How America lost the war of ideas

[Levi]

But since 9/11, despite much talk of winning hearts and minds, and the outpouring of billions of dollars, two administrations with very different approaches to the issue have both been defeated by it.

Defeated by what?

..the disappointments of real-world policy.

Key phrase here being "real world".

The question that haunted America after 9/11 – ‘Why do they hate us?’ – tended to provoke the wrong answers. It was falsely comforting to believe that America’s enemies did not understand it, and that the remedy was to harness the skills of Madison Avenue to demonstrate that the United States was a benign actor, a force for good that had brought the world science and technology as well as Hollywood and hamburgers.

I am sorry he doesn't like hamburgers. I love them. So my take away here is that I, as an american, don't understand my enemies are great guys whereas my enemies do understand correctly that my government and my country in general are evil oppressing bastards. PR campaign to follow. Ok.

Officials in the State Department, and Pillar and some of his colleagues at the CIA, tended to see extremism as a reaction to foreign occupation of Muslim lands (Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya) and as being rooted in poverty, under-development, and resentment of local dictators allied to the West. On the other hand, neo-conservatives such as Elliott Abrams in the National Security Council and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon saw the phenomenon as being rooted in a culture of hatred and intolerance nurtured by bigoted imams, pernicious schoolbooks, and Saudi money.

So, it can't be a combination of those things? All black, or all white then?

I will stop here and say and it's easy to pick apart failed policy, and bash the U.S. Maybe for good reason. But this is a (very) thinly disguised US hate letter.

I didn't think it was that good at being even that, let alone "news".