Ralph Peters speaketh Truth.   Few folks tell it like it is as plainly and frankly as he manages to do on a very consistent basis.   His latest article in the NYPost is a short, very readable summary of why the Islam vs. West battle has been raging for almost 10 centuries -- if not overtly, at least subtly in the minds of the Islamicists while we were distracted with the dotcom boom.

Still, even Huntington fell short by suggesting that this clash of civilizations was something new. Clashing is what civilizations do. Especially monotheist civilizations, with their one-God, one-path-to-the-truth, our-way-is-best convictions.

...We should not be surprised at the current clash of civilizations. It would be far more surprising if it were not occurring. Such conflict is the rule, not the exception.

...But [the solution is] not peace at any price. And cooperation doesn't work unilaterally.

Our soldiers in Iraq aren't engaged in a religious crusade. But ours is, undeniably, a cultural crusade, based upon our belief that the values of our civilization, from human rights to popular sovereignty, are superior to archaic forms of oppression.

The article is short, crisp, and lovely reading.    Go there NOW.

Many commentators who muse about the nature of the human species (Thomas Sowell, Dinesh D'souza, Steven Pinker - just to name a diverse lot) argue that differences in political opinion basically come down to one of 2 overarching views of raw Human Nature - "Tragic" vs. "Utopian".   (Yes, there are a million shades of grey here and I don't feel like slicing & dicing...let's just say that these are the 2 poles.)

The Rousseau-inspired Utopians believe that humans are generally born noble and are corrupted by the machinations of Society.   "Society" is an engineered artifact of the Power-holders (Rich White Men) whose design ends up maximizing the individual vices of the disenfranchised (violence, envy, poverty, and so on).  Thus, if Society can be re-engineered - usually via the government - then the ailings of the human being can be eradicated.  If only society could be structured the right way, they would argue, humans would love each other equally and violence would go away.

Hobbesian / Lockean-inspired "Tragics" believe that the seeds of strife are embedded deep into the human condition.   There's violence in human societies because the humans themselves have a violence gene.   There's poverty in human societies because humans in the raw are impoverished and the social machinations that build wealth are the exception rather than the rule across societies.   The fact that we've constructed a society in the US that's as violence-free and poverty-free as we've managed to enjoy comes from our social systems recognize these underlying failings and accommodating the problem (e.g. via checks-and-balances, individual empowerment, property rights, and so on.)   Violence is tempered not because we try to make individual hearts virtuous but primarily because of the threat of a harsh, almost-equally-violent imprisonment.

What Peters points out in his essay is a similar, essential, underlying faultline belief between the 2 conflicting views on MidEast policy - is conflict inevitable given the wide difference in social theories or is the conflict engineered due to our multicultural-failings and specific policy initiatives?  Who provides the clearest model of man between the Islamicists and the West - Rousseau or Hobbes / Locke?  The Clash of Civilizations, Peters argues, was inevitable and can only be cured by a deep injection of our cultural values (Liberalism, Capitalism, Democracy, Individualism, and so on) into Islamic society.