The Enemy At Home (37 page)

The left would like America’s military to become more like Europe’s peacekeeping forces that engage in so-called humanitarian intervention. Traditionally, such intervention has been limited to extreme cases, such as stopping genocide. The left would like to expand the scope so that force is used, as Rifkin puts it, “to protect people’s universal human rights.” In this view, rather than promote democracy, America’s military would be more like a “nanny state” with guns. In a recent article in
Foreign Affairs,
Isobel Coleman calls on the United States to use its power to “champion female education in Iraq.” The U.S. should also “do everything it can to aid Iraqi women’s groups and programs designed to help women leaders there.” In particular, “Washington should consider establishing a women’s college in Baghdad.” Also, “The U.S. should start channeling a significant portion of its reconstruction dollars to Iraqi business women.” Moreover, the U.S. mission should have “an adviser on gender issues” to implement these various initiatives.
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At the risk of being a spoiler at the feminist picnic, one might stop and ask: why should the United States do any of this? Shouldn’t these decisions be made by the Iraqi people through their elected representatives? If the cultural left has its way, the U.S. military would become the enforcement arm of the left’s social agenda. The left seeks to stop parents who use corporal punishment on their children, lock up patriarchal husbands who rule over their families, prosecute people who are intolerant toward homosexuals, take down religious monuments that have been erected with public funds, block the efforts of citizens who object to pornography displays and abortion clinics, and distribute condoms and sex kits in schools and communities around the world. These measures are likely to stir up opposition, so the left needs American power abroad to quell the resistance. Thus the left has an important role in its scheme for the U.S. military. Call it the Immorality Police. Rather than suppress immorality, the unique role of the armed forces would be to enforce it.

To achieve a fundamental transformation of American foreign policy, the left needs America’s current policy to suffer a loss from which it cannot recover. The left seeks to engineer this defeat by imposing so many restraints on Bush that he can neither win the war abroad nor effectively defend against terrorist attacks at home. This strategy sets up a no-lose situation: it is the liberals who encumber the president, yet it is Bush who will be blamed if there is another attack. The left also seeks to demoralize the American people so that they demand immediate withdrawal from Iraq. This is where bin Laden and the Iraqi insurgents come in. The terror they produce is the propaganda the left needs in order to convince the American people that the war is imposing an unacceptably high toll. Even decapitations broadcast over the Internet serve the purpose of disheartening Americans, which is why the left shows no indignation over Al Qaeda’s use of such tactics. When Islamic radicals kidnapped and then brutally murdered four American contractors working in Iraq, the leftist blogger Markos Moulitsas was unmoved. Writing on his Web site, dailykos.com, Moulitsas confessed, “I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit.”
¹⁸

The left’s model for Iraq is its successful campaign a generation ago to sway public opinion against the Vietnam War. Just as liberals in the press were able to turn military victories like the Tet offensive into political defeats, today’s left-leaning journalists are working overtime to turn military and political gains in Iraq into political liabilities. While the military destroys insurgent strongholds in Fallujah, the headlines focus entirely on civilian casualties. As part of this technique, leftists in the press can be counted on to highlight casualty figures: “Death Toll Reaches 2,000!” and so on. As the left knows, the American people don’t like casualties, but what they dislike even more is a cause that cannot succeed. That is why leftist politicians and pundits continually harp on this theme. “The idea that we are going to win the war in Iraq,” declares Democratic national chairman Howard Dean, “is just plain wrong.” Senator Patrick Leahy declares that “it has become increasingly apparent that the most powerful army in the world cannot stop a determined insurgency.” So insistent are these leftist refrains that even mainstream liberals now echo these themes. Zbigniew Brzezinski calls for America to cut its losses and retreat from Iraq rather than following the counsel of “those who mindlessly seek an unattainable victory.”
¹⁹

Although the left cannot say this, it is vital from its point of view for America to withdraw before Iraqi forces are adequately trained to fight the insurgency. To advance the prospects of the left, Bush must lose, and therefore the insurgents must win. Leading leftists seem determined to settle for nothing less than total defeat. In order for this to happen, the left must keep the Iraqi people constantly guessing about whether America will pull out. As long as ordinary Iraqis fear a hasty withdrawal, they will never report insurgent activity to the government or to the Americans. Iraqis know that if American troops withdraw, the informants they leave behind will be the first ones targeted for assassination by the insurgents. Consequently America is deprived of one of its vital tools for winning the war, which is the information provided by law-abiding Iraqi citizens.

If the United States fails in Iraq, then the nation’s infant democracy will be strangled in its crib. More than this, America’s democracy initiative in the Middle East will collapse. This is precisely what the left wants. Not that the left is happy about the prospect of an Al Qaeda–run fundamentalist state in Iraq. It is a worthwhile price to pay, however, for inflicting a devastating defeat on Bush. This will ensure that the Democrats win back the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, restoring the supremacy the Democrats enjoyed for much of the twentieth century.

Islamic radicals like bin Laden, who once considered “America” the enemy, have come to recognize the left as a crucial ally. The radical Muslims know what military strategists from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz have pointed out—the strength of a country is determined by the sum of its military force and its will to fight. When the will is absent, then all the force in the world is useless. Contrary to the relentless propaganda from left-leaning media outlets, in reality there is no way that America can lose the ground war in Iraq. The Shia majority, which makes up 60 percent of the Iraqi population, and the Kurdish minority, which makes up 20 percent, both have a strong vested interest in supporting democracy. They are the de facto allies of America. The Kurds also happen to be one of the most pro-American people in the world. The insurgency is drawing almost exclusively from the Sunni population, which numbers 20 percent. Not that the insurgency makes up one-fifth of the Iraqi population. It is composed of a small fraction of the Sunnis, perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people. So this is not Vietnam, where there were a million men on the other side. The insurgents are ruthless, as shown by their willingness to kill fellow Muslims and attack religious sites in the hope of fomenting social chaos and civil war. So far, this desperation strategy has provoked a good deal of sectarian violence, but as Al Qaeda documents acknowledge, it has little chance to dislodge the existing government. It does not take a degree in military tactics to discover what the insurgents already know: no resistance made up of a few thousand guerrillas can win a war against the Iraqi majority backed up by the resources, training, and might of the U.S. military.

There is one way, however, for the Islamic radicals to win. They can win the war in the American mind. This is where the left fits into bin Laden’s tactical scheme. Bin Laden recognizes that Al Qaeda by itself cannot destroy America’s will to resist. It is impossible for bin Laden to persuade the American people to get out of Iraq. He relies on other Americans to undertake this psychological mission. To bin Laden’s unbelievable good fortune, there is a group in the United States dedicated to precisely this task. The left is Al Qaeda’s secret weapon in the campaign for American public opinion. As bin Laden knows, the left has already succeeded once, in Vietnam. Here again, in Iraq, the left is laboring for a similar outcome, a Saigon-style evacuation by the U.S. military.

Remember that Vietnam was a defeat for the American armed forces, but it was a victory for the political left. It was a victory in the sense that the left demanded that America accept humiliation and withdraw, and America accepted humiliation and withdrew. The left sought the “liberation” of Vietnam, and Vietnam was “liberated.” This outcome turned out to be very bad for the people of Indochina, who suffered unimaginable horrors following the U.S. pullout. At the same time, the Vietnam disgrace helped to advance the leftist agenda in America. First, the antiwar cause unified the left. As we discover from histories of the period, opposition to Vietnam brought together the foreign policy left and the cultural left, so that devotees of Ho Chi Minh and devotees of hallucinogenic drugs all marched together against the war. Second, the outcome in Vietnam decimated the political influence of the right. Not only did America’s defeat corrode the morale of the American military, but it also undermined patriotism and traditional values in America. The Nixon presidency was further crippled, and a new generation of liberal Democrats was elected to Congress in 1974. Finally, as historian David Allyn shows, the left’s triumph in Vietnam paid handsome social dividends.
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It greatly bolstered the counterculture, giving added impetus to women’s liberation, gay rights, and the sexual revolution. So, from the left’s point of view, Vietnam was not only a foreign policy success but also a cultural success. Therefore, for this group, the prospect of “another Vietnam” is an outcome that is eagerly anticipated.

Since the left is determined for its own reasons to ensure that America loses the war on terror, it becomes a natural ally for bin Laden. Together they form what may be termed the liberal-Islamic alliance against American foreign policy. Like the left, the Islamic radicals realize they are teaming up with “infidels,” and they have no qualms about doing so. In Iraq, for example, Al Qaeda has shown no hesitation in making common cause with Saddam Hussein’s Baathist infidels. Bin Laden calls it a “convergence of interests.”
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Both are fighting against the Americans, and so they find themselves on the same side. By the same token, bin Laden and his followers believe they can work together with America’s left. Both are fighting against Bush’s war on terror, and so there is another “convergence of interests.”

The left’s de facto alliance with Islamic fundamentalism places decent liberals and Democrats in a difficult position. Liberal Democrats have never been entirely comfortable with the left’s extreme positions, and most of them would not condone working with the enemy to defeat America’s war on terror. On the other hand, liberal Democrats recognize that most of the ideas and activist energy in their party come from the left. While liberal Democrats may publicly distance themselves from leftists at election time, they are reluctant to wholly reject them.

Now, however, the stakes are higher. First, the left has carried the liberal doctrine of autonomy so far that it is virtually indistinguishable from the promotion of vice and decadence. Freedom has come to be defined by its grossest abuses, and “progress” for the left has come to mean progress in moral degeneracy. As a result, the ideas of “freedom” and “liberalism” have become repellent to many traditional people around the world, especially in the Muslim world. Liberals should not allow their good name to be corrupted in this way. Liberal Democrats should articulate a vision of autonomy that promotes self-fulfillment while recognizing that there are higher and lower forms of autonomy. Moreover, liberals know that there are certain things—like genocide and racial bigotry—that are wrong, quite apart from our subjective impulses. It is time for liberals to integrate autonomy into a framework that restores the traditional distinction between right and wrong.

Second, liberal Democrats who take their cues from the left are generally hoping to improve their prospects for winning elections. In the process, however, they are making an unconscionable “pact with the devil” and gravely harming the security interests of the United States. Is it worth risking the loss of the Middle East, not to mention the chance of further 9/11-style attacks, to improve the electoral chances for Hillary? Abraham Lincoln said that if America were ever destroyed, it would be from within. The left is the internal enemy that is helping the external enemy achieve its goal of the destruction of America.

Decent liberals and Democrats have every right to oppose the current administration, but they should do so without succumbing to the dangerous and irresponsible tactics of the left. Like Joseph Lieberman, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, and others, the good liberal can make his case for how the war on terror could be fought better, with a view to improving the chances of defeating Islamic radicalism, protecting America’s vital interests, and securing the safety of American citizens. The only choice for decent liberals and Democrats is to repudiate the left and consign it to the margins of political respectability where it came from, and where it has always belonged.

ELEVEN

Battle Plan for the Right

How to Defeat the Enemy at Home and Abroad

C
ONSERVATIVES NEED A
new direction in the war on terror, and a new strategy in the culture war. So far the right is fighting the two wars separately and also unwisely, courting the wrong people while alienating its most important allies. No wonder the outcome of the war on terror remains uncertain, and conservatives face the prospect of being routed in the 2008 elections. What is required is a novel approach based on the recognition that the war on terror and the culture war are related. Indeed they are two different arenas of the same struggle. Given this fact, we need to pose two questions. How can we use the culture war to win the war on terror? How can we use the war on terror to win the culture war? In this concluding chapter I offer foreign and domestic policy strategies that will help conservatives win both wars.

The danger now facing the right is obvious. The consequences of losing the debate over Iraq may be the loss of Iraq itself. Such an outcome would not only imperil America’s vital stake in the Middle East; Bush’s Iraq failure would be used to discredit conservative foreign policy for a generation. Are we ready for Vietnam all over again? If the left can convert national security—usually a source of political strength for the right—into a liability, then it has vastly improved its chances for winning future elections. If conservatives lose badly, all three branches of government—the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court—could end up in the grip of the opposition. The entire conservative agenda, from tax cuts to school choice to restricting abortion, would be stalled. Moreover, the right’s political loss would be followed by a cultural assault seeking to demonize Bush as another Nixon and conservatives as dangerous fanatics who cannot again be trusted with power. At a time when the right is within sight of complete victory, it risks losing everything and returning to the minority status it held in the years before Reagan.

So far conservatives and Republicans seem eerily blind to the prospect of political annihilation. Their political strategy can be described as looking for friends in all the wrong places. First, many conservatives attempt to persuade leftists to wake up to the threat of the radical Muslims and join a united American war on terror. Call this the “One America” strategy. Second, the right intends to rebuild ties with Europe so that the West can generate the kind of alliance it had against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Call this the “One West” strategy. Finally, the right is on a quest to locate liberals in the Islamic world who can be recruited in the cause of “civilization” against “barbarism.” Call this the “Don Quixote” strategy.

None of these approaches is working. We have found the liberals in the Muslim world, and it hasn’t made a bit of difference, even though all eight of them have agreed to support us. The Europeans don’t share our conservative principles, and now that the Cold War is over, they have realized that their interests diverge from ours. The stereotypes of European anti-Americanism (Bush the mad cowboy, Bush the Christian fundamentalist) are largely based on hostility to American conservatism. Even more remote is the prospect of persuading the left to join Bush and the conservatives in the war against Islamic radicalism. Has this approach to date produced a single convert? Nor will it, since the basic strategy of the left is to work with the Islamic radicals in order to defeat Bush and the right.

It’s time for conservatives to jettison these self-defeating strategies. They are rooted in nostalgic beliefs about a common Western heritage and common American culture, as well as erroneous assumptions about Islam. Instead, we need a multicultural strategy based upon the firmer foundation of common beliefs and values. So far Bush has been fighting his war against Islamic radicalism mainly on the military front. Such a campaign is indispensable, but it can never succeed, no matter how many insurgents it kills, if the supply of radical Muslims is continually replenished from the ranks of the traditional Muslims. The traditional Muslims are the only people who are capable of stopping radical Islam. Thus victory in the war on terror depends on America’s ability to create divisions between traditional Muslims and radical Muslims. America can decisively win this war by allying with traditional Muslims, and working with them to defeat the Islamic radicals.

The best way for the right to make such an alliance is to convey to Muslims that we share common ground with them on traditional values. Conservatives can communicate this message by challenging and attacking the left and the Europeans on the international stage. Instead of trying to unify America and the West, the right should highlight the division between red America and blue America, and also between traditional America and decadent Europe. By resisting the depravity of the left and the Europeans, conservatives can win friends among Muslims and other traditional people around the world.

On the domestic front, the right must stop its petty infighting and engage in a concerted political campaign to expose the left as the enemy at home. In order to achieve its own objectives, the left is serving as bin Laden’s public relations team in America, and conservatives should not be afraid to say this. Conservatives must show the de facto alliance between the Islamic radicals and the American radicals, and demand that mainstream liberals and Democrats expel this faction from their camp. In short, the right should force liberals to banish the left from the precincts of political respectability. In this way conservatives can turn the tide both at home and abroad, and improve their chances for winning both the war on terror and the culture war.

LET US EXPLORE
these themes in greater detail. First I want to examine how conservatives can use the culture war to win the war against Islamic radicalism. If the American left is covertly allied with the radical Muslims, the American right should openly ally with traditional Muslims. Former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht is one of the few people to recognize that “these religious traditionalists—and not the liberal secularists—are the most valuable allies the United States has.”
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Traditional Muslims are in a difficult position. Numerous surveys such as the Pew Research study have shown that the vast majority reject terrorism. At the same time they don’t want their condemnations of terrorism to sound like an endorsement of Western secularism and moral depravity. In general the traditional Muslims also reject violence, although some will approve violence that is used in what they consider “wars of national liberation.” Moreover, the Pew survey shows that very few Muslims consider democracy a “Western way of things that would not work here.” The World Values Survey shows that in most Muslim nations support for self-government is just as high as in the West. In some countries more than 90 percent of Muslims endorse democracy—a higher percentage than in the United States.
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Muslims want democracy, but at the same time they want real democracy. They want governments that reflect Muslim interests, not American or Israeli interests.

For traditional Muslims, self-rule also means the right to establish a society under God’s rule and governed, at least in some aspects, by Islamic law. This is not to say that traditional Muslims are enemies of individual freedom. They support basic freedoms, such as the right to own property, the right to assembly, the right to one’s religious beliefs, the right to vote, and the right to criticize the government. At the same time, they reject contemporary liberalism. Traditional Muslims do not support the right to blaspheme against Islam, the right to sex before marriage, the right to no-fault divorce, the right to abort one’s offspring, or homosexual rights. Nothing discredits freedom in the eyes of traditional Muslims so much as the equation of freedom with what they perceive as gross immorality and licentiousness. For many Muslims, it is not freedom but moral depravity that is today the distinguishing feature—and leading export—of American civilization. When traditional Muslims see how freedom is used in America, they become increasingly convinced that the Islamic world is better off without this kind of freedom.

What traditional Muslims identify as the sins of the United States, however, are really the sins of the cultural left. Traditional Muslims don’t see the Americans who work hard, go to church, and look after their families. Instead they turn on their TV sets and witness the perverted lifestyles that Hollywood presents as sophisticated, admirable, and typical of “the American way.” In the United Nations and elsewhere, Muslims confront feminists, zero-population-growth activists, and sexual libertines who present themselves as champions of American and indeed universal values. This is America’s face to the non-Western world as portrayed by the left. As a consequence of the left’s prominent role in international activism and popular culture, traditional Muslims see one America and do not realize that there are two Americas. They see the immorality of blue America and take it to be representative of all of America. The Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol points out that this ignorance is exploited by bin Laden and his allies. “The masterminds of Islamic radicalism work hard to mask the religiosity and decency of average Americans.”
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In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like
Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet
, and
The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.
There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet. Conservatives should also reject Huntington’s doctrine of a “clash of civilizations.” This, too, sets up a false division between the Islamic world and the West, placing traditional Muslims and radical Muslims in the same camp, which is exactly where bin Laden wants them. Moreover, Huntington ignores the clash of civilizations within the West, and he wrongly assumes that a social or religious conservative in America would have more in common with an American or European leftist than with a traditional Muslim. Admittedly some on the right may feel uncomfortable about teaming up with Muslims. Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.

As much as possible, conservatives need to enlist traditional Muslims in the war against radical Islam. For this reason the 2005 ports controversy involving the small country of Dubai was particularly harmful. With unerring opportunism, the left seized on the issue. Leftists pretended to be outraged at the prospect of Muslims administering America’s ports, even though the security of the ports would have continued to be the responsibility of U.S. government agencies. The left also saw a chance to subvert the Bush administration’s effort to build ties with friendly Muslims. Partly as a result of liberal political pressure, but also as a consequence of foolish prejudice, many conservatives in the House and Senate joined the chorus demanding cancellation of the ports deal. Finally the government of Dubai chivalrously stepped aside, but the whole episode left many traditional Muslims jaded and frustrated.

If conservatives hope to make friends in the Muslim world, they must stop holding silly seminars on whether Islam is compatible with democracy. In reality, a majority of the world’s Muslims today live under democratic governments—in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Turkey, not to mention Muslims living in Western countries. There is nothing in the Koran or the Islamic tradition that forbids democracy. Islam calls for the Muslim community to be governed by a caliph who is God’s viceregent on earth, but no procedure is specified for who should be the leader or how he should be chosen. The Koran does call for governance to be done by
shura,
or consultation, and as the Muslim historian Hamid Algar writes, “An election is nothing more than a mechanism for the implementation of this general Koranic principle.” Even Islamic radicals like Qutb and Mawdudi admit this. The only caveat, as Khaled Abou El Fadl points out, is that “a case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God’s sovereignty. It cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty but must instead show how popular sovereignty…expresses God’s authority, properly understood.”
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This mirrors the Declaration of Independence’s argument that it is the Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights, and thus it is a perfect expression of the conservative understanding of American democracy.

A SECOND WAY
for conservatives to build ties with traditional Muslims is to let them govern their own societies. This is the meaning of Islamic democracy—Muslims must choose their own way. Iraq is the test case for this. If the people of Iraq want Islam to be the state religion, we should allow it to happen. If they want sharia, let them have it. But wouldn’t all this be a violation of true democracy? Not at all. As Noah Feldman points out, England has an established church, so religious establishment is not incompatible with religious toleration. Israel is simultaneously a democracy and a Jewish state. Moreover, most European countries have democratically chosen to relinquish some of their economic liberties in the interest of economic security. So why can’t Muslim countries choose to give up some of their civil liberties in order to promote civic morality? Just as democracy has enabled Japan to establish a very different kind of society than France or America, so democracy will enable Muslims to define their own civilization. As philosopher Charles Taylor says, we should recognize the concept of “multiple modernities.”
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This is multiculturalism in its truest and best sense, and it deserves conservative support. The right should recognize, as the left does not, that democratization does not mean Westernization.