The left and the right see the ‘War on Terrorism’ in diametrically opposite ways. Nowhere is this clearer than in Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Let me run down some of the differences.
Event: The London or Madrid bombings.
View from the right: these events are aimed at demoralizing the West and separating our allies from the fight against Islamic terrorism. They illustrate how important it is that our intelligence agencies have expanded powers to snoop on American citizens and justify harsh interrogations, and the suspension of habeas corpus.
View from the left: these events are direct retribution for the UK and Spain’s alliance with an illegal war that was trumped up on ‘fixed facts’. No war in Iraq, no bombings in London and Madrid. They illustrate that we are pursuing the wrong strategy. We cannot sacrifice our liberty for an illusory amount of security.
We can go down the line, but we will see these opposite interpretations over and over again. For example, who is more closely aligned with the worldview of the terrorists? The left or the right?
For D’Souza, it’s the left.
D’Souza: Actually, it is the left that is allied with the radical Muslims. The Islamic radicals supply the terror, and the left uses that to demoralize the American people to persuade them to “cut and run” from Iraq and from the Middle East. My point is that conservatives should counter this by building alliances with the traditional Muslims, who are the majority in the Islamic world.
That is how D’Souza sees it. I see it completely differently. In my view, the radicals supply the terror and the right uses it to justify abridging our civil liberties and fighting wars of aggression that they wanted to fight anyway. In my view, the terrorists do the dirty work of the right-wing imperialists, military and energy contractors, and political strategists. I don’t know if there can be any common ground at all between our two worldviews. D’Souza goes so far as to call me the enemy.
Realistically, Bush now is fighting two wars: one over there, and a political war with the left over here, and I’m more concerned about the political war here, because the most likely way to lose the war in Iraq is to lose the war for the American mind.
No one likes to be accused of treason, but D’Souza does have the germ of a point here. There are financial and military limits to how long we can stay in Iraq, but it is domestic political pressure that will cause the United States (not to lose, but to) admit defeat and leave Iraq. As long as the American people support the military occupation of Iraq we can stay there. So, those that undermine the support for staying there by, say, reporting on the facts, are hastening military defeat. That is why one of the things I have been advising the President to do for a long time is to dramatically define down our goals in Iraq so that, when we leave, we can spin it as less of a defeat. I was extremely depressed when, in the midterm rhetorical battles, the administration kept ramping up expectations for Iraq.
I want to focus on one more theme from D’Souza’s book. This is his interpretation of why radicalized Muslims hate us and attack us. Here is what D’Souza says:
D’Souza: The United Nations, and many of the other international agencies that have mostly been abandoned by the right, have been taken over and staffed by leftist Americans and Europeans pushing a secular, anti-religious agenda worldwide. When Muslims see groups such as Amnesty International undermining traditional Muslim norms in the name of “human rights,” and other groups filing lawsuits everywhere to change social legislation, they see America doing this. Many Muslims see that the secular left has been successful in emasculating Christianity in the United States, and virtually eliminating it in Europe, and believe that it’s now trying to do the same to Islam. In this perception, of course, they’re completely right.
This is where the Christian right and the so-called moderate Muslims can make common cause. They can make common cause against sexual permissiveness, abortion, and homosexuality. This is the Pamela Anderson’s tits argument for the clash of civilizations. But is Dinesh right?
I’m asking a secular question: Why did the people who did 9/11 do it? It’s not because of U.S. troops in Mecca — there are no U.S troops in Mecca; and it’s not because “they hate us for our freedom,” as Bush once said. Actually, they hate us for how we use our freedom. And they see America as imposing its perverted culture, its sexual freedom, its extreme version of separation of church and state, on the rest of the world.
But of course it’s not America that is promoting all this, it is the cultural left. So it is the cultural left’s view of America � a kind of Gomorrah on a hill � and its efforts to promote those values abroad that is the main source of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.
In answer to this theory I quote Usama bin-Laden. This is from bin-Laden’s 1998 fatwa that preceded the African embassy bombings. Please note that he listed three grievances. Also note which order and priority he put on those grievances.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.
The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.
When bin-Laden offered this analysis it seemed wildly off-base. Very few people in America thought we were about to commit further aggression against Iraq, use Saudi Arabia as a staging post to invade and occupy the country, or ‘annihilate’ what is left of the Iraqi people and humiliate their neighbors. In fact, we weren’t going to do those things and would not have done those things if not for a butterfly ballot in Palm Beach and a 5-4 Republican majority on the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s foreign policy has played out in such a way as to almost make bin-Laden look like a fortune-teller or a psychic.
It cannot be denied that the terrorists that carried out the 9/11 attacks (presumably ordered and planned by bin-Laden) provoked Bush’s response. But it also cannot be denied that D’Souza is wrong when he says that the 9/11 attacks were not inspired by our occupation of Mecca. Actually, we never stationed troops in Mecca, but we stationed them in Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda terrorists don’t make much of a distinction.
The real question for U.S. foreign policy thinkers remains: how do we fulfill our vital objectives in the Middle East at the same time we limit the blowback those objectives inevitably cause?
The left and the right have totally different ideas on this. For the left, it all starts with getting a peace settlement in Palestine. For the right it involves creating a garrison state at home and putting a jackboot on the throats of any government that dares to oppose us in the region.
This makes the following D’Souza statement all the more ironic.
The Muslim world is divided between traditional Muslims, who are socially conservative, and the Islamic radicals who are distinguished by the fact that they want to kill us. Traditional Muslims do espouse some things we reject, but they are right to protest the global degeneracy being promoted by the European and American left. So as conservatives we do have some common political ground with them.
This will help to drive a wedge between traditional and radical Islam, which is the only long-term formula for winning the war on terror. What’s the alternative? For conservatives to declare Islam as the problem and to fight the 1 billion people of the Muslim world abroad, in addition to the left at home? This is foolishness.
At last we have found the common ground. Fighting the one billion people of the Muslim world abroad is indeed ‘foolishness’.
