Looking Through Western Eyes

If you read one thing today, make it Fouad Ajami's Featured Article on OpinionJournal.com.

Ajami stresses that we must look at Western and coalition actions as they are seen by the residents in the MidEast. Read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

But this brutal drawn-out struggle between American power and the furies of the Arab-Islamic world was never a Western war. Our enemies were full of cunning and expert at dissimulation, hunkering down when needed. No one in the coffeehouses of the Arab world (let alone in the safe houses of the terrorists) would be led astray by that distinction between "secular" and "religious" movements emphasized by the Senate Intelligence Committee. They live in a world where the enemies of order move with remarkable ease from outward religious piety to the most secular of appearances. It is no mystery to them that Saddam, once the most secular of despots, fell back on religious symbols after the first Gulf War, added Allahu Akbar (God is great) to Iraq's flag, and launched a mosque-building campaign whose remnants--half-finished mosques all over Baghdad--now stand mute.

War on Terror Posted by jk at September 28, 2006 4:22 PM