"It will take two generations of war and occupation to have any long term influence on how the Arabs view the Western world"
That's a very contestable point. These viewpoints are not so fixed as one may imagine, and had the war been properly carried out, I imagine that we would already have succeeded at putting Iraq on the road to modernization, and thus establishing a cultural base which might influence the rest of the Middle East.

But that misses the larger point, that it is probably solely due to US intervention that the Middle East is as stabile as it is, and if it were not for our presence its' citizens would be much more miserable and the oil would not be flowing. For over a decade now it has the been the US that has been key in maintaining a balance of power amongst the nations, and to simply withdraw, as you propose, would be to pull the carpet out from under them, screwing the Middle East, the United States, and ultimately modern society.

By the way, the fact that we are obliged by current economics to create and maintain such efforts (military initiatives, support for dictatorships, etc.) in the Middle East is one of the best reasons to develop alternatives to oil. But we've got to stop consuming oil before we stop supporting the Middle East.