Okay, so I have one last post to offer up before I go away for a while.  Enjoy. 

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended. ~The New York Times

If the characterisation of Bush’s attitude at this meeting is accurate, it goes a long way towards explaining the man’s limitations: the limitations of his imagination, his knowledge and his grasp of the politics of the region.  Here is someone who seems to earnestly believe that we have done the Shi’ites a great service and that they should be appropriately grateful.  As I suggested the other day, gratitude of the sort we might expect might simply not be possible for them to give.  But in any case Mr. Bush’s frustration seems to stem from the fact that he cannot see why anyone would be terribly upset over our providing weapons and political support to the people bombing their co-religionists.  Surely their gratitude for liberation should outweigh anything so meager as religious solidarity!  Herein lies the core problem: the belief that these people will prefer their new liberated status so much more than their previous religious loyalties (loyalties which they have only just recently been able to start expressing openly and ebulliently again–thanks, indeed, to the invasion) that their gratitude to the liberator will trump solidarity with their fellow Shi’ites.  We truly have become a profoundly secular culture if Mr. Bush, supposed embodiment of evangelical religious enthusiasm, cannot perceive the reasons for Iraqi Shi’ites expressing their support for other Shi’ites in a time of conflict.  Given his anemic or rather nonexistent expression of concern for the Christians of Lebanon, perhaps this response should not surprise anyone.