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America is a modern Rome: an arrogant empire that does not understand the limits of power. I guess no empire really does. This is why they rise and fall. It is not an American trait; it is the nature of unchecked power. Yet in his book, Murphy tries to construct a moral ethos for American hegemony and aggressive drive to dominate the world. Unfortunately the basic premise of his argument goes against history.
In 1994 I spent time in Gaza trying to understand the life of the first Palestinian suicide bomber after the signing of the Oslo agreements. Yes the young man, who crashed a bike into an Israeli checkpoint and blew himself up, was a member of Islamic Jihad. He did spend a lot of the last month of his life in a mosque. But he did not die for Islam.
Bush is right. The glass is not half empty. It is half full. But I do agree with Mr. President that the job is not yet done. Not enough Iraqis have been killed. The country is torn but not permanently broken. Sectarianism is confined to a conflict between Shias and Sunnis -- the Kurds, the Christians and Iraq's other minorities are not yet actively engaged in the blood bath. The plunder of Iraqi oil has yet to be completed.
Summer reading recommendation: "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East" by Sandy Tolan (Bloomsbury, 2007).
The book is a great piece of literary non-fiction. It tells the stories of a Palestinian and an Israeli whose lives have been intertwined and divided by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bashir is a Palestinian whose family was forced to flee their home in Ramla as Israel was being established. And Dalia, then just a baby, moved into the same house as Bashir with her Bulgarian Jewish family fleeing the horror of the Holocaust.
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