The Gift of the West‪.‬

With the Cold War over, the historic conflict between Islam and the West has retaken center stage, and we are again embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Old fights about hallowed ground have become new fights about what's under that ground, wrapped in a larger crusade for regional stability. But in the case of Iraq, the United States' muscular foreign policy is, at least rhetorically, aimed at something higher: something beyond weapons searches, the construction of military bases, and the securing of an important commodity. It is the final assault upon a formerly amiable dictatorship in an attempt to press it and its neighboring Muslim societies to become more Western. Americans are devoting many lives and enormous amounts of money to this enterprise because many of them and their leaders believe the Western way of life is not only a fitting model but one that is to a certain degree transferable: the West has a gift to give. My view of the West's gift is different. I think of it not as a political or economic gift that we have to give but rather as a spiritual gift that we received from the literal, physical west itself, by virtue of Europe's perch on the unexplored Atlantic and the sheer scale and plenty of the new hemisphere colonized by a self-selecting, "America-loving" (to use Emerson's phrase) fragment of European society.