More Than Muscle Needed

Rich Lowry says we need more than massive military force to change the culture of the Middle East:

Instead of a backward-looking debate about the number of post-invasion troops in Iraq, we should be having a forward-looking one about how we can attain the requisite cultural understanding for any long-term effort to transform the Middle East. We need a good dose of muscular multiculturalism, not in the cause of undermining the American nation (the radical left’s favorite use for it), but of advancing one of its most important foreign-policy goals.

With lessons from Britain's own experience:

Historian Niall Ferguson might have been correct when he urged the application of U.S. power in far-reaching corners of the globe, but wondered whether we had the right stuff to pull it off: “America’s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund. Unlike their British counterparts of a century ago, who left the elite British universities with an overtly imperial ethos, the letters ambitious young Americans would like to see after their names are CEO, not CBE [Commander of the Order of the British Empire].”

We're still early in the game, though. We might still pull this off with far-seeing men like Rumsfeld at the helm.