WRIGHT IS WRONG: In Slate, Robert Wright has been a persistent critic of just about every move the Bush Administration has made in the war on terrorism. His latest effort shows how even razor-shrp logic will lead you astray if it starts from the wrong premises.
The flaws in Wright's approach can be summed up in one sentence: he hasn't read his Bernard Lewis. Fundamental to Wright's critiques is the belief that if the U.S. acts wisely (i.e., in accordance with Wright's prescriptions), it can drastically reduce the number of Muslims who hate the U.S. and thus reduce the pool of future terrorists. The corollary to that argument is that if the U.S. acts unwisely (i.e., everything the Bush administration has done), it will expand the ranks of those Muslims who hate us and accordingly expand the pool of future terrorists. As such, Wright's critiques are merely a higher-class version of the familiar voices who seek to blame certain American policies for "why they hate us;" he merely substitutes game theory for a general animus towards Israel or U.S. policy during the Cold War.
The problem with Wright's (and his cohorts') approach is that, as elegantly explained by Lewis in this November article in The New Yorker and in this prophetic 1990 piece from the Atlantic Monthly, "they hate us" for what we are and what we represent (the "House of War," to use Lewis' phrase), and that our actions directed at the Muslim countries are of secondary importance in influencing Muslim attitudes - and when such actions are important, they often don't cut the way people assume Wright and his ilk assume they do. (See Lewis' New Yorker piece regarding the U.S.' relations with Sharon and the Shah.)