[sturm und drang]

Madape wrote:

"Do our enemies hate us more now than they did before? It's hard to say, but who cares. These people already hated us enough to slaughter us by the thousands on 9/11."

Okay, I'll bite. I care.

And I bet you'll care, too, when the situation and at our interests abroad starts to look a lot like Israel.

"These people" did not hate us enough to slaughter us by the thousands on 9/11. An extremist terrorist group hated us enough to do that. What we have done, as Zakaria points out, is spread that enmity beyond a small extremist group into the very mainstream of Arab culture. Our actions in Iraq have engendered a broader and deeper hatred of America than has ever existed. And it will take 15-20 years to reap the consequences of an entire culture brought up from birth to despise us.

So myopic, yes. Yes yes and yes. We can resume this conversation in 2025.

This glittering freedom, democracy and prosperity you so eloquently describe is far from assured. The point of the article is that we had begun to make inroads - we and our allies had begun the admittedly long and aruduous process of reforming the Middle East. Now that we have gone in and bungled the implementation of it, we are the mark of Cain. No one in the Arab world will embrace or accept anything associated with us, including the very American notions of freedom and democracy. People will rebel against the very freedom, democracy and capitalism we are trying to instill - simply because it is American.

One other quick point: you decry the big, bad leftist media for misrepresenting our governance of Iraq. It's not really that bad, you say. I won't even debate this broken-record leftist media schtick, but will instead ask a simple question: In this case, is not perception reality? The perception of the rest of the world - and the rest of the Arab world, in particular - is exactly what matters, like it or not.