"Whatever its immediate apparent outcome, the war on Iraq represents a catastrophic breakdown of the British and American imagination. We've utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded, and for that we're likely to find ourselves paying a price beside which the body-count on both sides in the Iraqi conflict will seem trifling.

Passionate ideologues are incurious by nature and have no time for obstructive details. It's impossible to think of Paul Wolfowitz curling up for the evening with Edward Said's Orientalism, or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or the letters of Gertrude Bell, or the recently published, knotty, often opaque, but useful book by Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam, based on Rosen's anthropological fieldwork in Morocco, or Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. Yet these, and a dozen other titles, should have been required reading for anyone setting out on such an ambitious liberal-imperial project to inflict freedom and democracy by force on the Arab world. The single most important thing that Wolfowitz might have learned is that in Arabia, words like "self", "community," "brotherhood" and "nation" do not mean what he believes them to mean. When the deputy secretary of defence thinks of his own self, he - like me, and, probably, like you - envisages an interiorised, secret entity whose true workings are hidden from public view. Masks, roles, personae (like being deputy secretary for defence) mediate between this inner self and the other people with whom it comes into contact. The post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic self, with its autonomous subjective world, is a western construct, and quite different from the self as it is conceived in Islam. Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as a social being. The self exists as the sum of its interactions with others. Rosen puts it like this: "The configuration of one's bonds of obligation define who a person is . . . the self is not an artefact of interior construction but an unavoidably public act.
..."

"A Nationalist is someone who is offended if someone
protests against the government, does not worship it's
symbols -like flags and such, does not respect it's
leader, and states any opinion which goes against
government policy or statements. When the country is
at war, a Nationalist thinks anyone who says or does
anything the government does not like should be
killed, jailed, beaten, and/or deported, period. To the
Nationalist, anyone who speaks out with a dissenting
opinion is a traitor.

A Patriot is someone who loves the people of the
country, who loves the liberty and freedom of the
country, and who will uphold the ideals of the
country by protesting against what they perceive to be
government misbehavior, mismanagement, or bad policy.
When the country is at war, a patriot who feels
the war is wrong, for whatever reason, considers it
even more important to speak up, demonstrate, and seek
to find consensus to stop the war. A Patriot may or
may not wave a flag or sing nationalist songs, but
they do not put them over the rights of the people.

Nationalists, like Nazis, Royalist, and Totalitarian
Communists, have always been the bane of freedom,
seeking from their cowardice to lock down all
freedom with an extreme set of rules which they alone
gladly obey, in lockstep fashion. In America, as the
Second Iraq War shows, Nationalists and Patriots
are deeply mixed, and the Right Wing Nationalists,
through their radio pundits, are again seeking to
destroy America through their twisted fear of
freedom and Liberty. Nationalists have never failed to
destroy the ideals and eventually the existence of
their countries through perpetual war and internal
oppression. For examples, look at Nazi Germany and
Stalinist Russia."