Clash of Civilizations

Chicago Boy "Lexington Green" hits the nail on the head:

"...The French think we're crazy. They have their reasons. In fact, they are kinda right. The US got smacked on 9/11 and it has its blood up. Bush is leading us one of the USA's intermittent crusades. The rest of the world wets its knickers when this happens because there's no saying how it is all going to come out. But Bush's logic is simple. The Muslims live in shitty countries and blame us, so they hate us and want to kill us. We have to knock out Saddam anyway, the crazy bastard, since he's gonna get a nuke. And the US Gov. really does believe this and fear it, as do I. So, Iraq gets to be the petri dish where we're gonna try to grow something like an Arab-speaking democracy, where we will undo the root causes of terrorism by changing the whole region, starting with Iraq. We have to do this because the long-term alternative is more and more and worse and worse terrorism, culminating in the USA treating the whole Arab world as if they were the Apaches, which would be a catastrophe for them, physically, and for us morally. So, Bush, who is nothing if not a high-stakes gambler, is putting all his chips on this Fukayama-esque root-causes scenario. As a great Chicagoan said: "Make no small plans".

The rest of this post is worth reading as well.