[link|http://jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/rauch.html|This one could fit under a lot of forum headings here]

Excerpts:

For a society -- as opposed to just a few people in it -- to thrive over time, it needs to transmit values and habits that encourage industry and thrift, learning and curiosity, and trust and cooperation. I'll go out on a limb. Absent a natural cataclysm or foreign conquest, any culture that transmits such future-oriented values will succeed, no matter where it is, how it starts out, and who makes up its members. Any culture that cannot transmit those values or that, worse yet, transmits their opposites will stagnate or fail, no matter how many advantages it starts out with...

Because dysfunctional cultures are dysfunctional, they tend to die out over time. But they are not helpless. They can prolong their survival by isolating themselves and demonizing the outside world. If that fails -- if the outside world filters in and if the talented and ambitious filter out -- they can lash out. They can bolster internal unity by fomenting external fear. The one sort of power a dysfunctional culture possesses, whether in Kandahar or Ramallah or Belfast or Chicago, is the power to terrorize -- through violence, charisma, and a swaggering embrace of death. The power to frighten the pudgy, prosperous bourgeoisie is the only kind of power against the outside world that some gangbangers and militant Islamists will ever know...

Hunters say a wounded animal is more dangerous than a healthy one. The task for the West is not so much to defeat militant Islam as it is to manage militant Islam's self-destruction -- possibly a trickier job. Looking ahead, beyond Afghanistan to Pakistan and Sudan and Saudi Arabia and other fever swamps of militant Islam, it may help to bear in mind that what initially looked like the clash of two cultures is better understood as the catastrophic collapse of one of them.

With you it's all giant ants.