updated + some minor corrections

Reza - as noted, I have some reservations about Berman too, but they're quite tangential to his basic analysis - his suggestion that the cultural metastasis of Revelations is the basis of poly-local totalitarian irruptions makes a lot of sense to me.
Could you be more specific about your doubts?

For anyone interested, Blogger Michael Totten (http://www.michaeltotten.com) is an example of a contemporary Bermanite commenting on current events (perhaps Roger L Simon is another). The position has a lot in common with 'neoconservatism' properly understood (i.e. not a million miles from 'Truman Democrats').

No... I accept the idea in its entirety (i.e. the heart of your suggestion about Berman) but an example of doubt about few passages:

>>>> Berman: “The United States ought to act prudently in the Middle East and everywhere else; but no amount of prudence will forestall that kind of hostility. And this should not be news. For the radical nationalist and Islamist movements are not, as I say, anything new. Movements of that sort are a reality of modern life. They are the echo that comes bouncing back from the noise made by liberal progress.”

At the surface, such a statement IS surely correct. But:
It’s crucial to ask, at this point, is the Islamist movement a reality of modern life or is Berman too blind to realize that Islam has been always this kind of military insurgency from its time of emergence not to gain an utopia purged of minorities (it is itself a first class minority industry) but a progressive movement towards annihilation of all utopias. An aged but still fresh wound palpitating rapidly and now is about to open. It has been precisely programmed to introduce all manifests of idolatry (even belief which is a necessary process to latch onto the monotheistic God or monotheistic totalitarianism) to the Unlife of War or Ghiamat which is not a Revelation-based type of Apocalypse. Does the Persian empire was a liberalist society that Arabs wiped out in an unbelievably short time? (read Hashem-e Razi’s take on the Sasanians) Was Europe a free society that Arabs ceaselessly tried to un-root. Contemporary Islamism is merely a progressed highly-promoted line of the original islamic militarism. We can never separate Islam from its militaristic insurgency. For other politics which perceive the world through mutual affordance (liberalistic type of communication? or the so-called slogan of "I/we am/are open to everything" i.e. economical openness) such a xeno-insurgency is equal to the annihilation of their economical openness (which they paranoiacally associate to the survival of their collectivities and individuals) so what is the solution? [1] engineering a fully functional Liberalism to afford this propagating omega-desert (anti-desertification techniques at the edge of a Sahrasia) or if the first option failed, [2] awakening the military and the same time the victimized face of liberalism. To this point is liberalism trying to block or domesticate a current / polytics that is older than itself (we saw that it is connected to an unfathomably ancient infested germ-cell of monotheism – read Holocaust of Freedom: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004414.html) that is to say, repressing (via liberalistic politics: a pure irony) something whose sole purpose is an ungraspable generosity to attach everything to itself in its journey to the unlife of war or the other way around?

islamism = a nationalistic movement; is Wahhabism a nationalistic movement? (again see: http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004053.html) Surely this is the common belief of the crowd both on the left and the right ... this is why they are so easily lured to Islamic mega-machinery of Xerodrome and assemble what should be assembled (the Gog-Magog Axis?)

Reza - couldn't have asked for a more provocative response, or a more persuasive one.
The new problem this leaves me with is how to articulate the Apocalyptic oecumenism Berman traces all the way to Qutb with the autonomous tradition of Jihad you remind us of - but sure you'll have some tips here ;)

PS. Actually this problem, which has never lucidly condensed for me before, seems like it occupies a hugely strategic place in 'WoT theory' (where 'Bermanites' and [what i'll call for now] 'Huntingtonians' are clearly talking past each other on the nature of the struggle)