Not Just a Flesh Wound

I've been meaning to link to a long but worth-reading post by Bryan Preston:

We all know what happened. But bin Laden had gone to school on us. He knew about our political hemophilia. Given time, and a wound in just the right place, we would bleed ourselves to death.

That's why I got worried. I suspected that al Qaeda knew what such a wound could do to us, and was either planning to inflict that wound or hoping we would inflict it on ourselves since it seemed that al Qaeda could no longer mount an attack us US soil. He knew that either way, he could count on US political forces arrayed against the Bush administration to do his heavy lifting once the wound had been inflicted. ...

What we have witnessed in the past week or so has been the bleeding from the Abu Ghraib wound. Al Qaeda got very lucky, because otherwise the war in Iraq was going fairly well for us. Violence had flared up in Iraq, but so had local elections--in which mullahs ran for office and lost to businessmen and doctors. A militia had sprung up to oppose us, but another militia had sprung up to oppose the first militia. We were showing patience and restraint, and applying force properly for the most part and avoiding civilian casualties. The Zarqawi memo told a story of inevitable allied victory and terrorist defeat.

And then Abu Ghraib. And our political opposition thinks it has a "silver bullet," our Senate all but handcuffs our intel operatives, the press goes wild with stories about US "atrocities" even while terrorists saw an innocent American's head off with a machete, and we flagellate ourselves into a stupor from which we may not recover.

The question becomes: do the Westerners loading their silver bullets understand what they are doing, or do they truly believe that dialogue and effacement convince the world's tyrants to just go away?