BruceandNan,

I would suggest that ideas, or ideals, rather than greed or guns motivate conflict. The young men and women who have lately served as suicide bombers were persuaded to act, not bribed or coerced.

Conflicts between ideas, such as exist between liberal, secular democracies and autocratic theocracies, can be very difficult to manage – and then only after the other is understood. The West has only lately given substantial consideration to the Arab Middle East; for the prior four decades, their efforts were correctly focused on containing the Soviet Union.

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Eudaimonia