But I feel that we just do not appreciate the depth and duration of the smoldering war in which we have placed a canister of gasoline. I don't think we in the west view War or Cultural Conflict in the same way as it is seen in that region. I think not understanding that was the primary failure in the horrific execution of the 'war on terror', and its 'grand non-sequitur': the war in Iraq.

I think what looks like 'peace' or 'status quo' or 'stalemate' to our culture when observing that area is simply just looked at by the participants as the particular arrangement of a very bloody chess board that is (a) artificial as the result of the fading echoes of imperial meddling and (b) looked upon as transient to those who have merely wiped the blood off their long knives temporarily.

Fundamentally, if we wanted to 'win' this 'war', what we should have done is to look at what the cultures in the region would have understood as defeat, not what we would construe as victory, and worked in that direction. War with and in Iraq and its outcome was not that solution.

If you want to win a round in a battle, you win on your terms. If you want to win the conflict absolutely and completely, you demonstrate victory that your opponents have no other choice but view as definitive (there are nastier options, but we would lose our souls if we went there). Even if the invasion of Iraq was indeed relevant to the 'conflict with terrorism' (which it wasn't), it was the idiots move. Demonstrating the success or even failure of a conventional military struggle simple does not mean in that cultural context what it means in our context.

In their context, I'm afraid: grist for the mill.

And the mess left at the end: a cornucopia for the radical elements of the region we wish to terminate.

In the end, we did not even win on our terms, and worse than lost in their terms. We handed them the fuel for a hundred years of recruits, hearts and minds. We handed the real bad guys a treasure chest of oil and hopeless people haunted by fear and a sense of oppression at our hands. Osama could not have dreamt of a better outcome.

I often speak of this conflict as the testing of information age world philosophy by iron age ideals. 1st century solutions to 21st century problems. It is a test we should have passed, by all that I hold dear and believe and value. Instead, it is a test we are failing every aspect of. The sole reason for our failure lays with the trivialization of discourse and the absence of practical truth within our political system. Bad leadership trumps the greatest advantages, and poor socio-political health trumps all.

The America of Jefferson, of the enlightenment, of the Federalist Papers would have knocked this ball out of the park. The America of Rupert Murdoch, George Bush, Karl Rove and Pat Robertson have missed every strike across the plate, indeed, wouldn't know a fastball from a handsaw.

Vietnam and SE Asia normalized, this is true, but the conflict, while bloody and no less brutal, was much more superficial than the context of the real struggle in the middle east (Class warfare and the aftermath of imperialism setting the conflict for a struggle between two essentially modern, primarily secular, belief systems). If anything, the 2-dimensionality and facile nature of the struggle made it like a flash-fire- fertilizer, in essence, for spring flowers and saplings.

this I think is the kind of fire that burns all the way through and leaves a fine dead ash.