James Lileks recently published a 2 paragraph summary of press coverage of the Israeli-Hamas situation that I HAD to quote:

The top-of-the-hour radio news played today's news just as you’d expect - everything shoved through the tit-for-tat template. Israel attempts to take out a terror leader; Hamas “responds” with a bombing. As if they’re equal. As if targeting the car that ferries around some murderous SOB is the same as sending a blissed-out teenager to blow nails and screws through the flesh of afternoon commuters so he can bury himself in the heaving bosom of the heavenly whorehouse. Cycle of violence, don't you know.

They don’t have helicopters, we're told, so they use suicide bombers. [vv - emphasis mine]  If they had helicopters, they would have strafed the bus and everyone waiting at the corner. Give them a nation where Hamas runs unchecked, and they’ll have helicopters. They won't be Apaches. The bill of sale will be calculated in Euros and the manual written in French. By then the excuse for the terror won't be oppression; it'll be "the legacy of oppression." Sometimes I swear the mainstream media won't take a look at the Palestinian's horrid death-cult subculture until we learn that a suicide bomber played "Doom" at an Internet cafe for five minutes. And then they'll blame Intel.

I'm hardly man enough to propose better, nuanced phrasing to Master Lilek.   BUT, the logic here is actually even more viciously circular.  A culture that relies on suicide bombers will never build helicopters. 

A culture based on face, that extols the virtues of victimhood, and that actively discourages honest introspection and tolerance for dissent / self-criticism will never be able to solve the human and technical challenges necessary to build & fly an Apache.  A design conflict between 2 engineers building an aircraft engine isn't something that can be adjudicated by a closer reading of the Koran.  Building complex technology requires that senior designers be humbled not just by nature but occasionally by junior designers.   It requires accepting that sometimes the absolute best intentions are just flat out wrong.  You need to recognize that absolutist, blinding passion isn't the test of what's Right but often the heart of what's wrong.  And most of all, it requires building a cultural psyche that's resilient & accepts that Truth is discovered through an open process of trial and error instead of revealed by studying the ancients.

The hideous complexity being tackled isn't just the design of the machine but rather the design of the human organization & individuals behind it.  Technological products aren't created in abstract of the underlying values and inter-personal beliefs of the designers involved - a fact that far too few in the political world understand.   PoMo's cringe at the inescapable conclusion if you accept that tech products are a product of a culture.   Given that some tech products are superior to others, thus so are some cultures.   (If you need proof that tech evolution is "directional" and can be objectively graded, just ask a Hamas leader if he'd prefer trading in the suicide belt for an Apache)