This post of Kathryn-Jean Lopez's has been nagging at me for the last few days. It's a response to a New York Times op-ed by Peter Bergen, which argues, in short, that the widespread worry over madrassas is really misplaced -- those who've attacked us haven't been poorly educated automatons with no skills save massive Qur'anic recall, rather, we've been hit by a succession of college graduates, of engineers, of highly educated Arab men with job prospects and the background to "know better". Thus, concludes Bergen, this isn't a question of funding literacy, it's a question of stopping those with the desire and, crucially, the ability to do us harm.
Lopez dismisses this with 20 catty words of snark. Why? Why is she fixated on the hate that madrassas may or may not breed? She's certainly not concerned with the resentment the French might harbor towards us. No, it's just Arab anger that bugs her. This seems to represent a fundamental break in how liberals and conservatives view terrorism, and it's one worth exploring (especially since efforts to craft progressive foreign policies create sets of principles that are somewhat hard to distinguish from neoconservatism).
For conservatives, the WoT does appear to be a War of Civilizations, a "they-hate-us-and-our-way-of-life" confrontation. In that way, Arab resentment occupies a fundamentally different spot on the conceptual map than European irritation, or African disappointment, or Latin American fury. But in order to keep that perspective valid, the war against terror really does have to take a broad view of its enemy, it needs to fight "Islamofascism" rather than the miniscule fraction of Arabs contemplating attack.