Dear Mr Kimball,

what a faithful bunch of admirers you have gathered here…it makes me wonder what happened to the liberal democracy that you praise… where is the dialogue gone? Where is the richness of opposite perspectives meeting and negotiating a common ground gone? Nothing that I have read on this page is compatible in any way with the democracy that you pretend to defend. All the comments that are displayed are less than intelligent and, in the manner of your article itself, disrespectful (to the opponent, ie Rowan Williams) approvals of what you wrote. I am not saying that approval of your words is wrong, but that no one approves of you in a constructive way, and I suspect that the reason for that is the weakness of your argument and its wrongly conceived polemic dimension.
With a misplaced self-confidence you misinterpret (if not entirely miss) Rowan Williams’s nuanced argument. Your perspective is unilateral and aggressive and what is worse, you mix an intellectual argument with what I would call a personal attack. I can not possibly imagine how someone of your stature and intelligence can make such a grave mistake. I can not understand how someone of your intelligence and critical training can fail to criticize US foreign policy, and to apprehend the hatred that it has engendered world wide. I can not understand how you would fail to understand that at the roots of terrorism lies US failure to understand the potential consequences of its unjust and cruel acts, carried in the name of democracy and human rights. I can not understand how you would fail to criticize this in light of the fact that innocent people (both in America and elsewhere)would be the ones to suffer for the self interested decisions taken by a few so called political leaders. Lastly, i believe that your failure to constructively engage with criticism that has been made to US foreign policy, and your “traditional” by now perceiving of it as an attack against American values, is a disgrace to the intellectual professions.
In truth, if something that I wrote triggered such reactions as the ones i read on your website, I would be ashamed.

yours respectfully,
iqi