Do We Hate America? The Arab Response

[Ken White]

Great observations but one thing bothers me. Your descriptions is almost word for word the same as things I've heard from my buddies who were in Vietnam. While on a one to one basis, most Vietnamese just wanted to get on with their lives and were pretty decent folks, in the aggregate they had a culture and a system which generated and--more importalty--tolerated organized violence. Seems that the important point is not whether the average Iraqi is an OK fellow when you're sitting sipping tea, but how he responds to violence against Americans or against other Iraqis.

I'm not sure if this means anything or not. Perhaps it's just a brain fart.

(emphasis added / kw)

I'm not sure the sentence I emphasized makes a great deal of difference. In Korea, Viet Nam, the Mid East and elsewhere it's been my observation that, as a nation (opposed to as individuals) we are politely tolerated and little more. We annoy people in other nations on many levels. If there's a war going on, we tend to annoy them even more (for several reasons...).

Point being, the average person is not stirred to action due to that, only those who object violently become problematic and they are a fairly small percentage. We are never going to win many hearts -- and most minds, fortunately, eschew violence. The key is thus not the average local national but the unhappily disposed, a fairly small percentage. Almost by default you can woo in one way or another about half of those; the other half aren't going to play nice under most any circumstances. All you need to do with the average local is avoid hacking him or her off to the maximum extent possible.

We don't do that too well, mostly due to this

"We have adopted a model of counterinsurgency -- essentially the British one -- which is predicated on cultural acuity. But we do not have it. That, I think, is a large part of our problem.

For whatever reason, a lot of Brits do this fairly well; few Americans do.