been like that every month. These suicide jihadists are so hard to defeat because they have no desire to build anything. Their only goal is to make sure that America fails in its effort to bring decent, pluralistic, progressive politics to Iraq. They will kill any number of Muslims to ensure that we fail.

Do not delude yourselves that this is only about Iraq. In March, a suicide bomber blew up an Internet cafe in Morocco, and on April 10 four more suicide bombers struck there. On April 11, a pair of suicide bombers, claimed by Al Qaeda, killed 24 people or more in separate attacks in Algiers. In February, a suicide bomber in Quetta, Pakistan, blew up a courtroom, killing the judge and at least 14 other people — the sixth suicide bombing in that country in a month. Last Friday, Saudi police arrested 172 who they said were jihadists who planned to do things like flying airplanes into oil fields. On Saturday, a suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 28 people while trying to blow up the interior minister.

You may think that I’m more dangerous than Bin Laden and that a strong America is more dangerous than Al Qaeda. You’re wrong. If we are defeated in Iraq, they’ll come after you. They already are. And if we’re defeated in Iraq, you’ll no longer have to contend with a world of too much American power. You’ll have to contend with a world of too little American power. You will not like it.

Don’t let your anger with me blind you to your own interests. You are holding your breath until I turn blue. But I’m not going to turn blue. You are. I want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, but I need you Arab leaders to get off the fence. I know that you fear democracy in Iraq, but the alternative is much worse. If the jihadists win, the Arab world will have no future. I need your help in forging a settlement in Iraq and in denouncing this suicide madness from every mosque and minaret every hour of every day — with no qualifications.

And to Europe, China and Russia, I also say: Get off the fence — I can’t stabilize Iraq without your help. I don’t have the resources. I know I was a jerk in stiff-arming you. Believe me, I’m over it. I’m here to listen to what you want me to do. But unless we — the world of order — all pull together now, the forces of disorder are going to have their way, and there is no wall that will protect you.