I'll take Western Enlightenment ideals over Medieval Muslim ideals any day. And, yes, for all its faults, Western culture is by most objective measures less oppressive and more conducive to human health, security and happiness than Middle Eastern cultures.

-- Tim W. Brown

And that is why you fail.

That said, I will never be an apologist for the barbarous behavior of the warring factions in that country. If we've learned nothing else from America's ill-conceived invasion, it's that long-standing, seething hatred between Iraqis existed for a very long time, literally hundreds of years, and was kept in check only by the Ottoman Empire, France and England and later a homegrown totalitarian dictator.

I have been reading military blogs since right after 9/11 and I have found one in particular that has extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful posters who are officers, retired officers and assorted spooks, civilians and the occasional NCO.

http://www.intel-dump.com/

According to the posters at Intel-Dump, the Iraqis were very forbearing after the initial invasion and did not really start fighting each other until it became clear that the US occupation was venally incompetent and FUBARed everything it touched.

Just as a tiny example of the sheer ineptitude of the occupation, below is an image that I grabbed of the title screen of the Coalition Provisional Authority's web site early on in the occupation:

http://i17.tinypic.com/2qvdoic.jpg

I think this speaks for itself.

The right wing brain exists in Flatland. It cannot perceive a third dimension. These statements about what the left/liberals think reveal the distortions their narrow perception imposes, not only on their understanding of left/liberal views, but also on the world itself.

Here the third dimension is social and political institutions. The right cannot grasp that our actions may be affected by the structures of a society.

For the right, the world is composed of individuals who are moral or they are not. If they are moral, they will prosper; if they are not, it's ok to kill them when they get in our way. (Because, you see, then they are obstructing our unquestionably moral actions.)

Actually, political scientist Shawn Rosenberg conducted some experiments that showed cognitive limitations in conservatives. Asked to analyze the periodicity of a pendulum's swing, they couldn't reach the idea of holding one factor constant while systematically shifting the value of another to decompose their effects. This was back in the 80s; for some reason it hasn't been well-publicized.