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Go Read The Belmont Club Now: bq. But since it is Al Qaeda's policy to precipitate civil war in Iraq and America's goal to hold it together, the Sunnis in Fallujah will be safe from massive reprisal for the present, though the perpetrators of this recent outrage are living out their last hours. Yet even if the challenge can be met without destroying Fallujah it is uncertain whether it can be accomplished without destroying Fallujah's culture. In a wider sense the ritual dragging and meathook hangings, the passing out of sweets and cold drinks to celebrate the death of the infidel are things not confined to Sunni triangle. The West Bank festivities after September 11, the famous scene of Palestinian youths holding out their bloodstained hands in almost sexual ecstasy as they tear a Jew limb from limb, or troops pursuing Islamic rebels on a Philippine island seemingly littered with detached heads poses an existential problem for Western democracy. They are the 21st century equivalents of finding the crematoriums of Auschwitz and Dachau or being forced to watch, with unaverted eyes, the wholesale extermination of a Chinese city under the banner of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They leave us wondering whether there are ideas on earth which cannot claim the protection of tolerance and democratic space. This is just one paragraph. You have a lot more to read. Go now here and read.