It is very hard to resist letting the philosopher in me talk in these forums. I try to stay away from philosophical jargon and vocabulary. It is alienating, in many ways. Quoting philosophers is even worse. But, in this case, there is a passage from a philosopher - Zizek - who is unique; he combines philosophy with everyday language and history. This thread reminded me of this passage, quoted at length.

With the global American ideological offensive, the fundamental insight of Graham Greene's The Quiet American is more relevant than ever: We witness the resurgence of the figure of the "quiet American," a naive, benevolent agent who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western freedom. It is just that his intentions totally misfire, or, as Greene put it: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

The underlying presupposition is that under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans. That is our true desire-all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints and they will join us in our ideological dream. It's fitting that in February 2003 the right-wing journalist Stephen Schwartz used the phrase "capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution around the entire world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the enemy to a more aggressive stance.

It is the United States that is now, as the defunct USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush said, "Freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the almighty God's gift to every man and woman in the world," his apparent modesty nonetheless concealed, in the best totalitarian fashion, its very opposite.

...

When Bush celebrated the explosive and irrepressible thirst for freedom as a "fire in the minds of men," the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Dostoevsky used the phrase to describe the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." Today, we already see-and smell-the smoke of this fire.