LIANE HANSEN, host:
Stories from the Middle East have preoccupied writer Gina Nahai all her life. Nahai is the best-selling author of "Caspian Rain" and a blogger for the Huffington Post. Nahai says if the West wants to create peace within the Middle East, it needs to learn about the values of both cultures. She sent this audio blog.
Ms. GINA NAHAI (Author, "Caspian Rain"; Blogger, The Huffington Post): In the Middle East, unlike in the United States, the choice is not always between good and bad. Often, it's between bad and worse. For most people, success is never whole - expectations are tailored not to what is ideal but to what is possible. Reform has always worked better than revolution. And it has come not at the point of the sword but through the slow and painstaking labor of education.
Ideas, cultural exchanges - real learning take years, sometimes decades, to come to fruition. But if you look closely enough, you will see that American arts and literature - its film and fashion and music, its technology and science - have long ago found a way into the hearts of the people of the Middle East. You can resist the invasion of an army, Victor Hugo said, but you can't resist the invasion of an idea whose time has come.
We have wasted precious years and resources, chasing quick fixes in the Middle East. It's time we learn to accept our own limitations, came to appreciate the power of arts and education, and invested in planting the seeds of ideas that will grow and blossom in their own good time.
HANSEN: An audio blog from Gina Nahai. She's the best-selling author of "Caspian Rain" and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.