Once again—this cannot be emphasized often enough—I am not suggesting that the left hates America. Nor does the left always “blame America first.” The left doesn’t blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing economic sanctions against South Africa. The left doesn’t fault America for its global support of contraception, liberal divorce laws, and the legalization of prostitution. The left is entirely in favor of Hollywood and the music companies spreading decadent cultural values through movies, television, and songs. The left would like to have Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Brokeback Mountain seen in every country. In short, the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.
CONTRARY TO DAVID Horowitz and others, the left in America doesn’t want communism or full-scale socialism but for America to become more like Europe. Whether they mean it or not, Hollywood leftists are always threatening to move to Europe if Republicans are elected one more time. Liberals like Felix Rohatyn routinely call for American courts to adopt European precedents.12 There has been a spate of left-leaning books extolling the old continent. Consciously seeking to contrast Europe with America, these books have titles like The European Dream, Why Europe Will Run the Twenty First Century, and The United States of Europe. Author Tony Judt terms Europe a “model for universal emulation.”13
Part of the appeal is economic. Europe has a short work week and a generous welfare state. While many Americans take pride in how much the country’s welfare rolls have been reduced, author T. R. Reid reports that “in Norway the government takes pride in showing that the number of recipients has been growing rapidly.” The main appeal of Europe, however, is its cultural politics. “It is in Europe,” Jeremy Rifkin writes, “where the feeling of the sixties generation has given rise to a bold new experiment in living.” If many Muslims criticize America for moral decadence, many Europeans criticize America for not being decadent enough. Unlike America, Europe is completely secular. France is so systematically hostile to all religion that one of its leading politicians, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaks of the nation’s “secular fundamentalism.” Flag waving is not considered respectable in Europe. “The open display of patriotism,” Reid writes, “is widely sneered at in Europe.”14
Europeans also despise traditional America, which is why Bush is the object of pathological derision and why Michael Moore’s books have broken publishing records across the continent. Appealing to a nondiscrimination provision in its charter, the European Union has forced all member nations to admit homosexuals into the military. Many European countries have legalized gay unions. Meanwhile, traditional marriage has declined to the point where it is now a minority lifestyle. Reports of adultery do not harm a European politician’s reputation, and in France they sometimes enhance it. Childlessness has become a common phenomenon in European households, with the result that the population of Western Europe is shrinking. Of the women who do have children, few devote themselves to full-time motherhood. In France, all children between the ages of three and five are placed in full-time, government-funded day care, a system that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically recommends for this country.15 Many Europeans find nothing controversial in assisted suicide or recreational cocaine use. European countries generally permit abortion but are horrified by the idea of capital punishment.
Many Europeans regard cultural depravity as a mark of their sophistication. In many cases the government gives its blessing, as in Amsterdam, where drugs are legal and you can walk into a coffeehouse and order hashish or marijuana with your cappuccino. The Dutch government provides users with free needles and “treatment”—often consisting of more drugs. Prostitution is also legal, and the only government regulation of it is to ensure that the facilities are sanitary, condoms are used, and taxes are collected. The government even conducts tours of the red light district, and official maps helpfully designate the locations of brothels. Best of all, there are no pesky religious conservatives to object to any of this. The “conservative” reaction to Islamic radicalism in Europe is mainly to take a firm stance on behalf of liberal decadence. The general tone of the European right is, “We won’t stand for any fanatical immigrants questioning the secular basis of our society or telling us to pull our pants up.”
Finally, Europe provides an operational demonstration of the alliance between left-wing radicals and Islamic radicals. In several European countries, radical imams celebrated 9/11 and called for the destruction of America while leftist academics and civil rights groups demanded the imams’ “right to be heard” and defended the legitimacy of their “dissent.” In Britain, secular leftists and Muslim fundamentalists jointly formed the Stop the War Coalition and worked together to discredit Tony Blair for supporting America’s Iraq policy. For the American left, Europe is politically far ahead of the United States and provides a blueprint for the direction in which this country should move.
SINCE EUROPEAN DECADENCE stands at the opposite pole to the traditional values of non-Western cultures, the left is faced with a problem: how to impose the liberal values of Europe on those conservative cultures? Here we see why the left does not want to dismantle American power. The left needs American power to promote its agenda. What the left seeks is a transformation in the use of American power. This explains why many on the left frequently call for the United States to intervene militarily in countries where no American self-interest is involved. The same people who oppose American action in Iraq or Iran insist that America should intervene in Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Kosovo, or Sudan. While Bush is preoccupied with Iraq, George Soros complains that “already the United States has been reluctant to get engaged in Liberia.”16 Columnist Nicholas Kristof has repeatedly urged America to intervene, if necessary with military force, in Darfur. At first glance such rhetoric seems simply bizarre. The reason people such as Soros and Kristof advocate apparently pointless intervention is that, from their perspective, it is not pointless. Indeed, it provides an excellent opportunity to promote the values of contemporary liberalism.
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.17
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 b
e 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.20 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.”21 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.
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