Imagine a land where bombs explode almost daily and children are killed by terrorists without conscience. On one side we find a people who suffered through the horror of slave-labor death camps; on the other side a people who suffered through a terrible war -- which they began when what they felt was their property was seized from them -- a terrible defeat and (for them) a terrible occupation. Now imagine those same peoples 15 years later, living side by side, peacefully.

This sounds like a pipe dream: The Middle East could never be this way, we think. But we do not need to imagine this land.

We are living in it.

One century after America's Civil War, the descendants of slaves daily faced the twin terrors of homicide and arson. Yet only 15 years after the rise of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the back of segregation and neo-Confederate violence had been broken.

Can Palestinians likewise mount a successful, nonviolent movement toward peaceful co-existence with their former adversaries? In short, can history repeat itself?

How expensive would it be for us if it did not? America spends an estimated $3 billion a year in support of Israel. This support is justified because Israel is a democracy and our main ally in the region. Yet we also spend $2 billion supporting Israel's nondemocratic neighbor, Egypt. Billions more have been spent maintaining bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and now Iraq. We justify these expenditures by surrendering to the serpentine excuses of realpolitik: We need the support of key figures and families in the region, we say, and so we have to work with them. Just as we once said of the Dixiecrats and other segregationist politicians in the American South.

We can transform this paradigm, as we did then, and at little cost to ourselves. We can utilize the experience of the civil rights movement -- which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows all too well (her childhood friend was killed by an improvised explosive device in segregated Birmingham) -- to assist Palestinians in their stride toward peace. What we need is a Muslim Martin Luther King.

Many believe that leaders are born, not made, but programs to cultivate leadership and promote good will among men have been used successfully for generations. Oxford's Rhodes Scholarship is one such example. Its idea is to bring the best and brightest from the British Commonwealth (and beyond) to build strong ties among English-speaking peoples, and stronger ties to England. Founder Cecil Rhodes, pirate though he was, wished for there to be "an understanding between the three great powers" -- America, Britain and Germany -- that "will render war impossible."

What we recommend is a sister program for the Middle East. One could hold a competition for the 30 best young orators in the Palestinian diaspora. (King first gained prominence at age 26, and the Rhodes Scholarship is only for men and women under that age.) Send them to an American institution such as Stanford University, where they could study for the doctorate under Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project and historian of the civil rights movement and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Then, after they have spent several years studying the African American experience with special courses and lecturers, focusing especially on the efficacy of nonviolent direct action, send them back to their native lands.

This is no program of indoctrination. Indeed, it would be detrimental if American spy organizations were to infiltrate or interfere with the King scholars in any way: the scholars would lose all credibility at home. Just as King spoke out against Southern injustice (and American injustice in Vietnam), the King scholars must be free to criticize America and, it is to be expected, the occupation. They would not be able to lead the Arab street otherwise.

By bringing young leaders from the region, we would avoid disasters like the U.S. Army's flirtation with mathematician Ahmed Chalabi, a man who had no real roots in Iraq, but whom America still wished to enthrone as a new shah. The Chalabi experiment blew up in America's face like a roadside bomb.

The King scholarship program might cost only $2 million per year -- an endowment of perhaps $20 million could put it on its feet indefinitely. And, coupled with the application of "soft power," the export of American culture -- notably, hip-hop music, which serves both as a mechanism for promoting intercultural understanding and as a nonviolent channel for youthful aggression -- one could reasonably expect to see the flower of peace bloom in the desert of despair.

Two specific aspects of the civil rights movement would be most effective in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: first, the proper utilization of legal instruments as a way to wage a nonviolent campaign; second, the utilization of mosques to mobilize a nonviolent grassroots struggle. Mosques in the West Bank and Gaza can be used to promote peace over violence and terrorism, and the African American experience can teach Palestinians how to do this.

In "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, at one point two men stand outside a gate. One seeks to enter; the other seeks to prevent him from entering. Both men wait there for their entire lives. Though one is guard and the other the one guarded, both men are prisoners.

In game theory, the branch of mathematics made famous by "A Beautiful Mind," there is a paradox called the Prisoners' Dilemma. Each of two prisoners may believe it is in his best interests to harm the other, but one can mathematically prove that both men would be better off if they cooperated. A King scholars program might help us resolve the prisoners' dilemma that is the Middle East.

This is a utopian dream, perhaps. But another man dreamed, once, and we all know what became of that man's dream.

We are living it.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush stressed the importance of improving math education. He proposed to "train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math."

But where will these teachers come from? And will the training of teachers be sufficient to increase the number of students choosing math and science careers? And why does all this matter?

Because mathematics is the foundation of the natural sciences. It is no coincidence that Isaac Newton, the man who formulated the law of gravitational attraction that revolutionized our understanding of the universe, was also the man who popularized the calculus. And the natural sciences, however pure, are what give us airplanes, cable TV and the Internet.

In the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment, a test that measures math literacy, American 15-year-olds performed worse than their peers in 23 countries, as well as those in Hong Kong. It's not hard to see why. According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 40 percent of the nation's middle school math teachers do not have the equivalent of an undergraduate minor in math. The average starting salary of a teacher is only $30,000, whereas the average starting salary for a recent college graduate in computer science or engineering is $50,000.

Short of following the British, who have proposed paying experienced math teachers more than $100,000, with a guaranteed minimum of $70,000, where will we find a way to attract the thousands of teachers George Bush wants?

New York State initiated an innovative program to bring teachers from Jamaica for two or four years to teach in New York schools. Jamaica, a developing nation where one U.S. dollar equals 65 Jamaican dollars, is nonetheless a stable, English-speaking nation with an unbroken democratic tradition; it stands poised to beat the United States in establishing the world's first Institute for Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism. When teachers for the New York program were recruited on the campus of the University of the West Indies, recruiters found more experienced math and science teachers than they ever dreamed they would.

But you can have all the teachers in the world and still not inspire kids to learn math. My friend Autumn e-mailed me about her nephew, Joshua: "He's upset because he's asked several of the math teachers why math is important or what are certain formulas used for -- there has to be a use, correct?"

Autumn told her nephew about my work in counterterrorism and for the television crime drama "Numb3rs." Autumn reported, "He's told his math teachers about you as well, and about the show 'Numb3rs.' He's informing them that through something called lattice theory you are managing to fight terrorists -- all with math."

Mathematics is art, and should be appreciated for its beauty, not simply for its utility. But we cannot expect 11 year-olds to cherish totally order-disconnected topological spaces as much as professional mathematicians do.

As I first proposed in January 2005, television shows like "Numb3rs" (or "Medium") -- where the main characters are mathematicians -- could work with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to show kids how math is really used; the council and Texas Instruments are now working together to use "Numb3rs" to promote math literacy in schools.

Another way to inspire kids is to relate mathematics to something they see every day. In order to excite students and draw funding to his school, school superintendent Ronald Ross of Roosevelt, N.Y., has begun looking into the idea of creating a curriculum involving math and counterterrorism. What kinds of topics would students learn?

The opening line of the Oscar-winning movie "A Beautiful Mind" is "Mathematicians won the war." During World War II, the mathematics underlying cryptography played an important role in military planning. Winston Churchill admired Alan Turing, the mathematician who had mastered the German codes, recognizing him as the man who had perhaps made the single greatest individual contribution to defeating Hitler.

At Los Alamos, the lab that built the atomic bomb, Cliff Joslyn uses lattice theory to mine data drawn from thousands of reports of terrorist-related activity to discover patterns and relationships that were previously in shadow.

Lattice theoretical methods developed at MIT tell us the probability that we have disabled a terrorist cell, based on how many men we have taken out and what rank they hold in the organization. Lauren McGough, a Massachusetts high school student, tested the accuracy of this model by getting her classmates to pretend they were terrorists, passing orders down a fictitious chain of command, essentially confirming what the theory predicts.

High school students could learn algebra, trigonometry, calculus and logic while also learning concrete applications involving homeland security. No longer would students yawn and ask, "What is math good for?" Beauty could defeat both terror and boredom.

Whatever you may think of the State of the Union address, when it comes to supporting math education, we should all see pi to pi. President Bush is correct when he says that mathematics education in America must improve if the United States is to stay economically competitive, but the stakes are much higher than that. During the Cold War, the United States would not have tolerated a military gap between itself and its adversaries. Yet today, with 61 percent of all U.S. doctorates in math going to foreigners (15 percent to Chinese), we readily accept a "math gap."

Dollar for dollar, the best defense against our adversaries' weapons of mass destruction may be our allies in the Americas, armed with weapons of math instruction.

Improving math education is not merely a smart idea. It is a matter of national security. Algebra is one revolutionary Islamic concept we cannot afford to neglect or ignore.

Noah Feldman

In looking at the brewing civil war between the two groups in Iraq, it's easy to assume that the cause is ancient hatred. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the overwhelming majority of Iraqi history, Sunnis and Shi'ites have lived peacefully side by side, and numerous Iraqis are the children of mixed marriages. Instead we are witnessing in Iraq what occurs when government collapses and there is no state around capable of guaranteeing personal security.

What do you do when your family is in peril and you cannot turn to the government for protection? The answer is that you will take security wherever you can get it. You need to find some group that will be capable of keeping you safe, and that group had better be one that can count on your loyalty just as you can count on its protection. If you are a member of my ethnic, racial or religious group, then we share at least some basic bond, which may be enough to ensure our loyalty to one another. I need some assurance that you will have my back, and identity is better than nothing.

Sunnis and Shi'ites may find themselves joining militias or supporting denomination-based political parties even if they are not particularly pious and would much prefer not to. Something similar happened in the former Yugoslavia when its government collapsed with the fall of communism and nothing replaced it. Ethnic activists - call them identity entrepreneurs - will always form the core of the new militia. These radicals will emphasize symbols, like al-Askari mosque that was blown up last week in Iraq, and hope that followers will react by strengthening their commitments to the group itself.

Is it possible to break the cycle of violence that gets under way when identity groups move toward civil war? One answer is for an outside force to impose a solution. The killing did not stop in Bosnia or Kosovo until Western powers showed they were willing to bomb. But this approach is not viable in Iraq, where U.S. bombs came first and civil strife has followed. Instead the only way out of the violence is for Iraqis to realize that they have more to gain by negotiating a settlement between their groups than they do by allowing a full-blown brothers' war to break out.

Vali Nasr Author The Shia Revival (forthcoming)

What lies at the heart of the sectarian violence in Iraq is not so much religious dispute as it is a very secular competition for power and prominence in the new Iraq. Iraq is not all that different from Northern Ireland or Bosnia, where religion paraded as ethnicity and became a vehicle for communal rivalries. In the vacuum of power left by the fall of Saddam Hussein, the game of numbers has favored Shi'as, who are 60% of the population. It is for this reason that they wholeheartedly embraced democracy. Disgruntled Sunnis, on the other hand, vested their fortunes in boycott and violence, hoping that as spoilers, they would gain leverage in negotiating over the future.

Few in the West recognized the depth of either the Shi'a anger at the Saddam regime or the Sunni rage born of loss of power. There is a strong sense of Iraqi identity among both Shi'as and Sunnis, but as strong allegiance to sect and ethnicity in every election has shown, a shared notion of what Iraqi identity means and how each community sees the future of Iraq is fast disappearing. As happened in Bosnia, in Iraq mixed marriages and shared memory of coexistence will not be enough to stop internecine violence.

Shi'as embraced the political process that the U.S. set in place in 2003 in the hope that it would guarantee their security and serve their interests. There is indication now that many Shi'as are having second thoughts. Already overstretched in facing the Sunni insurgency, the U.S. can hardly afford losing the Shi'a as well. If tensions escalate to a full-blown civil war, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria may all join the war to protect their co-sectarians and to scramble for pieces of a failed Iraq.

Pulling Iraq back from the brink will be difficult. Building a strong central government and an effective security force will help. The challenge is to get them up and running before events on the ground pass a point of no return.

James D. Fearon

By any reasonable definition, there has been a civil war in progress in Iraq at least since the Coalition Provisional Authority formally handed over authority to the Iraqis in 2004. A civil war is a violent conflict within a country fought between organized groups seeking to compel a major change in government policies or to take control of the center or a region. The insurgents in Iraq target the U.S. military, but they are also fighting against the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to think that if the U.S. suddenly withdrew, the insurgents would not continue to fight to control or shape the government.

When we hear talk about incipient civil war in Iraq, the fear is of an escalation of the current insurgency into a much bigger war. Analysts may have in mind something like the U.S. Civil War, with Sunni and Shi'ite armies fighting each other across well-defined fronts. Or they may imagine a sudden spasm of massive communal conflict and ethnic cleansing along the lines of Bosnia or Rwanda. Neither scenario is all that likely, although bouts of violent ethnic cleansing are certainly possible in a few parts of the country, especially Kirkuk.

My guess would be that as the insurgency continues to create insecurity, sectarian militias will continue to grow in power and influence. They will increasingly supply local security, but in the form of protection rackets that extort as they protect. They will clash with each other over territory and control of revenue sources. Since the Sunnis remain highly disorganized, some of these local fights may initially be intra-Shi'ite. But in the absence of effective political incorporation and protection from national police and army units - which are heavily infiltrated by Shi'ite militias - Sunnis will gradually form a patchwork of militias. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood conflict and violence will increase. Think Lebanon.

Juan Cole

If you look at the ethnic conflicts and street demonstrations during Iraq's modern history, it is remarkable how few have involved Shi'ites fighting Sunnis. During the colonial era, Iraqis were united by their opposition to the British occupation. Sunni and Shi'ite tribes cooperated in rebelling against British rule, and were only put down with a bombing campaign in 1920 that killed 9,000. In 1941 mobs targeted Iraq's small Jewish population; Jews had been a valued part of the Iraqi national fabric but were accused, unfairly, of being pro-colonial. After World War II, much of the violence in Iraq was fueled by issues of class. In 1948 slum dwellers and railway and oil workers revolted against a government treaty with Britain. In 1959, Arab nationalists assassinated Communist Party members, while mobs in Mosul and Kirkuk attacked and killed rich businessmen and landowners.

Iraqi Muslims have not all along been severely divided by religious sect. There have been many instances of strong cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites. Other social divides have led to mob violence in the past, but Iraqis have overcome them to re-establish national unity. It remains to be seen whether they can accomplish this feat again.