Review of John Rushing's new book

Mother Jones has a review of John Rushing's new book, Mission Al Jazeera. Who is John Rushing? He was the Marine that acted as a liaison to the Al Jazeera reporters in the 2004 documentary Control Room. As the Iraq war continued he became more disillusioned with the way the war was being handled. After resigning his commission, he then took a job as a correspondent for the English language version of Al Jazeera. But Rushing is not some liberal who hates America:

Ultimately, Rushing seems to be writing for an audience of disillusioned conservatives—which may be what he is: Someone who sees the United States' blunders in the Middle East as oversights rather than machinations and for whom engaging with other cultures is a novel but welcome idea. Rushing's main message is that Americans and Arabs need to learn more about each other's cultures and histories—an idea which hardly seems radical, but has nonetheless managed to stir up a fair amount of controversy.

Our (America's) inability to understand other cultures will continue to get us in trouble. Iraq after the war is not like Germany after WWII; we should not have expected a rapid rise of democracy just because we arrived. It doesn't help that fifty years ago, we helped to undermine democracy in Iraq's neighbor, Iran, just because we didn't like the things the Prime Minister was doing. Believe it or not, our leaders may talk about "spreading democracy" but they don't always have the purest of intentions towards foreign nations.