[Snowden]

This little gem caught my eye:

(King Abdullah's "crescent" breaks at any rate: Syria has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are children of darkness.)

In fact, Syria is feeding the Sunni warriors into Iraq.

and this:

It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.

The Kurds, of course, are Sunni - the war against them by the Sunni Arabs is based strictly on that; they are Kurds, therefore, they are hated. So it's not always the sect or branch of Islam that causes hatred.

We cannot deal with these people unless and until we have some understanding of them. Winning a battle is not at all the same as winning a war - and the war is far from over, I'm afraid. This is a war that must be won unequivacably, and I don't see the end in sight - do you? If we win in Iraq - will it be over? Not at all; we entered and considered that we had "started" this war in Iraq. But we at that time entered actively into a war that has been going on for 1400 years; and we were not aware of that, as a nation.

Ignorance can be very costly, and I wonder when and if we will win this war - or will another administration simply declare it won and pull our troops out? I wonder about these things; especially in light of the lack of awareness and dedication we see in our press and in the protests that are aimed at the wrong ideas. Maybe I'm all wrong about this - I hope so. But I know I'm not.