(via Andrew Sullivan) Heartwarming story from Boxing Central about the Iraqi boxing team.   This quote really caught my eye:

The team also has an American trainer helping them. Maurice "Termite" Watkins was a great amateur and was a contender at 135 and 140 pounds as a pro. Watkins was carried out on the shoulders of the Iraqi team after the competition in Karbala on Tuesday.

"So what if he is American?" asked Bahaa Abdel Hussein. "The important thing is that he is helping us to reach the Olympics. We are athletes and we are not interested in politics."

Substitute "not interested in politics" with "not interested in Jihad" and you get an idea of what success in Iraq will ultimately look like.  Just as these guys are athletes, not Jihadi's, others will consider themselves Bankers, not Jihadi's.   Homebuilders, not Jihadi's.  Bakers, not Jihadi's.  Engineers, not Jihadi's.  And so on. 

The Mullah's will complain about Iraqi's who seek success in this world (and at the Olympics, no less!) rather than 72 virgins in the next but the Iraqi's will be better for it.  And piece by piece, Iraqi's will share these dreams of the hear-and-now with others in the region.

Eventually, Americans won't longer be regarded as a bucket of undifferentiated infidels but rather a few will become fellow athletes, trainers, entertainers, scientists, engineers, bankers, and so on.  Acknowledging that we're not one big, evil mass but actually a collection of individuals - and that some of us actually share the same motives and ideals - is a massive first step towards tolerance and cohabitation.  

But seeing this first requires that Iraqi's see themselves as individuals, with individual goals and aspirations, and with initiative and effort being the driving force -- boxing, in this case, is a rather convenient example.  It will take time and won't be without risk.

I know how incredibly idealistic this sounds BUT, when you knock down the rhetoric this happens all the time in the Real World.  As much as I despise Chirac, I work with French engineers on an engineer-to-engineer basis and NOT in some weird, overt American-to-Frenchman way.   I clearly recognize that they do the same for me regardless of their feelings towards Bush.  The fact that we silently have these mutual expectations of each other, at the individual citizen level, is why American-French relations -- as crazy as they occasionally seem -- are nevertheless far more sane than, say American-Saudi ones.  We've got relatively clear, predictive, and reciprocal mental models of each other's intentions and use that to manage our relationship.

Similar economically driven exchanges and impressions are now generally the norm between the Americans and erstwhile skeptics like the Chinese, Russians, Germans, Japanese, Indians and so on.  I'm sure that some forefather of a Chinese entrepreneur spent his waking hours figuring out how best to blow up NYC, while his son is now instead trading on the NYSE and looking forward to shopping on 5th Avenue.  (in fact, the cozy relationship between the PLA and corporate China make it somewhat likely that at least a few of these father/son pairs exist). 

I'm not saying that Anti-Americanism will magically reduce to zero.   It will just morph from crazed fanatics willing to extinguish their own lives whilst taking a chunk from our national flesh into something more akin to the heated conversations in the cafe's of Paris, Brussels, or Moscow.  A source of concern nonetheless but far from a mortal one.