Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term "detente". Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word "moderates" to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.
I agree with Yamani that calling the likes of the Saudis "moderate" is a subversion of the term and quite simply contradicts with reality. However, I disagree with the notion that there is anything new about this term. Since the early 80s, when the US decided to sell AWACS to the Saudis, this canard about them being moderates has been around.
For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in "tradition". Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate..
This is an interesting concept that hearkens back to the axiomatic anthropological notion of cultural relativism. Basically, this notion posits that, "an individual human's beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of his or her own culture". This means that if something is defined as "traditional", then it can't really be "bad" since it is "authentic". Of course, this becomes a subset of moral relativism and is why many anthropologists are actually anthro-apologists. I think that it is possible to understand a cultural practice without agreeing with it. Besides, I completely reject this notion of authenticity and agree with Hobsbawm's notion of the invention of tradition. Traditions are adaptive and constantly evolve and change to fit the needs of the moment. At the same time, unless they are challenged, they will continue unchecked.
I think that at any given time there are several strains of a tradition being practicd "out there". The more aggressive ones, the ones that are backed by those with wealth and power or those willing to use force to achieve their political ends are often the ones we are familiar with. This hearkens back to Foucault's "regimes of truth" or Marx's famous quote that, "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. At the same time, other strains that are not "hegemonic" (to use Gramsci's language) exist and may come into play once the other tradition is no longer adaptive. However, as Edmund Burke rightly noted, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the Middle East, where long-standing traditions are struggling to stay alive in the face of the onslaight that modernity has presented it with. Rather than completely crush the radicals in Islam so that the voices of moderation have some space in which to speak up, the West appears to have made a Faustian bargain to prop up the so-called "moderates" because they are "our sons of bitches" (To paraphrase FDR about Samoza). Having said that, I stand by my conviction that democracy is hardly the magic bullet that will miraculously solve all the region's problems. Based on recent signs, it looks like the Bush administration has come to this conclusion as well.
The use of moderate to describe such leaders is necessary to mask the death of Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, with its lofty goal of regionwide democratisation. Indeed, Rice's visit to Egypt in January emphasised the word moderate and completely ignored the word democracy.
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