One of Ours

...The Arab world, alas, has been cursed with oil. For decades, too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people — men and women — in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship. Arab countries barely trade with one another, and unlike Korea and Japan, rarely invent or patent anything. But rather than looking inward, assessing their development deficits, absorbing the best in modern knowledge that their money can buy and then trying to beat the West at its own game, the Arab world in too many cases has cut itself off, blamed the enduring Palestine conflict or colonialism for delaying reform, or found dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Falluja.

To be sure, there are exceptions. Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Morocco and Tunisia are all engaged in real experiments with modernization, but the bigger states are really lost...

...The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed — and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that. It's time for the Arab world to grow up — to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam...

...here's what else I know from visiting Iraq: There were a million acts of kindness, generosity and good will also extended by individual U.S. soldiers this past year — acts motivated purely by a desire to give Iraqis the best chance they've ever had at decent government and a better future. There are plenty of Iraqis and Arabs who know that...

..."They are using our mistakes to avoid their own necessity to change, reform and modernize," says the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen.

A senior Iraqi politician told me that he recently received a group of visiting Iranian journalists in his home. As they were leaving, he said, two young Iranian women in the group whispered to him: "Succeed for our sake." Those Iranian women knew that if Iraqis could actually produce a decent, democratizing government it would pressure their own regime to start changing — which is why the Iranian, Syrian and Saudi regimes are all rooting for us to fail.

But you know what? Despite everything, we still have a chance to produce a decent outcome in Iraq...