MUST READING - AT 10:15 A.M. ET:  One of the best paragraphs I've recently read.  From Reuel Marc Gerecht at The Weekly Standard: 

In diplomacy and espionage, there is no worse mistake than "mirror-imaging," that is, ascribing to foreigners your own actions and views. For Westerners this is especially debilitating, given our modern proclivity to assume that others pursue their interests in secular, material, and guilt-ridden ways. Confession is an important part of the Western tradition; self-criticism is less acute elsewhere. Americans, the British, the Spanish, and the French have written libraries about their own imperialistic sins; Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Russians have not. In an unsuccessful effort to reach out to Iran's clerical regime in 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the actions of the entire Western world. Last week, in response to President Barack Obama's let's-talk greetings broadcast to Iran, theocratic overlord Ali Khamenei, "supreme leader" of the Islamic Republic of Iran, enumerated 30 years' worth of America's dastardly deeds against the Islamic revolution--but not a peccadillo that the clerical regime had committed against any Western country.

COMMENT:  Spot on.  Please read the rest of the piece, one of the most perceptive I've read recently.  I hope they read it in the White House.  But, since it's from The Weekly Standard, they'll probably ridicule it.  Neocon stuff, you know.

March 28, 2009