Perspectives

Arab Street Bum has a thoughtful post on communication between Arabs and Americans. I obviously disagree with him in that I hope the U.S. is not defeated in Iraq, but his larger points are spot on. After all, Americans may not like hearing Arabs who see us as occupiers hope for American losses, but the Arabs tend to look askance at casual references to blowing things up, presumably in the Arab world. It would be great if we could find a way to get past these emotional issues to the underlying root causes of fear and mistrust, but unfortunately when wars are going on, that becomes a lot more difficult.