If you're going to read anything about the Iraq war, read the periodic pieces by Peter Galbraith. He's been writing about Iraq for a while in the NY Review of Books and if you want what Bush and his people lack -- an accurate mental map of the world (or that part of it) -- he will provide it. Now Salon appears to have wisely caught on to him and published an excellent piece by him about the coming U.S. loss in Iraq -- acually the loss that has already happened, as he points out.
One strand of thinking about western relations with the Arab world is that the Arab world (which once was far more advanced than Europe) is burning with resentment over its weak position from colonial times onward. In some versions of this, it is an irrational hatred that has driven them to counterproductive and unreasonable positions vis a vis Israel and the United States. In other versions, it is a perfectly rational and understandable reaction to past & current Western exploitation, support for dictatorships, and the harming of innocent people through the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I don't speak Arabic, don't know the culture, and don't pretend to know what is true. (In general, though, I am suspicious when foreigners are cast as implacably irrational.)
But if this view is correct in some measure, it raises the supremely ironic possibility that a United States "loss" in the Iraq war would do as much good as anything to lower the risk of terrorism. If the Arab world feels humiliated, then perhaps our own humiliation could paradoxically start a process of healing.
I do so wish we had succeeded in carrying out our professed democratizing mission in Iraq. But I shudder to think about all the human carnage that is taking place in Iraq now and in the past 5 years and how much hatred is being inflamed against our once and future great nation (though it now be on a bender of bloody blundering stupidity), and how that hatred could come back to hurt us later.
Of course this kind of idea drives conservatives into frothy madness, humiliation being the worst thing that can happen to our country in their view (worse than 60,000 American or 3 million foreign deaths, if Vietnam is any measure). But a stiff does of humility may begin to erode at least a bit of the mountain of ill-will the Bushiz have spread around the world this decade.
The point when we were most "humiliated" -- right after 9/11 -- was the point when the world was most sympathetic to us, including the peoples of countries like Iran. But of course that could not stand.
If our national security establishment and terror-alarmist conservative politicians were truly interested in minimizing the chance of terrorism, they would embrace humility. But of course they are more interested in cheap hate-driven revenge (masquerading as 'necessary toughness') than in truly fighting the problem.
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