CLIVE THE CLAIRVOYANT

Is prescience in the eye of the beholder? You decide. "The Silver Castle," a novel by my favorite literary critic, Clive James, tells the story of a waif from the Bombay slums who dreams of becoming a movie star. Toward the end of the novel -- which, by the way, was published in 1996 -- there's a dinner party at the home of a ravishing actress who has reached the pinnacle of Bollywood success.

Dinner conversation among the film producers and local intelligentsia drifts from Oliver Stone's "JFK" to hero worship to Gandhi and, inevitably, focuses on the future of India. A newspaper editor, who becomes the center of this set piece, then gets into a discussion about western influence with a couple of the producers.

"Surely now we have the greatest opportunity we have ever had," said the first producer. "Secularization. A free market. At last we can grow."

"Secularization," said the editor, "will mean nothing without tolerance. What we want from the West is their tolerance for belief, not their lack of belief. Under the old Empire the British left recruitment for the army to the tribes and castes, and look what happened. The movement towards tolerance was nipped in the bud. With bayonets. And now this new secularization is the biggest threat to tolerance there has ever been."

"How is that?" said the second producer.

"Because it will leave each religion prey to its own fanatics. It will strip each religion of its reasonable people and leave only the mad bombers who really have had only one religion all along. That is fundamentalism. Whose only expression is terror. The biggest threat we face. The great world threat of the next century, and it is already here."

Seems like a bulls-eye to me. Can the paradox of the U.S. dilemma be made any clearer as we try to build a secular Iraqi democracy without unleashing the religious fanatics? Now, with the Pentagon taking lessons from reel life (so it can apply to Baghdad what it learns from a screening of "The Battle of Algiers"), anyone for setting up a Pentagon reading room? Suggestions for titles are welcome.