We are seeing fewer and fewer pictures on the evening news of Palestinians and Israelis fighting with each other. But while this might seem to be a good thing - for surely no person can be counted good who wishes to see young people killing each other if the cause seems unwinnable and the casualty list unlimitable - in fact it simply indicates that at least for the moment things are worse in other parts of the world. And this is - as Telhami argues in The Stakes: America and the Middle East - problematic on two accounts. The first of these is relatively simple: Many civilians, no small number of them children, are being killed in this war, and this is by definition a tragedy. The second of these is more complex, and this latter is the central argument of this book.
Telhami argues that the current administration presents an overly simplified view of the "war on terror" that tends to focus on one nation at a time and one cause at a time, neither of which is justified. But rather than simply blaming the Bush administration for specific policy decisions such as the decision to invade Iraq (although certainly Telhami does not believe that it is blameless), the book focuses on five ways in which both the administration and many ordinary Americans conceive of terrorism and how these ways differ from many citizens in Muslim countries. A number of writers (such as Krog, 2000; and Holland, 1999) have written about similar dynamics in other conflicts in which terrorism has been a key weapon.
1) Americans have seen the right to defend themselves as extending beyond what many others have seen. While most Western and many non-Western nations sympathized with the plight of the American people after the 9/11 attacks, and many and probably most non-Americans believed that the United States has the right to defend itself in terms of its own territory and people being attacked (for this is a generally acknowledged right of
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