The United States is beginning to understand that projecting force is not the same as projecting influence. Every time I read or hear US-backed government in Lebanon, or US-supported regime in Afghanistan, I cringe. The biggest problem those people and the government in Iraq have is that they are perceived as US-backed, which the people of that region understand means US-controlled. No matter what we say our reasons are, we are alien invaders there. We may be able to reach accommodations with some of the population by paying them money not to shoot at us and blowing up their neighborhoods if they do, but we will never be accepted as "liberators." The people in the Middle East do not feel they need to be liberated from their own cultures. Mr. Kaplan is correct that any solutions will be worked out by the regional powers, including Pakistan and Iran. The best we can hope for is some sort of benign influence on the results. Mao and Mugabe aren't right that all power comes from the gun. Guns can coerce, but they can't guide and most of the time the ones with the guns wind up shooting themselves in the foot. If Al Queda had been more clever and less brutal in Iraq, they would have had more success. The same is true for the Taliban in Pakistan. The way forward for us to salvage something from Bush's fiascoes is to be more clever and less brutal. I know that is contrary to the way we are told to think of ourselves, but we've tried leading with our chins for the last several years and it doesn't seem to be working very well.