I wish someone here would respond to this bit from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

“The raging and chaotic civil war in Gaza (and incipiently in the West Bank) is hard to deny. Marty Peretz sees the same pattern as Iraq. So here’s a question for Marty: if Arab cultures are completely immune to democratic life, as he has long argued, why does he support the coercive democratization of Iraq with the blood of young Americans? By his own logic, isn’t it doomed to abject failure? And isn’t staying there therefore a fool’s errand? This is one aspect of neoconservative thought on Iraq I still haven’t fully understood (and I was exposed to and often impressed by the frankness of many neocons when it came to the limits of Arab-Muslim political culture). By neoconservative logic, the U.S. has undertaken about the least viable, most intractable, self-defeating task on Planet Earth. Why? Once the WMD rationale was exposed as a delusion, why haven’t neoconservatives cited the pathologies of Arab culture to argue for withdrawal?”