Comparisons between the Iraq war and Vietnam abound, on both sides of the argument. Opponents of the war, and subsequent occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have been shouting “quagmire, just like Vietnam” since the first week of the war. Proponents have been bringing up the specter of “betrayal on the eve of victory, just like Vietnam”.

There are indeed some similarities between the two situations, which may yet bring us to another foreign policy disaster, and these deserve thoughtful consideration. But in almost all important respects Iraq is not Vietnam, and the differences may give cause for cautious optimism.

First we ought to consider how Iraq is like Vietnam. To begin with, the rationales, both for and against, were never well articulated. But in the absence of a strong and compelling argument for going to war, any argument against going to war carries more weight.

“Bush lied, thousands died.” the elusive weapons of mass destruction. Arguments continue about whether Saddam did or did not continue his program to obtain chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It is certain that he did at one time have chemical weapons, which he used on the rebellious Kurds, and had been seeking biological and nuclear weapons, but no clear cut evidence has surfaced that he continued to pursue these programs after the cease fire following the first invasion of Iraq. The Iraqis certainly acted as if they were conducting hidden programs, but that may have been a bluff, in which case they have limited claim to sympathy for their plight. Or it may very well have been a case of the dictator demanding his people produce unbeatable secret weapons and being assured by his fearful subordinates, “Yes Boss, we’re right on it! Any day now.” (Note Hitler’s constant assurances that secret weapons would be fielded any day to reverse the tide of WWII.)

The salient fact remains that legally speaking we did not go to war with Iraq – because we had not been at peace with Iraq since the first Gulf War. There was a ceasefire in place, which Saddam was in violation of every single day. (By the way – this also apples to North Korea.) All arguments about the legality of the second invasion of Iraq must first address the first set of hostilities under George Bush Sr. There was never a lack of a cassus belli under the accepted standards of international law, just not very exciting ones to present to the public. Fine points of law are not very rousing when you are asking your citizens to commit to something as serious as a war.

Contrariwise the rational, well-considered argument that invading a country and dealing with the subsequent insurrection/ civil war was not in our national interest got lost in the hysterical America-hating rhetoric of the American and European Left and the overheated anti-statism of the isolationist libertarian Right. Like Vietnam, the voice of a patriotic and principled opposition to the war (which included a number of top military officers in both cases) was lost in the shouting of a movement whose hatred was of America, not war.

The movement whose basic motivation was America-hatred found the national interest argument unappealing, precisely because they care nothing for America’s national interest, and were therefore reduced to claiming that Iraq was a better place under Saddam and that American forces were responsible for more innocent deaths than Saddam’s evil regime a la Michael Moore.

Where the anti-war movement did succeed was in framing the debate as “pro-war” versus “anti-war”. Nobody but a Nietzschean lunatic is “for” war. The questions rational men must ask themselves are, “Do we have a choice and is war the worst alternative?”

Generations of post-World War II recriminations have lamented that the West failed to deal with Hitler until it was almost too late, and paid a terrible price in lives, treasure and a devil’s bargain with the Soviet Union that delivered another two generations of Eastern Europeans into serfdom.

Which brings us to the most obvious similarity between Iraq and Vietnam, or between any wars – the fact that they are expensive.

Iraq though, has been remarkably cheap in terms of lives lost. (If you can ever count lives lost as “cheap”. For every death, the world has ended for someone and is irretrievably damaged for others.) The insurrection has so far produced fewer American and coalition casualties than a good month or a bad day of any of our previous large-scale wars, while inflicting massive losses on the enemy. Ongoing civilians casualties (“collateral damage” in that detestable military euphemism) are arguably less than Saddam inflicted on his own people while in power – so far, and indeed more casualities are inflicted deliberately by Jihadist terrorists than accidentally by coalition forces. (Even the highly questionable John Hopkins study held that 2/3 of all deaths are Jihadists killing Iraqi civilians.)

However, the technological and training expertise that has produced this one-sided kill ratio must be paid for in other ways. To put it bluntly, the enemy spends lives they hold cheap while we spend money to preserve lives we hold dear – both ours and those of innocent civilians. That may look like a good trade but the legitimate question arises of how long we can keep this up before our economy suffers seriously, and with it our military capability? Particularly when the political realities are such that we cannot cut government services in other areas to compensate for military expenditures.

And there is disturbing evidence that Osama bin Ladin and his cohorts are well aware of this and counting on it.

Iraq is not like Vietnam

The most important difference is, there is no draft. Morally, this matters to those of us who believe passionately that our lives belong to us alone. Personally, it matters to those of us who are deeply insulted by the arrogant assumption by politicians of their right to arbitrarily dispose of our lives as they choose. Practically, it matters in that it deprives the America-hating movement of an army of foot soldiers.

Woven into the fabric of the very concept of consensual government is the principle that not only do we get to help choose it, we get to decide on a very personal level whether it’s worth dying to preserve. Those who made the war in Vietnam, in their arrogance forgot that part of the American national character described by Baron Von Steuben, who trained Washington’s army at the founding of our nation. In a moment of exasperation he exclaimed, “It’s not enough to give an American an order, you have to tell him why!”

Dissent in this war is tolerated to an extraordinary degree. During the Vietnam War, anti-war dissenters were spied on and harassed by all legal and many illegal means. Today their opinions are taken seriously, as dissenting opinions should be in a free society. On university campuses the opposition is not against the Establishment, nowadays they are the establishment and have no fear for their jobs in expressing anti-government opinions, often quite the opposite. Today students and faculty with pro-administration opinions are harassed, ridiculed, rejected for tenure, and increasingly, threatened with physical assault.

In this war, it is consensual government our soldiers are being asked to fight for. Those of us who came of military age during Vietnam remember watching power change hands in a coup and assassinations, followed by almost half a dozen coups before a military strongman emerged, who held power unopposed until the fall of Vietnam. Does anyone seriously wonder why American youths were less than enthusiastic about being told, not asked, to risk death to support that regime?

In Iraq the first order of business was to get an elected government with a written constitution in place. There are many perceived flaws in the process and it could still go horribly wrong, but Vietnam taught us the cost of waiting until “later” to get that job done. The sight of all those dyed fingers lifted defiantly in the air was inspiring to all who sincerely love liberty and wish the people of Iraq well. By now even those Iraqis who quite understandably resent the occupation of their country by a foreign power, must begin to realize that instead of fighting to eject American forces from their country, they can work to establish a stable government of their own choosing, and tell them to leave – if they still want them to.

A plebiscite held to ask them if they want the coalition to stay or leave, may (and I stress may) satisfy Arab conceptions of honor – as well as providng us with a graceful exit that is nor perceived as a rout.

Critics argue that the administration is making the unfounded assumption that everyone actually wants a democratic government, and this is a serious consideration. Our free institutions are based on legal and cultural traditions thousands of years old, which flat do not exist in most of the world. However while many have no strong desire for, or even understanding of free, consensual government it does not follow that they prefer living under one that terrorizes, tortures and murders its citizens at will.

In terms of geopolitics, the situation in Iraq is far different from Vietnam. Vietnam was a minor client state of a rival superpower that the U.S. could not afford to confront directly. Iraq was a major player among hostile Arab nations who resent and fear American world hegemony but cannot confront it directly and can only work covertly against American interests. Vietnam’s patron superpower had less interest in outright victory than they had in keeping the United States engaged in a protracted and expensive war that sapped its strength, created domestic chaos and distracted it from their main interest in Europe.

Iraq is in the geographical center of the struggle against Jihadism. The patrons of fanatical Jihadism are vitally concerned with Iraq and rightfully fearful that a stable, even semi-democratic Iraq would be the beginning of the end of their tyranny and autocracy throughout the Middle East.

Once France was chased out of Vietnam, the European powers could express moral disdain for America’s presence there, but had no financial interest threatened by it. Their realistic concern was that America would be distracted in a theater peripheral to Europe and our will to resist the Soviet’s plans to eventually absorb Western Europe into their empire destroyed.

With Iraq the situation is more complicated. France and Germany’s ox certainly got gored when their cozy financial arrangements with Saddam were trashed. However, in the long-term, a nuclear Iraq or Iran would be a greater threat to them than to America and they are in a far worse position to deal with the threat without the U.S.

Organized opposition to the Vietnam War in America was early on co-opted by a Hard Left cadre who made common cause with Soviet/ Vietnamese communism, which was portrayed as being on the side of workers, women, freethinkers, minorities, homosexuals and whoever else’s cause it was convenient for them to espouse. To this day, the survivors often remain visibly nostalgic about their days in the Movement, which were the most meaningful of their lives. As opposed to the foot soldiers of the Movement who basically just breathed a sigh of relief and got on with their lives once the draft was discontinued.

Today, the Hard Left opposition has made common cause with the Islamists who openly advocate and practice: chattel slavery, the brutal subjection of women, religious persecution, the murder of homosexuals, the extermination of Jews and who despise the multiculturalism of Western intellectuals. To say the least, this casts doubts on the sincerity of their patriotism and concern for human rights and seriously damages their credibility in the eyes of ordinary people with common sense – and even many intellectuals.

The Vietnam War was inarticulately justified, strategically confused and fought by soldiers who, though as valiant as any America ever fielded, could be compelled to serve no more than a one-year tour of duty, which forced the military to fight with a large percentage of inexperienced troops at any given time.

However, the loss of Vietnam forced the military into a radical rethinking of the way free nations conduct warfare. And the evidence indicates that the learning curve is even steeper than before. The modern all-volunteer military is highly competent, flexible, adaptive, forward thinking, and in spite of well-publicized abuses, far less likely to take out rage and frustration on civilians. The My Lai massacre took years of dedicated effort by a few brave individuals to bring to light. The far less serious abuses at Abu Ghraib were brought to light almost immediately by the Army itself and the individuals responsible tried and punished.

All of this justifies cautious optimism, but there are also reasons to be concerned. Precisely because the hysterical anti-American faction of the opposition has drowned out rational voices concerned about Iraq, these serious concerns may not be given the hearing they deserve.

Next: Iraq could be worse than Vietnam.

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By now I suppose it’s no secret that I’m an unabashed Western Civilization loyalist and do not regard the label “American” conjoined with “patriot” as a disgrace. I’ve written about criticism of America and Americans that I think is dumb, but there are things you can say about America that are not so stupid.

Here http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1013-31.htm you can find a view of America from a European viewpoint. Full disclosure, my wife and I know and like Brigitte Schön, my wife laughed her ass off and said, “I agree with everything she says!” Birgitte asks some embarrassing questions about Americans, such as:

“What is wrong about natural air in a home?

“What strikes every European in a mostly negative way is the constant and ubiquitous use of air conditioning in America. The outside temperature has become completely irrelevant for the use of AC, it seems. It is simply used ALL THE TIME.

“This leads to highly irritating situations. I have to take along a jacket or a sweater when going to restaurants or the movies in places where the outside temperature is 100° and more in order to avoid a cold.”

“What’s wrong about being in touch with nature?

“America has a spectacular nature, and lots of it, since it is – by the standards of the rest of the world – sparsely populated, with the exception of the coasts. It is sad to watch how little Americans seem to want to have any interaction with this great wealth.”

My wife just woke up and I had to break the news to her that the University housing administration left a notice that they are going to cut down some of the lovely tall cedar trees around our apartment. Apparently they’ve been identified as a “potential fire hazard” and dare I guess that it’s a liability issue?

“Oh darn it, what an American thing to do!” she exclaimed indignantly.

Showing my wife and family around this country has made me see it with new eyes. I’d heard about the controversy over SUVs. We both think they’re pretty cool ourselves. “But,” Monika asked. “why is every one we see spotlessly clean? I thought they were supposed to be for off-road? And why is it that every time I see one, the driver is talking on his or her cell phone?” I dunno, beats me.

Then there was the time in Wall-Mart around Halloween when we passed a woman with a boy. The boy was asking why they couldn’t have Halloween and the mother shouted, “Cause that’s the DEVIL’S holiday!” She still repeats that and cracks up from time to time.

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First we had the bomb and that was good,
’cause we love peace and brotherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb but that’s OK,
‘Cause the balance of power’s maintained that way.
Who’s next?

Well France got the bomb but don’t you grieve,
’cause they’re our allies – I believe.
Then China got the bomb but have no fears,
’cause they can’t wipe us out for at least five years!
Who’s next?

Egypt’s gonna get one too, just to use on You Know Who.
So Israel’s getting tense, wants one in self-defence.
The Lord’s our shepherd says the psalm, but just in case -
We’re gonna get a bomb!
Who’s next?

Well Indonesia said that they, were gonna get one anyday,
South Africa wants two, that’s right.
One for the Black and one for the White!
Who’s next?

Well Luxembourg is next to go, then who knows maybe Monaco?
We’ll try to stay serene and calm….
When Alabama gets the bomb.
Who’s next, who’s next, who’s next, who’s next?

Tom Lehrer

Well North Korea has gotten themselves a nuke, and whatever the world decides to do about it, Kim Jr. is being treated like a major player, which seems to be what he wanted all along.

To me it seems like being a small country with one or two nukes is like holding a pistol on a roomful of men armed with machine guns. Sure you could do some damage for a second or two, but…

Now that North Korea has one, does anybody doubt that Iran is not far behind? The most optimistic predictions had an Iranian bomb from 5-10 years off. Now they can just buy/ borrow one.

Still, small countries make convenient targets, i.e. it’s not difficult to plaster the whole damn place with comparatively little of the arsenal of any of the Big Three nuclear powers and they know this.

What we’ve got to wonder about is:

1) Are either of these guys crazy enough to openly use one on us or any friend of ours? Well if either one did, it would likely only happen once. Afterwards there’d be a salutary example that the world would remember for a lo-o-o-ong time.

2) Would either try to funnel some nukes to terrorists with no fixed address, while maintaining deniability? Oh dear, this offers some problems. A response might be to announce in advance that any unexplained nuclear bombing would be followed by the bombing of: Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, Paris… (just kidding, sort of).

3) If Kim Jr. and Amenaboo-boo are really crazy or out of touch enough to try something like that, would the people around them let them get away with it? Because a country has a suicidal psycho leader does not necessarily mean that he’s surrounded by suicidal psychos.

Well we’ll probably wind up trying sanctions for a while. Who knows, if China’s on board it might even work. On the other hand, millions more Koreans are going to starve to death because nobody’s got the juevos to calculate the “terrible arithmatic” that Lincoln spoke of. And starving men do tend to get desperate.

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Journalist Jill Carroll is back home now, and detailing her experiences as a captive of the jihadists in Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor.
( http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0814/p01s01-woiq.html ) I’m sure the details will prove fascinating, but the upshot of what she has learned is that the Islamists are – gasp! – different from us! Furthermore, I believe that she’s beginning to suspect that they are really not very nice people. Oh whatever will this poor old world be FORCED to endure next?

Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I’ve experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake – that of supposing that these people are bascially Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless, as was Jill Carroll apparently.

I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I “made my year” as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of “running” from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say “he did a runner” to explain why someone isn’t showing up for work anymore. And while my experience wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as Jill Carroll’s, I could have told her a thing or two before she went to Iraq armed with her overflowing good will.

In Eastern Europe and the South Balkans, whenever I have gone to live in a place which I had formed opinions about, the actual experience of living there has always radically changed those opinions, sometimes into a completely contradictory one. Most often, my academic research led me to form a beautifully coherent model which experience turned into a semi-coherent collection of observations and tentative conclusions.

In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from “blowback” from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization. And by the way, among “rational, fair-minded” non-interventionist libertarians, not a damn one of them has asked me, “What in your experience caused you to change your mind?” Instead what I get are gratuitous insults followed by insufferably condescending lectures about how wrong I am.

So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term “Arab” covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, more specifically about Arabs from the oil states about why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and are pissing off the rest of them. I suspect that many of these also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON’T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human. We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect – as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart. Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn’t buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness. This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY. Yes I know, I’m making a cultural value judgment, the cardinal sin when I was a grad student in Anthropology. With us, the most important sources of self-esteem are useful work and the love of a good woman. Being good at something that requires skill (even a hobby) and being of primary importance to somebody just because you are who you are. Work for them, is something to be avoided. The basic forms of work: making stuff, growing stuff and moving stuff around, is taken care of by a class of indentured servants, usually non-Arab Muslims from the Third World, and even today, by outright slaves. The Kingdom is a modern country, they abolished slavery in 1967, but old expats have reported seeing slave auctions as late as 1981.

On one occasion a student of mine asked me, “Teacher, what do you call a man who can be sold?” (Excellent use of the passive voice, I was proud of him.) I explained, “He is called a slave, the condition is called slavery, the verb is to enslave.” Later I had occasion to ask them about the headsman, the fellow who cuts heads and hands off in chop-chop square in front of the mosque on Fridays. The reason I asked was that from my studies I knew that in tribal societies converting from a tribal or feudal system into a system of common laws, a man condemned to death by a court of law must often be executed by a member of his own tribe, or a complete outsider so that the execution does not spark a blood feud. In the Kingdom the headsman is usually a Sudanese. My students explained, “Yes teacher, he’s a slave.” i.e. he’s a person of no importance and therefore outside the web of obligations of vengeance.

The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.

In Tunisia I saw a population doing their own work and I have worked with a fair number of Jordanians engaged in skilled labor and the professions. Note that neither is an oil state and I believe their contribution to the ranks of terrorists is far less than the oil-rich countries. It is difficult to argue that poverty is the driving cause of terrorism.

“Of conjugal love they know nothing.” (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare – and greatly desired. In the Kingdom I found a few students with a consuming interest in romantic poetry, whom I had to teach very discretely. Most of them were just obsessed with sex however. And interestingly, when visiting the West or the fleshpots of Bahrain, they are said to have a tendency to fall in love with the prostitutes they patronize.

Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion. And Allah doesn’t seem to be delivering on his promises of being exalted above the unbelievers these days.

On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member if you convert to the One True Religion. The Brotherhood of Believers is a reality in the lands of Islam, and while it sometimes falls short of the ideal (as does our democratic ideal) it is a reality, and in its way admirable.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of “maintenance” is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets. An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, “If God wills it.” A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, “It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah.” Or, “I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah.” (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, “You are all going to pass the exam, right?” “Inshallah teacher.” “No, no!” I shouted, “No inshallah. Study!”

This was once also characteristic of the former communist countries. Work was indifferently performed and maintenance was a real problem. A factory owner in Poland told me that machines he bought from Sweden lasted only half as long in Poland as they did in Sweden because of poor maintenance. However as soon as people were assured that they could keep a reasonable amount of what they worked for, people reverted to their true cultural patterns, worked plenty hard and started to take care of their tools and the public spaces.

5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.

With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way. The obligations of the superior to the inferior do not equal those of the inferior to the superior. Obligations within a family or clan outweigh all others. That is why we had to take care not to sit members of the same clan near each other during exams. If one asks another for help, he has to give it. In spite of promises to the school and even when the clansman is a total stranger. Obligations to other believers outweigh all obligations to unbelievers and especially when the believers are fellow-Arabs. And in contracts with unbelievers, the obligations of the Believer to the kaffir are not equal to the obligations of the kaffir to the Believer.

Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-selfconsciously demanded that a pub near a Mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion – in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demanded the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Kingdom.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.

In our civilization, when two men get down, either seriously or just “woofing”, what do they say? Some variation of “I’m going to kick your ass.” Am I right? Here’s what I heard in the Kingdom, “Hey, don’t f**k with me, or someday you get a knife in the back.” I’m not saying that wouldn’t happen to you in the West, but most men would be ashamed to make a threat of that nature. We don’t understand that direct shock battle is not necessarily the law of nature. When overwhelming force is brought to bear on them, they become cringing and obsequious. To put it bluntly, they lie their heads off to get you to turn your back on them. Try to see it from their point of view – how else do you expect them to act when you have the overwhelming force? You expect them to meet you on equal terms when the situation is so unequal? What other tactics are available but prevarication and delay followed by a sneak attack?

Folks, what we call “terrorism” is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people.

7) In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.

Thus an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and the reality comes as a surprise. Remember the “Mother of all Battles”? Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don’t seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama. Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they’re arguing over a taxi. “This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!” “You lie, it’s mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!”

An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe – and they react with utter surprise when an American up and decks him. “What did I do?” To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.

They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

I cannot begin to tell you of some of the things I’ve heard from Gulf Arabs or read in the English language press in the Kingdom. “The Jews want Medina back.” (Medina was a Jewish city in the time of the Prophet.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been turned into an immensely popular miniseries on Egyptian TV. The Blood Libel (the medieval myth that Jews need the blood of non-Jewish babies to celebrate Passover) is widely reported in the Arab press, and widely believed. Allah will replenish the oil beneath Arabia when it runs out.

I’ve been assured, by well-educated and otherwise sensible people that Winston Churchill was Jewish and that Anthony Quinn had been blacklisted and would never work again after making Lion of the Desert (just before he made that turkey with Kevin Costner).

9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.

This involves some seriously weird stuff about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them. I’ve read in the English-language press of the Kingdom serious admonitions against using Black Magic to win an advantage in a dispute with a neighbor. The columnist did not deny the efficacy of Black Magic, he just said it’s forbidden to use it. On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of “myth” to them and I used the example of the djinn. I wasn’t getting through to them at all and was concerned that I had mangled the pronunciation of the word when it dawned on me that the reason they didn’t understand what I was getting at, was that they had no doubt that the djinn were real.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the West went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.) Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

In the West, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their idea as “perfectly valid for them”. Doesn’t work that way for them, God’s Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. I know I know, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of enforcement in such detail as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it. Can the subjugation of women coexist with Western Civilization with Western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God will it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves – and they know this.

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