Let's talk about how all this happened. It happened because we in the West don't understand our

enemies and they know that and they exploit that. In 2004, President George W. Bush gave an address

at the United Nations, in which he said one of the most naive things any president has ever said.

He said, this is a direct quote, when it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no

clash of civilizations. People everywhere are capable of freedom and worthy of freedom. the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations.

People everywhere are capable of freedom and worthy of freedom.

The desire for freedom resides in every human heart.

It's a direct quote from George W. Bush 2004.

That was idiocy then, and it's idiocy now.

It is simply not true.

People have many different priorities.

For a lot of people, their priority is not freedom, Western notions of

freedom. It's adherence to fundamentalist interpretation of Quranic law. For many, their priority isn't

economic development. It's belief in the murder of Jews across the world. But this peculiar Western

belief system that everyone wants freedom has led the West down two separate and

equally stupid paths. Path number one, which we saw over the course of the last 25 years,

was nation building. That's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. The West fooled itself

into believing that tribal peoples with different priorities really, really wanted iPhones

and sexual liberation, and that if we offered those things, they would welcome us with open arms.

Instead of pursuing a realistic foreign policy designed to protect America's interests, we launched off into a utopian world of our own making, and we failed.

Yet we continue to pursue that path today. We continue to act as though, for example, it is Israel's job to build up the infrastructure in Gaza or

provide them water and power even while Hamas murders babies in their cribs and put its own civilians

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