The Enemy At Home (4 page)

To American liberals, the great social revolution of the past few decades—with its 1.5 million abortions a year, with one in two marriages ending in divorce, with homosexuality coming out of the closet and now seeking full social recognition and approval—is viewed through the prism of an expansion of civil liberties, “freedom of choice,” and personal autonomy. Thus it is seen as a moral achievement. But viewed from the perspective of people in the traditional societies of the world, notably the Muslim world, these same trends appear nothing less than the shameless promotion of depravity. So it is not surprising to see pious Muslims react with horror at the prospect of this new American morality seeping into their part of the world. They fear that this new morality will destroy their religion and way of life—and they are quite right!

Osama bin Laden chose his words carefully when he said that 9/11 was an attempt to scorch “the head of the snake.” In the view of the Islamic radicals, America is the embodiment of pagan depravity. According to bin Laden, this is why religious Muslims must stop fighting local battles and concentrate on destroying Satan’s empire on earth. This is seen as nothing less than a divine mission. In bin Laden’s words, 9/11 showed “America struck by Almighty God in its vital organs.”
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For the Islamic radicals, 9/11 was a message to America that said: Your America is a repulsive sewer. This sewer is now pouring itself into the rest of the world. We will fight to the death to keep it out of our part of the globe. In fact, we will fight in any way we can until every vestige of your sick, demented culture is eradicated from the holy ground of Islam. We may be poor and oppressed, but we would rather be poor and oppressed than become the immoral, perverted society that America has become. So get the hell out of the Middle East, because you represent the values of the Devil.

THUS WE HAVE
the first way in which the cultural left is responsible for 9/11. The left has produced a moral shift in American society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and immorality. This deluge threatens to engulf our society and is imposing itself on the rest of the globe. The Islamic radicals are now convinced that America represents the revival of pagan barbarism in the world, and 9/11 represents their ongoing battle with what they perceive to be the forces of Satan.

I have focused so far on American cultural depravity and its global impact. But there is a second way in which the cultural left has helped to produce 9/11. In the domain of foreign policy, the left has helped to produce the conditions that led to the destruction of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. First, under Jimmy Carter, the liberals helped to get rid of the shah and to install the Khomeini regime in Iran. The pretext was the shah’s human rights failings, but the result was the abdication of the shah and the triumph of Khomeini. The Khomeini revolution, which has proved the viability of Islamic theocracy in the modern age, was the match that lit the conflagration of radicalism and fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world. It is Khomeini’s success that paved the road to 9/11.

During the Clinton administration, liberal foreign policy conveyed to bin Laden and his coconspirators a strong impression of American vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice. When Al Qaeda attacked and killed a handful of marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from Somalia. When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the USS
Cole
in 2000, President Clinton responded with desultory counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These American actions, bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike directly at America on September 11, 2001.

Now that America is fighting back, seeking to uproot the terrorists and transform the political landscape in the Middle East, the left is fighting hard to prevent that campaign from succeeding. It does so not simply by resisting at every stage whatever actions are proposed and implemented to win the war, but, just as important, by unceasingly fueling the hatred of American foreign policy among Muslims. It is a common belief among Muslims, for example, that the main reason America consistently sides with Israel is that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim lawyer I interviewed in Tunis puts the matter this way: “I keep hearing,” he says, “that countries base their foreign policy on self-interest. The self-interest of America is in obtaining access to oil, and we are the ones who have all the oil. The Israelis don’t have any oil. So why is America always on the side of Israel and against the Muslims? Please don’t tell me it’s because Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East. After all, Israel is one of the main reasons why so many Muslims are America’s enemy. So I am forced to conclude that there is only one reason why America acts against its self-interest and backs Israel. The reason is that Americans hate Muslims. America is violently opposed to Islam. So the Christians are making allies with the Jews to get rid of Islam.”

This is a relatively articulate expression of one of the central themes of fundamentalist propaganda. The argument is that America is a bigoted nation that wants to take over Muslim countries and steal their oil. In reality this claim is absurd. Americans do not hate Muslims, and America does not want to occupy the Muslim world or seize its natural resources. America supports Israel for complex reasons of history, common ideology, and the domestic political influence of Jewish Americans. So this Islamic perception of American foreign policy is utterly wrong. But it is routinely confirmed by the American left. The writings of leading leftists affirm that, yes, America is a racist power that wants to conquer and plunder non-Western peoples. Political scientist Anne Norton writes that anti-Muslim bigotry is now “the unacknowledged cornerstone of American foreign policy.” Legal scholar Mari Matsuda insists that “the history of hating Arabs as a race runs strong in the United States,” where Arabs are “reviled even more than blacks.” Rashid Khalidi contends that America’s actions are based on “wildly inaccurate and often racist stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East.” Writing in the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram,
Edward Said claims that “for decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam” and that America’s Middle East policy is based on blind hatred for stereotypical “sheikhs and camel jockeys.”
¹⁹
By confirming Muslims in their worst prejudices, the American left has strengthened their conviction that America is evil and deserves to be destroyed.

To repeat—because this is a point on which I do not wish to be misunderstood—I am in no sense suggesting that the left is disloyal to America. To say this is to confuse the success of the Bush administration, or even of American foreign policy, with the interest of the country as a whole. As we saw earlier with Senator Byrd, the left has its own view of what’s good for America, and it is fiercely loyal to that ideal. So disloyalty is not the issue. The issue is why the left is so passive, reluctant, and even oppositional in its stance in the American war on terrorism. My answer is that the cultural left opposes the war against the radical Muslims because it wants them to succeed in defeating President Bush in particular and American foreign policy in general. Far from seeking to destroy the movement that bin Laden and the Islamic radicals represent, the American left is secretly allied with that movement to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy. The left would like nothing better than to see America in general, and President Bush in particular, forced out of Iraq. Although such an outcome would plunge Iraq into further chaos and represent a catastrophic loss for American foreign policy, it would represent a huge win for the cultural left, in fact the left’s greatest foreign policy victory since the Vietnam War.

The notion that the American left seeks victory for Islamic radicals in Iraq may at first glance seem implausible. One person who does not think so, however, is bin Laden. In his October 30, 2004, videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential election, bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced Bush for election rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil companies and contractors like Halliburton, for curtailing civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to school-children while the World Trade Center burned.
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Apart from the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” bin Laden sounds exactly like Michael Moore. And why not? In opposing President Bush and American foreign policy, they are both on the same side.

Moreover, several leading figures on the left are very candid about what they are fighting for. Moore writes, “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Author James Carroll commends the insurgents for exemplifying “the simple stubbornness of human beings who refuse to be told what to think and feel.” Writing in salon.com, Joe Conason calls on Bush to enter into a “negotiated settlement” with the Iraqi insurgents, an outcome Conason concedes would be a “defeat for the United States and a perceived victory for Al Qaeda and its allies.” Gwynne Dyer states in a recent book, “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.” Activist Arundhati Roy declares on behalf of the left, “We must consider ourselves at war.”
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What she means is that the left is fighting a political battle not against Al Qaeda or Islamic fundamentalism but rather against the Bush administration.

In placing the cultural left and the Islamic fundamentalists on the same side, I am not trying to score a partisan or even an ideological point. In fact, if the political left and the Islamic fundamentalists are in the same foreign policy camp, then by the same token the political right and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the same wavelength on social issues. The left is allied with some radical Muslims in opposition to American foreign policy, and the right is allied with an even larger group of Muslims in their opposition to American social and cultural depravity. This is the essential new framework I propose for understanding American foreign policy and American social issues. I conclude by spelling out the implications of these alignments for American conservatives.

In a way, conservatives are in the best position to understand why traditional cultures fear and hate America. That’s because conservatives share many of the moral concerns of traditional people. The right should not be deaf to complaints about the dissolution of religious and family ties, because it worries about those things in this country. The right understands the implications of the erosion of traditional morality, because it has seen the consequences of that erosion in the United States. Thus the right can play an important mediating role in helping America and the traditional cultures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to understand one another better.

But so far the right has kept its blinders on since 9/11. The isolationist right labors under the illusion that America can retreat behind its borders and fight a one-front battle against the cultural left at home. As a practical matter, this is foolish. Islamic hatred of America will not go away if American troops come home, because this hatred is not based on the presence of American troops abroad. Hasty withdrawals from Afghanistan or Iraq will further embolden bin Laden and his allies and make the United States less, not more, safe.

The right’s myopia, however, is not confined to the Buchanan and libertarian wings. Mainstream conservatives (including the Bush administration) understand better the military need to take the war to the enemy, and also appreciate that there is a political battle to be fought against the left at home. But most conservatives do not see how these two battles are related to each other. Moreover, the Bush administration is wrong to see the war against Islamic radicalism as a purely military operation. The military component is indispensable, but it is not sufficient to achieve victory. The reason the war seems endless is that the ranks of the enemy continue to grow. It is simply not possible to kill all the terrorists, because the engine of Islamic rage is powerful enough to keep generating more of them. The only way to win the war is to create a wedge between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims, and to support traditional Islam against radical Islam.

To date, the Bush administration has made no serious attempt to articulate the moral case for American foreign policy to Muslims (or to anyone else). Many conservatives compound the problem by defending American decadence against the foreigners who hate and fear it. Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration began consulting Hollywood executives and Madison Avenue executives to market “brand America” abroad. To this day the administration persists with this foolishness. Strangely enough what the administration is promoting are liberal solutions—separation of church and state, feminism, and the idea of the working woman—together with the debased values of American popular culture. Of course these “solutions” only compound the problem. They further alienate traditional Muslims and push them toward the fundamentalist camp. So the liberals are correct that U.S. policy is “creating more terrorists”—but not for the reasons they think.

The Bush administration and the conservatives must stop uncritically promoting American popular culture, because it is producing a blowback of Muslim rage. With a few exceptions, the right should not bother to defend American movies, music, and television. From the point of view of traditional values, they are indefensible. Moreover, why should the right stand up for the left’s debased values? Why should
our
people defend
their
America? Rather, American conservatives should join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.