Another piercing quotation from Fouad Ajami's magisterial book The Foreigner's Gift:

"For America, the surprise was that it had expected to sweep into Iraq and encounter Iraqis seared by the dictator's brutalities and glad for their deliverance. Those it found, but Americans encountered Arabs in Iraq, people given to all those defects that had frustrated American power and intentions in Egypt, in Arabia, and among the Palestinians. That journey into the "heart of the Middle East," as President Bush described the expedition into Iraq time and again, turned out to be a venture into all the malignancies of Arab politics. Despotism, sectarianism, antimodernism, willful refusal to name things for what they are: they are in plentiful supply in Iraq. A great power that had had its fill with the anti-Americanism and unreason of the Arabs suddenly found itself yet again in the thicket of that Arab mix of victimology and wrath..."

(p. 165)