"When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that’s the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trade Center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.
This mirror of "What Went Wrong" wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.
Who were these people? They were us." – Bjorn Staerk, a European war-blogger, able to confront his own complicity in the mistakes we made. (Hat tip: Crooked Timber.)
The Dish 