yes, i took a great liking to the penetrating clarity of thought & phrasing here :
In vast swaths of the Arab world, people know the truth of their condition but cannot utter it. Terror silences them. There is no deliverance, they know, if the cult of "martyrdom" is sanctified. There are beleaguered people who are eager for their world to be done with the furies of Islamism. The American victory in Afghanistan, and the promise that this new war has grander moral ambitions than the war that was fought against Iraq a decade ago, emboldened Arabs keen to retrieve the ground that religious and political radicalism had conquered. There is hope that there might be educational reform, and that radical preachers might be tamed.
especially poignant when followed by :
The Arab regimes that tell us that they are about to fall are conceding their own illegitimacy. The Arabs should be granted no special waiver from the imperatives of political reform--especially not by an America with its own quest for a just retribution against terror. For the good part of a decade, American policy averted its gaze from the malignant anti-Americanism at play in Arab lands, in pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. An American "Balfour Declaration" was granted the Palestinians by President Clinton, but the anti-American terror paid that diplomacy no heed.
Yet we should know that there is quiet approval in Arab lands--among decent men and women who harbor no illusions about warlords and preachers of zealotry--of America's campaign against terror. Our pundits here or in Europe may have been troubled by the "axis of evil" remarks of President Bush, but there were many Arabs who savored the clarity.
and the most intelligent writing on SI dealing with the subject matter at hand can be found over here on this thread , an ongoing journal kept since 9/11 by a brilliant citizen of the world Iqbal Latif:
Subject 14747
justice is truth in action ,
regards
mars |
