John Tierney explains why they fight us in Iraq (registration required).
(Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Steve Sailer.
Of course, this also brings up another issue, one reason why so many Americans cannot understand that people may fight us taking control of their country, even if we are trying to bring them freedom and goodness.
It's that Americans don't understand race.
All our talk about race and racism is laced with two prejudices:
(1) Races are defined in global, top-down terms rather than local, bottom-up terms. That is, race is thought of as a definite number of classifications (e.g., black, white, Asian) to which people can be defined. In reality, of course, any group of people who have significant reproductive isolation can be considered a race. Big races (whites) can be divided in to smaller races (Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and French). Therefore, tribal warfare, nationalism, clan warfare, all of this, can be seen as variations on racial conflict.
(2) Racism is supposedly all about "white privilege." Racism is (supposedly) all due to whites having so much power. Actually, racism is an outgrowth of the natural tendency to put one's own family first. The vast majority of people on Earth are racists and see no problem with it. Protecting "their own" means a lot more to them than abstractions such as democracy and liberty. Hell, the Sentinel Islanders are willing to attack helicopters that bring them food, just to keep outsiders, well, outside. And they are attacking them with primitive weapons like spears (or bows and arrors, I forget which). If people would stop and think and realize that most people in the world think it is perfectly acceptable to dislike or distrust people based on their not being like you, they might understand other people's actions better.
That is all.
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