For decades, some of the Arab region’s leading figures have sent sharply different messages to the West than to their own people, hoping to secure the best of both worlds from their rhetorical duplicity.

To U.S. and other Western leaders, they portrayed themselves as tolerant and peace-loving, interested in curbing violence and solving problems. To their people and the region, they ruled with iron fists, broached little dissent, pursued terror, and advanced a harsh ideological and operational anti-Westernism.