Learning Different Lessons

By looking at our big mistakes regarding the Mideast from a Mideast perspective, Khouri adds very valuable insight. There's no question that his logic is on target, and that we're relearning some difficult lessons we should have placed into our memory 30 years ago - i.e. the risks associated with arrogance of perceived power and wars that can't be won.

But unfortunately, not everyone learns the same lessons in the same classroom. I thought the bisection of our Country from Vietnam would heal within a decade or two and we'd be the wiser. Sure got that one wrong.

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Europe Learns, America Provokes
Rami G. Khouri
October 03, 2005

Rami G. Khouri is editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051003/europe_learns_america_provokes...

"Slowly, it seems, more and more thoughtful people in the West are asking deeper and more useful questions about the terror threat and how to solve it—including some among the ideological skinheads whose peculiar intellectual hooliganism still defines much foreign policymaking in the U.K. and U.S.

They are painstakingly moving toward a more comprehensive and accurate appreciation of the fact that religion, identity, socioeconomic conditions, foreign policy, terrorism and political governance systems are separate issues that impact on one another in subtle and changing ways, with the trigger for terrorism usually being a combination of humiliation and deep vulnerability in the face of foreign military and political power.

The last four years have been a costly learning experience, but if we learn from them, we shall not have wasted the time or the lives lost in Middle Eastern and Western societies alike."

Read the article at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051003/europe_learns_america_provokes...