Self-Loathing West Hides Its Face From the Truth

Reading David Warren is like taking a trip abroad with a very pleasant companion. His thoughtful and insightful pieces have the smell of the far off places that he has known. His desire to see the world for what it is illuminates his work. His latest piece reflects upon the troubles of the Middle-east and the lack of effort exerted by the West to understand and know what is going on.

"Worse, the flow of good information even to the U.S. White House and State Department has largely dried up. This is because the providers of it -- scholars who were actually reading and excerpting transcripts from Arabic, Persian, Turkish -- were successfully demonized as "orientalists" and "neo-conservatives" and successively pushed out of their (typically Pentagon) offices. So that at the highest levels of government in the West, the attitude is now, "We don't want to know."

It is the business of the Pentagon and the State Department to understand the world we live in, and the threats that loom before us. An administration and an entire Western culture that does not seek to know the truth fails its people.