ABSTRACT
The chaos people are witnessing these days in the Middle East reflects not only a failure of American policy but also a pitiful lack of American self-knowledge. Despite a lack of dynamic government in Washington, they have been trying to convince the Arab world that every Middle Eastern nation would be better off practicing our native brand of constitutional democracy. In a few cases, it seemed as if the people were not so much replacing an Arab political leader as substituting a competing religious ideology. The naive belief that all the peoples in the Arab world prefer a system of rule that separates Church from State has inevitably led people to bet on the wrong horses in the Middle East. Each "awakening" in the Arab Spring may have started as a political conflict between liberal and conservative factions, or between left-wing and right-wing ideologies.
