The mystery of bin Laden praising American leftists deepens when we realize that bin Laden is not accustomed to speaking this way. Bin Laden’s earlier statements are delivered in a lofty Islamic rhetoric, with multiple references to the Koran and the battles of early Islam. Now, however, bin Laden seems to be speaking in a kind of American lingo, making arguments that seem very odd for him to make. How unnatural it is to hear bin Laden discuss the Florida recount or Bush’s supposed misreading of U.S. opinion polls. Even more telling, a review of bin Laden’s statements prior to 2004 shows that he always referred to America as a single entity. Never previously did he distinguish between good Americans and bad Americans. Bin Laden’s view of the United States used to be one of undifferentiated evil. But starting in his October 2004 statement, bin Laden insinuates that not all Americans are so evil.
To see how bizarre this is, imagine if Hitler had issued regular missives during World War II in which he praised a group of Americans and cited from their writings. Imagine if he repeated their arguments and rhetoric with such precision that it would be hard to tell his words from theirs. Imagine further that one of Hitler’s favorite American authors embraced the Hitler endorsement, noting that Hitler and he felt pretty much the same way about American foreign policy and praising Hitler for holding such strong anti-American sentiments. The reaction throughout the country would have been one of unmitigated outrage! The reason there was no comparable outrage in this case is because one side, the left, was able to divert attention from the content of bin Laden’s political message, and the other side, the right, totally missed the significance of bin Laden’s actions.
Conservatives have reacted with cocktail-party bemusement to bin Laden’s professions of ideological intimacy with the left. There have been lots of quips about bin Laden being appointed to the board of directors of moveon.org or to a senior editorial position at The Nation. The typical conservative analysis concludes with a solemn attempt to dissuade liberal Democrats from giving in to bin Laden’s demands. As David Gartenstein-Ross wrote in frontpage magazine.com, “Accommodation is a trap. Those who favor negotiation and appeasement err in believing that mollifying Bin Laden’s immediate grievances will bring us peace. Ultimately, a strategy of accommodation and negotiation with Al Qaeda is the road to national suicide.”4 This approach completely misses the point of what bin Laden is trying to do, which is not to convince his enemy to capitulate but to convince his allies in America to coordinate their actions more closely with his.
Some on the left have shrewdly recognized this, which is why they make supreme efforts to deny any connection between bin Laden and the left-wing cause. Commenting on bin Laden’s 2004 videotape, David Wallechinsky informed the readers of huffingtonpost.com: “My guess is that he wasn’t trying to help either side. It is more likely that he was tired of being ignored. He saw the world was focused on the American election, and he released his video at that time in order to capture the most possible attention.” If this notion of bin Laden as frustrated attention seeker seems implausible, even more farfetched is Robert Fisk’s claim that bin Laden released his 2004 videotape to help Bush win the election. As Fisk told the left-wing radio program Democracy Now, “I’m sure Bin Laden realizes that further threats are more likely to help Bush than Kerry. What he wants now, of course, is a president who will further mire the country in the Middle East swamp. So I think that this is probably Bin Laden’s vote for George Bush.”5 Consider the absurdity of this analysis. Bin Laden and Bush are deadly enemies. Bin Laden calls Bush an apostle of Satan, the murderer of the Muslim people. Why would bin Laden seek to secure the electoral victory of a person he views as the great slayer of Muslims? If bin Laden seeks to defeat Bush’s war on terror, wouldn’t the easiest way to do that be to defeat Bush’s bid for reelection?
When bin Laden released his 2006 videotape, the left once again sought to steer public attention away from his political endorsement of left-wing sources. A few days after the tape’s release, two former Clinton officials, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, rushed to the New York Times to interpret what bin Laden might be signaling to the world. Many speculations later, they conclude on an inconclusive note: “It is too early to say how the tape will affect Muslim opinion.”6 But this analysis is a diversion, because bin Laden’s tape was not addressed to Muslim opinion. It was manifestly addressed to the American people. If bin Laden was signaling anyone, it was not Muslims but Americans. It is very important that we understand what he was trying to say.
TO UNDERSTAND BIN Laden’s American strategy, we need to reexamine with fresh eyes the reaction to 9/11 and the debate over the war on terror. Earlier in this book I spoke of a short period of national unity following 9/11, but there was one group that did not join in these sentiments. This was the left. According to the left, 9/11 was not a uniquely tragic event. “As atrocities go,” Noam Chomsky remarked, “it doesn’t rank very high.” Historian Eric Hobsbawm adds, “It was an appalling human tragedy. But it didn’t change anything in the world situation.” In the left’s view, the event was of little consequence and paled before the terror that America had long inflicted on Muslims and the rest of the world. Shortly after 9/11, Chomsky traveled to Islamabad to inform a Muslim audience that for centuries America had been killing colossal numbers of people, far more than the few thousand killed in bin Laden’s attack. The only significance of 9/11, Chomsky added, is that “for the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.”7
In this sense, 9/11 represented for the left a kind of equalization or political justice. To put it bluntly, America deserved it. “Given the constant belligerence and destructiveness of U.S. foreign policy,” wrote William Blum, “retaliation has to be expected.” Author and future Nobel laureate Harold Pinter termed America a “rogue state” that “knows only one language—bombs and death.” Political scientist Robert Jensen said that 9/11 was “no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.” Some on the left took immense symbolic satisfaction in the destruction of the World Trade Center. Author Norman Mailer wrote that “everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that Tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”8
In addition to viewing 9/11 as predictable and overdue, some on the left even admitted fantasizing about it. “They did it,” the French critic Jean Baudrillard wrote, “but we wished for it.” Political scientist Richard Berthold said that “anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would get my vote.” There were calls for an encore. Referring to American soldiers killed in Somalia in 1993, anthropologist Nicholas De Genova expressed his hope that bin Laden and his allies would inflict on America “a million Mogadishus.” Political scientist Ward Churchill said that in order to compensate for the mass murder that America has inflicted throughout the globe, bin Laden would have to kill several million more Americans.9
From the beginning, the left derived from 9/11 the lesson that American foreign policy was to blame and therefore America was the enemy. Historian Glenda Gilmore said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” Since America’s war against terrorism is evil, Joel Stein wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t support our troops. We shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea.” In an argument that echoed bin Laden’s own justification for killing American civilians, Churchill argued that by refusing to “effectively oppose” their government’s genocidal policies, U.S. citizens were guilty of “endorsing official criminality.”10
If 9/11 wasn’t very significant for the left, what was significant was President Bush’s reaction to 9/11. It is this reaction, Hobsbawm writes, “that did change the world.” The left argued that the Bush administration’s response to terrorism itself constituted terrorism—indeed a worse terrorism than that of 9/11. Howard Zinn wrote that in the name of a war on terror, “We are terrorizing other people.” Cindy Sheehan routinely calls Bush “the biggest
terrorist in the world.” Robert Fisk said Bush was using 9/11 to invade “a country which had nothing to do with those atrocities.”11
Iraq? No, Fisk is talking about Afghanistan. Today, in the context of the Iraq debate, many liberal Democrats seek to enhance their political credibility by noting that they supported Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan. Some liberals were indeed supportive of Bush’s action there. Others—especially elected leaders—acquiesced in it because they did not want to be perceived as “soft on terrorism.” But the left was opposed to Bush’s war on terror from the outset, and mobilized to stop Bush from bombing Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. Even the prospect appalled historian Eric Foner, who said, “I am not sure which is more frightening—the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” The same note of moral equivalence was struck by historian Howard Zinn, who wrote that just like the 9/11 attacks, “The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan is also a crime which cannot be justified.” To invade Afghanistan, Richard Falk wrote, shows an obstinate American “refusal to negotiate with the Taliban” and represents a “frontal denial of that country’s sovereign rights.”12
On September 19, 2001, leading figures on the left published an ad in the New York Times under the banner headline “Not in Our Name.” The ad condemned Bush’s war on terror as a “war without limit.” The signers of the ad were an interesting mix of cultural leftists and foreign policy activists. The list included authors Edward Said and Howard Zinn, novelists Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison, playwright and gay rights activist Tony Kushner, civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, feminists Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Katha Pollitt, former Vietnam War protesters Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, movie directors Spike Lee and Oliver Stone, actors Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, and Danny Glover, death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Democratic congressman Jim McDermott.13 The activist group MoveOn.org circulated a petition to its supporters warning that if America invaded Afghanistan, “We become like the terrorists we oppose.”14 The left, by its own count, organized more than a hundred demonstrations across the country to stop the United States from overthrowing the Taliban regime.
If the left had gotten its way, Bush would never have invaded Afghanistan and the Taliban would still be in power. Islamic radicals would still be in control of two states, Iran and Afghanistan. Al Qaeda would still have an official state sponsor, so that its future attacks could be more effectively planned, funded, and executed. One can see why bin Laden might be pleasantly surprised to find, in the very nation he attacked, a group of people seeking to minimize the prospect of retaliation and to keep his Taliban supporters in power. If he was furious about rulers in the Muslim world who inexplicably promoted America’s cause, bin Laden could be expected to be exhilarated to see a group in America—secular infidels no less—who surprisingly promoted the Islamic fundamentalist cause.
On the issue of Afghanistan, however, the left remained on the margin of political discourse. Its position of vocal opposition to the war on terror was generally shunned by the Democratic leadership in Congress. But the left did succeed in mobilizing an energetic and powerful political movement. This movement, led by groups like Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), is frequently termed “antiwar,” although it is more accurately termed “anti-Bush,” because its opposition is not to war per se but to Bush’s war. From the left fringe, this movement has over the past few years migrated into the political mainstream. In the 2004 primaries, it won over the leading Democratic contenders. It now defines the position of the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
IT IS THE Iraq war that has provided the rallying point for liberal Democratic opposition to Bush’s war on terror. Even some libertarians and conservatives have joined the coalition to defeat Bush’s Iraq policy. Some of this opposition is principled and derives from genuine and legitimate concerns that Bush is not fighting the war in the most effective way. A good deal of it is opportunistic, as left-leaning Democrats who opposed Bush’s war on terror from the outset found in Iraq a convenient occasion to go public with their opposition. It is the left, however, that provides the most coherent opposition to Bush’s war on terror. Moreover, with Iraq becoming the centerpiece of this war, the left has become the leader of the broad-based movement against America’s presence in that country.
The left’s position on Iraq has been clear from the outset: prevent Bush from getting into the war, and if this proves unsuccessful, then make sure that he loses the war. Having failed to achieve the first goal, the left is now explicitly promoting the second goal. Susan Watkins, editor of the New Left Review, affirms that “U.S.-led forces have no business in Iraq” and that “the Iraqi people have every right to drive them out.” Political scientist Robert Jensen claims the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq “and that’s a good thing. I welcome the U.S. defeat.” Leia Petty of the Campus Antiwar Network explains the purpose of her group’s demonstrations: “We’re here as part of a growing counter-recruitment movement that has the potential to stop Bush’s ability to carry out his agenda of war and terror.” Author James Carroll writes that the United States should not only “accept the humiliation” of withdrawal but “renounce any claim to power or even influence over Iraq.” Social scientist Nicholas De Genova argues that in Iraq and elsewhere, “The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.”15 In a sense the left’s position flows directly from its premise: since America is the leading terrorist force in the world, the real war against terrorism is a war against America.
Again, one can see the benefits of the left’s position from Al Qaeda’s point of view. Bin Laden has said that a “third World War is now raging in Iraq,” where the outcome for both sides is “either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” Ayman al-Zawahiri has declared Iraq the location of “the greatest battle of Islam in this era.” Why is Iraq so important to these Islamic radicals? Because since the Khomeini revolution in 1979, Muslim fundamentalists have not captured a single Middle Eastern state. True, the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has always been peripheral to the Muslim world. Moreover, the Taliban was rudely ousted by American forces in the aftermath of 9/11.
Right now there is only one success story for radical Muslims, and that is Shia Iran. The problem is that Shia Muslims are a small minority in the Islamic world. More than 80 percent of Muslims are Sunni. Islamic radicals badly need a second success in the Middle East so that they can show that the Khomeini revolution was not an aberration. Moreover, they need to demonstrate the viability of a Sunni Islamic state that can serve as a model for most of the world’s Muslims. Although Iraq’s population is majority Shia, it is through the success of a Sunni insurgency that bin Laden and his allies seek to establish in that country their revolutionary model. That is why bin Laden sent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into Iraq in the fall of 2002, before the American invasion. In a 2005 letter to insurgents, Ayman al-Zawahiri laid out the Al Qaeda strategy: “Expel the Americans from Iraq. Then establish an Islamic authority or emirate. Then extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.”16 With Iran and Iraq in their control, the Islamic radicals plan to wage war in the other Muslim states. First Jordan. Then Egypt. Then Saudi Arabia. Then Pakistan. Then Indonesia and Malaysia. Then Turkey.
If Iraq is vitally important to Islamic radicals, it is no less critical for President Bush. His success or failure there will largely determine his two-term legacy. Why, then, did Bush make Iraq a focal point of his war on terror? Today there is widespread liberal derision about Bush’s motives. Many liberals triumphantly note that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So Bush must have misled the American people about this. The left goes even further, asserting that “Bush lied.” The Nation claims that Bush went to war based on “falsehoods and deceptions.” Writing in Dissent, Jeff Faux refers to “the liar in the White House.” Al Franken goes so far as to say that “the President loves to lie.” Author J
oe Conason insists that Bush’s deceptions on Iraq “will someday fill many volumes.” Activist Cindy Sheehan insists, “My son died for lies. George Bush lied to us and he knew he was lying.” The theme of Bush as a devious prevaricator has become absolutely central to the left-wing understanding. Of late even mainstream Democrats have started to talk this way. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, faults Bush for going to war on “false pretenses.”17
Moreover, critics on the left charge that Bush lied by claiming a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In fact, Senator Barbara Boxer points out there is “absolutely no connection” between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. Columnist Bob Herbert joins the chorus, reminding us that “the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001 by Al Qaeda, not Iraq.”18 Bush, however, never claimed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. He did suggest that the war against Saddam Hussein was part of the war against terror. We have here two conflicting views of that war. Many on the left want the war to be confined to getting “the guys who did 9/11.” But Bush never viewed the war on terror in this narrow way. For Bush, 9/11 was symptomatic of a new Islamic radicalism that threatened not only American lives but also vital American interests in the Middle East. From Bush’s perspective, Islamic radicalism and terrorism thrive because of the toxic political climate in the region, and that climate is fostered by the vicious and dysfunctional regimes in the Middle East. Iraq and Iran were part of what Bush called an “axis of evil” threatening the peace of the world. The solution, therefore, is to attempt to change the conditions in the Muslim world that give rise to terrorism.
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