Hearts and Minds

"It's worse than failing. Failing means you tried and didn't get better. But at this point, three years after September 11, you can say there wasn't even much of an attempt, and today Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. and the degree of distrust in the U.S. are far worse than they were three years ago. Bin Laden is winning by default," said Shibley Telhami, a member of a White House-appointed advisory group on public diplomacy and Brookings Institution scholar.

I often wonder about all this. Winning the "war on terror" seems to me to be for sure a heart/mind thing, if this democracy we choose to force down their throats has any hope of sticking.

"If the United States does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world, the extremists will gladly do the job for us."

Who are we? What do we represent to "them'? I see America as freedom to hold your own individual ideas, promote your own values and system. Hard to promote to others, it's not an "ideal" in itself, rather an ability to choose thse ideals.