Of course, this realization is the Big No-No, the stake through the heart of multicultural teachings that give life to platitudes that everyone -- every culture, every religion, every people -- is the same, or, rather, wants the same things. (How many times have we heard the president or the secretary of State talk specifically about the normalcy of theoretical "Muslim Moms and Dads," even as actual "Muslim Moms and Dads" were celebrating mass murder committed by their suicide-bomber offspring?) For most, if not all, of our leadership, civilian and military alike, this is the blow to be warded off at all costs. As in: Live multiculturally or die.
And so, it seems, we crouch defensively over Iraq as though the secret to our national security lies within these lines on a map drawn by colonial powers in the early 1920s. We hone in on its provinces, its cities, its sects, its militias, its religious rivalries, its turf battles. We freely risk our men's lives and limbs in its dangerous neighborhoods, along bomb-mined streets, past booby-trapped houses, where we seek to destroy (or arrest) hunkered-down enemy fighters -- as though our men were worth less than their civilians.
Our soldiers learn to tell tribe from tribe and gang from gang, as though it were really our business. And in Baquba this week, where we have massed troops against 300 to 500 Al Qaeda fighters dug in among civilians (because they know we value our men less than their civilians), we are attempting to tell thug from thug. According to The New York Times, our men are equipped "to take fingerprints and other biometric data from every resident who seems to be a potential fighter."
And here lies another part of the answer for my letter-writing reader as to why Iran continues to fire away at us with impunity: In waging war through a microscope, we have lost sight of the big picture.