Winning War on Terrorism Takes More Than Military Success

I wrote to the author:

I just read your piece in the Sunday Trib, and find your points well taken.

It has seemed to me for a long time that Americans have lost the ability to explain why
America is great. To a large extent I blame this on the attitude among our intellectual elite
that America is something to be ashamed of, that patriotism is distasteful and plebian.
Those who speak for us prefer rather to emphasize passivity, trying not to look like the
hegemon any superpower is whether it wishes to be or not. In many ways, our State
Department has acted as though it were embarrassed by democracy. I know that there are
many in our universities and media who are embarrassed that we have elected George W.
Bush.

To ask people like this to handle our public relations is like asking France to give us a
testimonial. On the other hand, we have business people, like those who run MTV, who
think that showing Afghan teenagers videos of Jennifer Lopez will prove the superiority of
our system.

We seem to have failed to recognize the impact of the madrassahs in Muslim countries,
which have been used by radical Islamicists to recruit their youth to hatred and blame
rather than to show them how to improve their own lives.

I keep wondering why we haven't funded any schools to teach children in these lands the
value of education, hard work, tolerance, freedom of choice, cooperation and their value
as human beings; in short, the values that successful societies are built upon. Instead we
invite them to matriculate in the U.S. and offer the talented and ambitious a way out,
leaving the rest to suffer in poverty and oppression. We train people like Mohammed Atta
and Osama bin Laden, and sell arms to the authoritarian regimes that they hate. We are so
unsure of our own spiritual values that we make enemies by being non-judgmental and
non-interfering when we should not be, until the bough breaks and we go to war. I'm sure
that we are as big an enigma to the Muslim world as they are to us.