Who these people are, what drives them, and how they can hate Western civilization so much while being showered with all of its benefits is a question that will take years for many people to grapple with. Most commentators have only begun to explore this question, and their results have been mixed. (See, for example, a recent effort by John McWhorter.)

But the lesson of Iraq is that this ideological conflict is the real key to America's long-term survival. Winning the war requires more than military strength. It requires moral and intellectual strength. Only moral strength will give us the confidence to persist against the enemy, and only intellectual strength will allow us to win the internal ideological struggle against Western self-hatred.

If the danger within our own culture is the first lesson of Iraq, the second lesson is about the culture of the Arab and Islamic world--which is now revealed as being much worse than most Americans were ready to believe. Throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, large minorities of the population--in some areas, such as the Palestinian territories, they are outright majorities--do not blink at constant warfare and destruction, at mothers willingly sending their sons to become suicide bombers, and at a ruthless chaos in which every sect and tribe seeks to impose a violent domination over every other sect and tribe.

This is the curse of Iraqi politics. It is why Iraq took so long to create a constitution. It is why Iraq's elections for its first permanent government were followed by a four-month-long political standoff before Iraqis could appoint a new prime minister. It is why every major political faction in Iraq also maintains its own armed militia. In the tradition of the Arab world--a tradition deeply rooted in Islam--the political ideal is not individual liberty nor even peaceful coexistence, but rather domination, the absolute rule of one sect, tribe, or faction over everyone else. This is why the Arabs so easily imported every totalitarian ideology they found in the West, indiscriminately mixing the influences of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to provide the inspiration, first for the secular Arab dictatorships of the 20th century, and now for religious dictatorship.

Americans have never paid much attention to the internal cultural and political battles of the Arab and Muslim world. After the invasion of Iraq, they have had to pay attention, because the success of a crucial battle of the War on Terrorism depends on the political struggle in Iraq.

What they have seen is the ultimate refutation of the Multiculturalism of the left, which assured us that all cultures are "equally valuable" and that the cultures of the Third World are more equal than others. But Iraq has also been a rebuke to the glib confidence of some on the right who assured us that Arabs and Muslims are just like us, equally prepared to benefit from the blessings of a free society. In fact, the Iraqis have turned out to be far more violent, primitive, and tribalistic.

I think this lesson has been the most demoralizing to the average American. If Americans are "war weary," it is not because we have suffered massive casualties, because we haven't; most people do not even know anyone who has been killed or injured in Iraq. And it is certainly not because we are suffering from economic privation; this is a small and relatively inexpensive war. Americans are "war weary" because they are tired of having to pay attention to the unfamiliar and unattractive culture of the Middle East.

But the primitivism of the Arab and Islamic world does not mean that we should give up on Iraq. It is, in fact, the very reason we have to keep trying, because we can now glimpse the full brutality of the forces that will take over the Middle East if we do not oppose them with a better alternative.

And although it is easy to forget this, in the chaos that has come since, Iraq has also offered us a different lesson. The multiple elections held in Iraq in 2005, followed by that year's spontaneous popular demonstrations against Syrian tyranny in Lebanon--demonstrations inspired in part by the example of Iraq--all of these events are reminders that something better is possible. Even within the corrupt culture of the contemporary Arab world, the human spirit and a desire for some better kind of life is not dead.

But we have learned that the struggle to support the best men in the Arab and Muslim world, and to help them reform and improve the violent culture of their region, will be much more difficult and take much longer than many Americans had hoped.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone