Why We Were In Iraq
Posted By David Horowitz On March 21, 2013
On this ten year Iraq War anniversary, Frontpage editors have decided to repost David Horowitz’s article, Why We Are In Iraq, from our November 26, 2004 issue. The article is also a pamphlet available from the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Just before American and British troops entered Iraq to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein, a videotape of Osama bin Laden was aired on Al-Jazeera TV. The tape was aired on February 12, 2003, and in it bin Laden said: “The interests of Muslims and the interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the crusaders.”
Bin Laden was referring to the fact that four weeks earlier, millions of leftists had poured into the streets of European capitals and of Washington, San Francisco and New York to protest the removal of Saddam Hussein. Their goal was to prevent the United States and Britain from toppling Saddam and ending one of the cruelest and most repressive regimes in modern times. The protesters chanted “no blood for oil;” they called the United States “the world’s greatest terrorist state;” they called America’s democratic government an “Axis of Evil;” and they compared America’s president to Adolph Hitler.
In America, the demonstrations against the war were organized by two different groups. One of these was International ANSWER, a front group for the Worker’s World Party, which is a Marxist-Leninist sect aligned with the Communist dictatorship in North Korea. The other was the Coalition for Peace and Justice, an organization which was led by Leslie Cagan, a veteran 1960’s leftist and member of the Communist Party until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Coalition welcomed all factions of the left and was composed of organizations that ranged from the Communist Party to the National Council of Churches to Muslim supporters of the terrorist jihad.
Despite their efforts, the global protesters failed to stop the British and American military effort or save Saddam’s regime, which fell six weeks after the initial assault. This ended the filling of mass graves by the regime, shut down the torture chambers and closed the prison that Saddam had built for four to twelve-year-olds whose parents had earned his disapproval. But Saddam’s forces were not entirely defeated and regrouped to fight a rear-guard guerilla effort against the American “occupiers.” At the same time, the organizers of the anti-war protests had already determined to continue their efforts, this time in the arena of electoral politics. Accordingly, they directed their activists to march into the Democratic presidential primary campaigns and support the candidacies of anti-war Democrats like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean.
The enormous resources in money and manpower that the activists had mobilized against the war now transformed the campaign of an obscure governor of Vermont, making Howard Dean the immediate front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dean condemned America’s war in Iraq, and hinted that, if elected, he would make peace at the earliest possible opportunity and withdraw American forces from the Gulf. Electoral politics thus became the left’s rear guard attempt to produce the result their pre-war protests had failed to achieve: an American defeat in Iraq.
With the resources of the left squarely behind him, Howard Dean raced to the front of the presidential pack. In the spring of 2003, just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Dean’s nomination appeared so inevitable that he was endorsed by the titular heads of the Democratic Party, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. So leftist in its view of America’s world role had the Democratic Party become.
But just as the prospect of this nomination became a reality, Democrats collectively flinched. Verbal gaffes by the candidate, who remarked that the world was not safer because of the capture of Saddam, and a hyper-emotional rhetoric caused many Democrats to wonder if a nominee so overtly radical could carry the party to victory in the national campaign in November. Within a few weeks, this question was decided in the negative as Democrats abandoned Dean and rallied behind John Kerry — a candidate with a military record who had originally supported the war in Iraq but who recently had turned against it under the pressure of seemingly irresistible Dean tide.
This reversal of views on a matter of war and peace proved to be the most troubling aspect of John Kerry’s candidacy, and eventually sealed his electoral defeat. Having been a prominent Democratic supporter of the war both before and after the fact, he reversed himself on the basis of a trend in public opinion polls among Democratic primary voters. Rather than lose the nomination, he was willing to abandon his position on a matter as grave as war and peace.
This was in stark contrast to the behavior of another Democratic candidate, Senator Joseph Lieberman, whose deportment could not have provided a greater contrast. Having been the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee in the previous election, Lieberman ought to have been the presidential nominee in this one. But his views on the removal of Saddam Hussein put him at odds with Democratic primary voters and with the activists who had brought their resources into the campaign. Unlike Kerry, Lieberman did not waver in his views of the war even though it meant sacrificing his presidential ambition.
Patriotism and Treason
Certain issues beneath the surface of the political conversation, carry a charge so great as to shape the conversation itself. Such are the issues of “patriotism,” and “treason,” and the question of what constitutes legitimate criticism of government policy in a time of war.
To listen to the complaints of the left, one would think that conservative officials were standing ready with pre-drawn indictments for opponents of the war, or any criticism of government policy in matters pertaining to Iraq. Yet if any side has deployed the charge of treason to silence opposition on the war issue, it is the Democrats themselves, who have accused the President of taking the country to war under false pretenses, lying to the American people, and getting Americans killed for no reason, except to line the pockets of his Halliburton friends. Al Gore has called the President a traitor; the President has not mentioned Gore’s name.
The reality – for better or worse – is that that no one in America takes treason very seriously anymore, and hasn’t for a long time. No individual has been charged with treason in the United States in fifty years, not since Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally were tried for broadcasting enemy propaganda to American troops during WWII. Not the Rosenbergs, who stole atomic secrets for the Soviet Union; not Jane Fonda, who in the exact manner of the aforementioned traitors appeared on enemy radio in the midst of a war, denounced American soldiers as war criminals and called on them to defect. Fonda also collaborated with the Communist torturers of American POWs. Yet she was not charged with any crime. Nor were spies like Aldrich Ames, or defectors like John Walker Lindh, who joined the Taliban to fight against his own country indicted for treason. So let’s not pretend that there is any real threat in the word “treason” capable of chilling criticism of current foreign policy. If there were, Michael Moore would be in jail instead of on the short list for an Academy Award. When leftists complain that their patriotism is being questioned in an attempt to stifle their criticism, the claim is a red herring designed to prevent others from thinking about issues that affect our national security, or the implications of the positions that some opponents of the war have taken.
Contrary to the impression conveyed by the left, Republicans have been extraordinarily polite in confronting those who in assaulting the war have also slandered its supporters. In the first presidential debate President Bush chided his opponent for attacking the war in Iraq as “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” To make that claim “confuses” people, the President said, and is no way to lead a nation engaged in a war.
The president’s statement was certainly correct as far as it went. But coming from a leader of the Democratic Party who might soon be President, Senator Kerry’s statement actually served to do more than confuse people. If you are nineteen years old and an American marine in Fallujah, and are being fired on by terrorists, and the leader of the Democratic Party who is within a hair’s breadth of being your commander-in-chief says you shouldn’t be there at all, one can surmise that that does more than confuse you. It demoralizes you and it saps your will to fight. It can get you killed. The reckless nature of the Democratic attacks on this war – with the emphasis on reckless – serves to encourage the enemy more than reasonable criticism would require; worse, it probably demoralizes American soldiers on the field of battle and probably gets some of them killed. This is the subject that is suppressed when issues of loyalty and the proper tone of criticism are arbitrarily taken off the table in time of war. But Republicans are too polite to mention this.
Treason itself is not actually that difficult to define. It is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win. (Of course the desire alone would be merely a treason of intention; to meet the legal definition, there would have to be overt acts.) Are there such people in America, active in the nation’s public life? Michael Moore is an obvious example. The following statement by Moore appeared on his website on April 12, 2004 as the United States was struggling to build a post-war democracy in Iraq: “First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not “contractors” in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or to pour concrete in a driveway. They are MERCENARIES and SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE. They are there for the money, and the money is very good if you live long enough to spend it. Halliburton is not a ‘company’ doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested — or worse.”
While Moore described America’s role in Iraq as that of a predator and criminal he described the Saddam diehards and Zarqawi terrorists, beheading American citizens and killing American troops this way: “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. Get it, Mr. Bush?”
There is little doubt whose side of this war Michael Moore is on. Michael Moore wants America to lose this war and why shouldn’t he, since he regards the United States as a predatory empire illegally in Iraq, and “terrorism” as a fiction created by Washington to justify its imperialistic ambitions.
I have followed Michael Moore ever since the 1980s, when he was fired from his position as editor of the leftwing magazine Mother Jones. His firing was triggered when he censored an article mildly critical of the Sandinista dictatorship that had been written by the socialist Paul Berman. Moore was too much of a Leninist even for the leftists at Mother Jones. As a Marxist convinced that America is an empire ruled by evil corporations, Michael Moore is a self-conceived enemy. The issue of betraying your country when it is under attack never arises for Moore, because he denies that there is even a terrorist threat in the first place. Of course he does. Because in his eyes, America is an aggressor responsible for the attacks upon itself. American imperialism is the root cause of the War on Terror. This is not his unique view but is one shared by many people on the political left and by most of the people who marched in the “anti-war” demonstrations.
Michael Moore’s hostility to his own country in time of war is a fact, but what are the consequences? Moore has rooted for the enemy all his life, first in the Cold War and now in the War on Terror, but his treasonous sympathies have made a celebrity of him, not a pariah, and rich into the bargain.
A similar observation can made of about the leaders of the anti-war demonstrations, whose careers may not be a well rewarded as Moore’s, but whose commitments and absence of adverse consequences are the same. The national mobilizations against the war in Iraq were organized and led by veteran activists who rooted for the Communist enemy in the Cold War. They did so because, like Moore, they regarded America as an imperialist empire and the Soviet Union as an advocate for its oppressed global subjects. Guided by these radical assumptions they marched in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003 to thwart America’s war in Iraq and save Saddam Hussein.
It should be self-evident that these are not people for whom “peace” is a priority. When Saddam was faced with a UN ultimatum on November 8th to disarm “or else,” the opponents of American policy organized no demonstrations at the Iraqi embassy to persuade Saddam to comply. Disarming Saddam was not part of their “anti-war” agenda. In the same illuminating way, there were no demonstrations against the genocide the Communists carried out in Indo-China after America withdrew its forces from Vietnam. In its core, the anti-Vietnam movement was not about bringing peace and justice to Indo-China; it was about defeating America and helping the Communists to win. The goal of the radicals who organized the anti-war demonstrations during the conflict in Vietnam and the confrontation with Iraq are the same: whatever the war, America should lose.
This goal has now been introduced into the electoral mainstream under the auspices of the Democratic Party. In Michael Moore’s notorious film, Farenheit 911, which became a campaign spot for the Democrat Party, Saddam’s Iraq is presented as a peaceful, even idyllic country cruelly invaded by a callous and deceitful invader, which is us. The opening of this anti-American propaganda film was held in the midst of the presidential election campaign. It was attended by the leader of the Democratic Party, Terry McAuliffe, by Senators Clinton, Daschle, Harkin, Boxer and many other celebrating party members. It was an episode that can be said to mark how far we have slipped morally in this country that the leaders of one its two great parties are ready to accept any attack on the sitting commander-in-chief – and through him on the nation itself – as legitimate, and can do so in a time of war, and thus in effect don’t take our enemies seriously.
The matter of “treason” is not finally resolved by applying the term. This reflects the complex allegiances of the citizens a democracy like ours and also underscores the bad faith in the left’s defensive complaints. When they are pressed on the issue, “progressives” will be the first to claim that dissent itself is patriotism, indeed the only self-respecting patriotism (since, for leftists, embracing the positive in the American experience is reserved for right-wing jingoists and yahoos). Leftists will point to the fact that the American founders were themselves accused of treason and will remind us of Benjamin Franklin’s quip to “make the most of it.”
In America, the founding principles form the nation first, and only secondarily the ties of blood and soil. If America is indeed the greatest terrorist state, as Moore and other leftists proclaim, if America is an imperialist monster, then America is actively betraying its founding principles. If this is the case, loyalty to these principles – loyalty to America — would demand acts of treason as a defense of the constitutional faith. The code that leftists like Michael Moore consciously live by is this: “Loyalty to humanity is treason to America.” In their own minds, they have no country. They are citizens of the world, and America is the enemy of humanity (to employ a phrase Michael Moore’s Sandinista heroes inserted into their national anthem).
Here is how Moore himself defends his disloyalty to his country in the war on terror as a higher loyalty to its founding principles: “What if there is no ‘terrorist threat?’ What if Bush and Co. need, desperately need, that ‘terrorist threat’ more than anything in order to conduct the systematic destruction they have launched against the U.S. Constitution and the good people of this country who believe in the freedoms and liberties it guarantees?” (Stupid White Men, Part One)
To make a judgment on the this issue one has to first decide whether this nation has really violated and abandoned its founding principles and is thus worthy of betrayal in the midst of a war. If so, then Michael Moore is American hero and the left is a progressive force. If not, then Moore and the left are reactionaries allied with the most backward-looking and oppressive forces of our time, as well as self-declared enemies of their native land.
Legitimate Criticism of War Policy
Criticism of government policy is the life-blood of democracy. This includes war policy. But beginning with the founders, everyone understands – or used to understand –that there is a necessary trade-off between liberty and security and that in times of war sacrifices of the former are regularly made in the interests of the latter. “Loose lips sink ships” was a slogan memorialized on posters during World War II. It was an appeal to Americans to voluntarily restrict their own exercise of free speech to save the lives of themselves and their neighbors. It was not regarded as a bid to abrogate the Constitution or the destruction of the First Amendment, which is the way the leftwing is currently mis-characterizing measures to tighten America’s defenses against terror. It was a simple recognition that some speech can weaken a democracy and undermine its self-defense.
In a conflict like the war on terror, where the enemy walks among us and can kill thousands of civilians at a stroke, it is important to recognize the difference between criticism made in support of the war effort and criticism designed to undermine it, even if the actual line between them is not always easy to discern. Some criticism is maliciously intended, and some criticism in itself can constitute an assault on America that weakens our democracy and undermines our defense.
Before the fighting started in Iraq, some critics voiced a concern that an armed intervention would cause the Arab street to erupt and inflame the Muslim world. This was the criticism voiced by former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft’s remarks were obviously made out of concern for the nation’s security. a substantial amount of the criticism of the war in Iraq is based on similarly legitimate concerns. Scowcroft’s attack on the President’s policy was a harsh criticism. He said that under no circumstances should the America go to war over Iraq. But it was obviously a criticism based on reasonable concerns about America’s security, that were proved wrong when Saddam was toppled in the swiftest and least costly victory on historical record, and without the immediate consequences that Scowcroft imagined.
A large part of the criticism of the war, however, has been made on grounds that have nothing to do with American security, and in terms that are far removed from the realities. Often, as in the case of Michael Moore’s widely popular rants, these are thinly veiled attempts to portray America as the problem and the outlaw regime of Saddam Hussein regime as the victim. Often, the attacks are voiced in such a way (and to such a reckless degree) as to undermine the security of Americans and their forces in Iraq. It was one thing for Scowcroft to imagine negative consequences of great magnitude resulting from the attempt to remove Saddam and quite another when the initial stage of the war was won without such consequences for critics on the left to launch an all-out attack on credibility and morals of the Commander-in-Chief.
Within two months of the fall of Baghdad, Democratic leaders were assaulting the President as a calculating liar on the basis of 16 reasonable words in a State of the Union Address, which have since been confirmed by a bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee. As Senator John Edwards, who was one of those leaders attacking the President, pointed out, a President’s credibility is his most important asset. Why then attack him as a liar for saying that British intelligence had reported that Saddam was seeking bomb-making uranium in Niger? Particularly, when the British had done just that. Yet for weeks in June of 2003, Democratic leaders piled on the President as a “liar” for those very words.
It is one thing to make dire predictions in advance of a war, and quite another to make dire and unsubstantiated claims after the war is under way and our troops are still under fire in Iraq. In these circumstances, to say that the President lied to the American people and sent our troops to die under false pretenses is more than criticism, particularly when there is absolutely no evidence to substantiate the charge. When this is done by political leaders who supported the war in the first place, the betrayal is an even more egregious. Yet that is precisely what leaders of the Democratic Party did within two months of the liberation of Baghdad, most shamefully among them Ted Kennedy and Al Gore, but also John Edwards and Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, and Howard Dean.
Even the charges which followed the failure to locate stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction are reckless and baseless given the fact that there is no evidence the President lied about these weapons in advance of the war, and indeed the evidence would lead to the opposite conclusion, since all national intelligence agencies, including those of the Muslim countries of Pakistan and Jordan were saying the same thing.
The vitriolic and personal attacks on the President’s integrity and morality, while the war was only months old went beyond legitimate criticism and amounted to an effort to sabotage the war itself in the hopes that a failed war would unseat the President in the elections in November. These personal attacks were incitements to the American public to distrust and hate their President in the middle of a war. To go a step further, and portray Iraq — a country whose dictator had invaded two sovereign nations and murdered a million people — as an idyllic place into which American marauders intruded under false pretenses using their advanced technologies to blow innocent and “defenseless” people to bits (as Farenheit 9/11 did) is no longer criticism. It is an effort to sabotage the nation’s war on terror and soften us up for the kill. This is no longer criticism, nor is it intended as such. It is intended to as a war within the war, and is directed at all of us — Democrats and Republicans alike.
In the real world, of course, matters like these are not always so easily resolved. There is often an irreducible gray area, which makes distinctions difficult. Thus, there are incidents common to all wars that are regrettable and need to be regretted, but which can be exploited by one’s enemies. The criminal offenses at Abu Ghraib are one example. As war atrocities go — as the atrocities committed by our enemies in this war go — the incidents at Abu Ghraib were minor. They were an isolated series of indefensible but unrepresentative acts by low-level operatives. Still, we hold ourselves to higher standards than our enemies (and most of our friends) and concern was therefore in order. But when Abu Ghraib is inflated into a major atrocity and appears on the front page of the New York Times for more than sixty days running and is compared by a leading Senator to Saddam Hussein’s own torture chambers, something else was going on. This may have been just an atrociously irresponsible effort to topple a sitting President. But its clear effect was to conduct psychological warfare for the enemy camp, to undermine American leadership and to sabotage the war itself. The New York Times and Senator Kennedy expressed more outrage about Abu Ghraib in one day than Imam Ali Sistani the leader of Iraq’s Shi’ite population did throughout the entire episode, about which he said nothing.
Some people will recklessly exaggerate America’s deficiencies — even in the midst of a war – in pursuit of political power. Others, however, may do it out of habitual complacency. It hasn’t really registered on them that we are at war. Even after 9/11, they continue to think that America cannot be vulnerable. They haven’t absorbed what the 9/11 attacks revealed. In their thinking, America is still a free country and people can say what they want. But saying some things still has consequences, and we ignore them at our peril.
The War Was Not About WMDs
The attacks on the President in the first year of the war in Iraq were entirely about the rationale for the war. This is odd in itself. If we were to discover say that Abraham Lincoln had contrived to send a secret Union force to attack Fort Sumter and blame it on the Confederacy would that change our view of whether the Civil War was worth fighting? Yet that seems to be the logic of the opponents of the Iraq War for whom “missing WMDs” and other elements of the original argument in behalf of the war have been crucial to rejecting the war itself.
Yet this is a war whose aims and purposes make it very hard to understand how anyone who is a supporter of human rights, or who believes in freedom, could be against it. In four years, George Bush has liberated nearly 50 million people in two Islamic countries. He has stopped the filling of mass graves and closed down the torture chambers of an oppressive regime. He has encouraged the Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan to begin a political process that give them rights they have not enjoyed in 5,000 years. How can one not support this war?
The rationale for this war was not, as critics claim, stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. This is a misunderstanding that was the product of political arguments during a Democratic primary season that were intended to unseat a sitting president, but they had grave fallout for the credibility and security of the nation itself. The resultant misunderstanding about WMDS is the basis for most of the attacks on the war in Iraq.
In addressing this issue, it is important to remember that the Democrats who are now in full-throated opposition to the war, actually authorized it in the first place. The “Authorization for the Use of Force in Iraq” is the title of a resolution passed by both the House and the Senate, with Democratic as well as Republican majorities.
Since Bush has been accused of acting willfully and imperially and “dividing the nation,” it should be pointed out that not only did he request and secure a resolution for using force in Iraq from both political parties, but that this is more than his Democratic predecessor did in launching his own war in Kosovo. Bill Clinton neither sought to obtained a congressional resolution to use force in the Balkans. In gauging the sincerity of the Democratic attacks on Bush’s war-making decisions in Iraq, as “illegal” and “unilateral,” it is worth remembering that Bill Clinton never even sought congressional approval (or UN approval) when he went to war in Kosovo. This didn’t seem to bother Democrats at the time.
The Authorization for the Use of Force in Iraq that President Bush did seek and obtain in October 2002 has a total of 23 clauses. These 23 clauses spell out the rationale for the war. Out of all 23 clauses, there are only two that even mention stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. If this was the principal argument for the war, the resolution surely didn’t make much of it. What the resolution did stress – in twelve separate clauses – were 16 UN resolutions that that Saddam had ignored or defied.
These Security Council resolutions, were more than mere expressions of UN opinion. The first two of them 687 and 689 constituted the terms of the truce in the first Gulf War, whose violation was a legal cause of war itself. The other fourteen, were failed attempts to enforce them. This is why we went to war: to enforce the UN resolutions and international law.
Saddam Hussein had invaded two countries – Iran and then Kuwait, and used chemical weapons on his own people. We went to war with Saddam Hussein in 1991 to force him out of Kuwait, which his invading armies had swallowed. At the end of the war, there was no peace treaty, merely a truce that left Saddam in place. The truce was sealed by UN resolutions 687 and 689 and they set established the conditions by which we – who were still technically at war with Saddam – would allow him to remain in power. These resolutions instructed Saddam to disarm and to stop his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
How do we know he had programs for developing weapons of mass destruction? Because he had gassed the Kurds. Because his own brother-in-law who was in charge of his nuclear weapons program defected and told us he did. Because we sent UN inspectors into Iraq under the UN Resolutions and they located his weapons of mass destruction and destroyed the ones they found. The UN resolutions — backed by the armed power of the United States – partially worked. But only partially, and only for awhile. Saddam was forced to stop the programs the UN inspectors discovered, and he was forced to stop repressing the ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq, as the UN resolutions required. But without an occupying army in Iraq, the UN proved unable to hold him to the terms of its resolutions and he remained an internationally recognized menace. With the help of his allies on the UN Security Council — France, Russia and China, Saddam circumvented the sanctions placed on him, obstructed the inspectors and evaded the terms of the resolutions until finally, in 1998, he threw the UN inspectors out of Iraq altogether.
This constituted an act of war in itself, though Clinton Administration did not have the will to prosecute one. Saddam had broken the truce. When Saddam threw the UN weapons inspectors out, Bill Clinton fired 450 missiles into Iraq (more than the United States had fired into Iraq during the entire Gulf War) and got Congress to authorize an Iraqi Liberation Act, which passed by an overwhelming majority from both parties. But despite its name, the Iraqi Liberation Act only asked for authorization to provide military help to Iraqis trying to overthrow Saddam. It didn’t call for an American Army to do the job. Bill Clinton understood the grave threat that Saddam Hussein presented to international peace and thought Saddam should be removed and said so, because Saddam had broken the truce. But Bill Clinton didn’t send an army to do the job, because in 1998 he was too busy with an intern and was unable to perform his duties as Commander-in-Chief.
In 1998, Bill Clinton at least understood, as John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Al Gore also did at the time, that Saddam Hussein had violated international law and was a threat to the peace. He was an aggressor twice over. He had shown that he was determined to circumvent the UN inspections and the arms control agreements he had signed. It was clear to all –to every intelligence agency in the world — that Saddam was determined to break the UN sanctions and to develop weapons of mass destruction if he could. Why would Saddam throw the U.N. inspectors out if it weren’t his intention to build weapons of mass destruction and use them? (The famous Duelfer report says that in fact that he was.)
Saddam was a self-declared enemy of the United States who expressed his loathing for America in innumerable ways, among them an attempt to assassinate an American President and the distinction of being the only head of state to celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Despite leftwing claims to the contrary, there were in fact major links between international terrorists, including al-Qaeda and the Saddam regime. These are documented in in Stephen Hayes’ book, The Connection, which describes the relations between the government of Iraq, Al Qaeda, and the major world terrorist organizations. Among other gestures to the Islamic jihad, Saddam had inserted into the Iraqi flag the proclamation “Allahu Akhbar.” Saddam did not adopt the mantra of Islamic martyrs because he had a religious revelation. He did it because Islamic terrorists had adopted the slogan as their war cry and Saddam wanted to join their war.
Standing between Saddam and his malevolent ambitions in the fall of 2002 was the uncertain power of the United States. It was uncertain because the first Bush Administration had failed to remove him at the end of the Gulf War and the Clinton Administration was too paralyzed by ideology and circumstances to act when the need to repair the mistake became inevitable. Clinton fired hundreds of missiles into Iraq, but without an army to remove the tyrant, they were fired to little effect. After his defeat in the Gulf War, a still-defiant Saddam had boasted that America could fight a Cold War, but couldn’t endure ten thousand casualties. After America’s humiliation in Somalia, Osama bin Laden said nearly the same thing: American soldiers can fight a Cold War but not endure the will to defeat Islam in a holy war.
In the terrorists’ eyes, America was a paper tiger. This was perhaps the main cause of the miscalculations made by Saddam that led to his fall. But his assessment was correct until 9/11. Until that moment, America had shown itself to be a power unwilling and therefore unable to put an army in the field for more than four days since the Vietnam truce of 1973.
On September 11, 2001, the world changed because the perceptions of an American president changed. George W. Bush understood that this strike against us was a declaration of war. He understood that the world we live in is a world in which terrorists who are supported by rogue states like Saddam Hussein’s can get access to terrible weapons with which they can smuggle into the United States and use to do incalculable damage. America could not wait for such an attack before responding to the threat that these regimes represented. The consequences were simply unacceptable. America had to strike before the threat became imminent. Since Saddam had already shown that he would defy all attempts to control him and since he had already demonstrated that he would use weapons of mass destruction, and since he supported the jihad against the United States, his regime presented a peril that had to be confronted. John Kerry and other Democratic leaders spoke eloquently to these realities and endorsed the measures taken by the President that led to war. The Bush Doctrine is simply a statement of these realities along with the will to take the measures necessary to deal with them. It is to engage the war that has been declared against us by the terrorists and the regimes harbor them – Iran, Syria, Libya to name three.
In their attacks on the President, opponents of the war and even Democratic leaders who once knew better have said that Iraq was “no threat.” But if Iraq was no threat, why was Afghanistan a threat? Afghanistan is a much poorer country than Iraq. It has no great oil reserves; it wasn’t about to make a deal with North Korea to buy nuclear weapons “off the shelf,” as Saddam was when United States troops crossed his borders. So why was Afghanistan a threat? It was a threat because it provided the terrorists with a base of operations, and from that base they were able to deliver a devastating blow to the United States.
Since Afghanistan was a threat, obviously Iraq was an even bigger one, but so was Iran. Some critics of the war want to know why we didn’t attack Iran or North Korea, which appear to them more menacing than Saddam Hussein. There is a certain hypocrisy in these qualms. These are the same people who are argue that our attack on Iraq was illegitimate. Nonetheless, the question is worth answering. The difference between North Korea and Iraq is that as bad as North Korea is, it is not part of the Islamic jihad that includes al-Qaeda and Hamas, and which Saddam Hussein had joined. (To cite one instance of his role, $74 billion of the UN Oil-for-Food funds that Saddam embezzled went directly to finance the Hamas terrorist organization). The difference, finally, between Iran and Iraq is that we were actually at war with Iraq and had been at war since 1991. For a decade U.S. and British warplane had participated in daily missions over the “No-Fly Zones” in Northern Iraq in order to prevent Saddam Hussein from dropping poison gas on the Kurds. For ten years, the United States and Britain were engaged in a low-intensity war with Iraq to keep Saddam within the restrictions created by the UN resolutions that he relentlessly defied. This war had failed to accomplish its task, which is precisely why the United States and Britain initiated a larger war to finish the job.
The Deulfer Report, issued after Saddam’s removal, which involved the interrogation of officials of the regime, concluded that Saddam Hussein had one overriding agenda, which was to remove the UN sanctions, remove the UN inspectors, and resume his programs to build weapons of mass destruction. That is what the war was about.
To recap its timeline: After 9/11, George Bush declared that Iraq was in defiance of the arms control and inspection agreements that were designed to keep him under control and was therefore an international menace. In his State of the Union Address, delivered on January 20, 2002 he told Saddam, “You are part of an ‘Axis of Evil’ and you are in defiance of the 1991 truce agreements. You need to comply with the terms of the truce you signed, and with the U.N. resolutions, and disarm, open your borders to UN inspectors and give up your ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction — or else.” This ultimatum was delivered fourteen months before we actually went to war.
When Senator Kerry and other critics say the United States “rushed to war,” it is difficult to imagine what they are talking about. Shortly after George Bush put Saddam on notice in January 2002, Al Gore gave the first foreign policy address he had made since the election of 2000. In this speech, Gore praised Bush for identifying Iraq as one of the components of an axis of evil. He noted that Bush had come under criticism for making such a statement, and he made a point of supporting the President’s decision to do so. Saddam’s regime was, in fact, evil and a threat to the peace. Gore said America had to do whatever was necessary to deal with the threat that Saddam represented, even if we had to do it alone and without our allies’ approval. Al Gore betrayed his own vision of Iraq, just as the leadership of the Democratic Party betrayed a war it had signed onto, in the hope of making a seasonal political gain.
There was no rush to war. In September 2002, nine months after the Axis of Evil speech and six months before the onset of the war, President Bush went to the UN and told its delegates the UN must enforce the resolutions Saddam had disregarded and defied or become “irrelevant.” If the UN Security Council would not meet its obligations, enforce its resolutions and defend the peace, the United States intended to do so in its place. As an earnest of its intent, the United States had already begun sending troops to the Gulf. The immediate effect of this was to cause Saddam to readmit the UN inspectors. In the crucial months that followed, the American president said more than once to the Saddam regime: “You will disarm, or we will disarm you.” This was not a rush to war, but a deliberate march to a moment of truth in which Saddam’s intentions would be tested a final time: Disarm; open your borders to unobstructed UN inspections — or else.
In October, following his appearance at the UN, the President went to Congress and got the authorization he needed to use force against Iraq if Saddam persisted in the course of obstruction he had pursued for more than a decade. The vote was 77 to 23 in the Senate, receiving support from majorities on both sides of the aisle. On November 9, the President won a unanimous 15 to 0 vote in the Security Council for Resolution 1441. This resolution was an ultimatum that said to Saddam: “You will disarm, and you will show that you have disarmed by making a comprehensive report on your weapons of mass destruction ‘or serious consequences’ will follow.” The deadline for compliance was set for thirty days hence, or December 7, 2002.
The Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix has since written a book on these events, which he has called Disarming Iraq. Blix is a Swedish leftist who, by his own admission, was against going to war despite Saddam’s failure to comply with the UN resolutions.[1] In his book he acknowledges that UN Resolution 1441 was diplomatic language for an ultimatum of war, and that Saddam failed to meet its terms.[2] On December 7, which was the deadline for compliance the Iraq regime delivered a 12,000-page report that was essentially a rehash of previous inadequate and deceptive reports it had submitted and not a serious answer to the questions that had been asked. Thousands of weapons were unaccounted for, and the requirements the Security Council had laid down had not been met.
At this point, the question was whether yet another ultimatum should be allowed to slip with no consequences to follow. If there is never a consequence then the entire fabric of “international law” would be a sham. Neither the word of the United Nations or the United States would have any credibility. This would create an extremely dangerous international environment where force would be the only international abiter. If the word of a great power like United States could be taken seriously, the only way remaining to deter a future threat would be to go to war. In sum, not acting on UN resolution 1441 would show contempt for international law and order (as Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed out vainly to the French) and would increase the chances of future conflict with potentially even more deadly consequences than the one with Iraq.
The reason enforcing the UN ultimatum was summarized with admirable clarity by President Bill Clinton in 1998, although the disorder of his personal affairs paralyzed his government and restricted his action to launching missile strikes against Saddam: “If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations Security Council, and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program.”[3]
Senator Kerry and other critics on the left have claimed that Saddam Hussein could have been contained without going to war, that the weapons inspections would eventually work to disarm the regime and keep it disarmed. But this is an empty claim. It presumes the United States could keep 100,000 troops on the Iraqi border indefinitely and focus the main energies of government on keeping one rogue state in check. The only reason the U.N. inspectors were readmitted to Iraq in the first place was because of the decision taken by Bush to put a massive American military force on the Iraqi border, and to threaten the regime’s survival.
If threats are never acted on, they eventually lose credibility. That’s why enforcing the 17th UN resolution on Iraq was so crucial. The effort to mobilize enough force – diplomatic and military – to produce Saddam’s moment of truth on December 7, 2002 had been a year in the making. How long could the United States focus this kind of attention on Iraq and deploy these kinds of resources just to see that Saddam Hussein observed the promises he made? To let this ultimatum pass and continue the cat and mouse game indefinitely would mean paralyzing the ability of the United States to deal with the rest of the world. While the confrontation lasted it would cost of $1 billion a week and would mean maintaining more than 100,000 troops in the Arab desert (sitting targets for terrorists). Saddam, on the other hand, would have all the time in the world to manipulate “world opinion,” delay any result and wear the allies down. This entire exercise, moreover, would be merely extending an effort to stop Saddam Hussein from evading sanctions and controls that had been going on for more than a decade. It should be self-evident that this “alternative” to war was merely a plan for continuing an appeasement that had failed.
The Role of the Left
In January 2003, one detour remained on the road to Saddam’s moment of truth, — a detour that has since served to obscure the rationale for the war itself. When the UN Security Council deadline passed December 7th, America and Britain were alone among the major powers willing to enforce the resolution they had all signed onto. Saddam’s longtime ally told Secretary of State Colin Powell that even though Saddam had now defied his 17th UN resolution would veto a decision to go to war “under any circumstances (quelles que soient les circonstances).”[4] In January, 750,000 anti-war protesters appeared in the streets of London to join the French opposition and say no to war. The size of this demonstration was equivalent to 4 million protesters in the streets of Washington.
Four million American protesters would not even be the full equivalent of the political fact that confronted Tony Blair. The protesters were members of his own party. A proper equivalent would have been if millions of Republicans had marched in Washington to oppose enforcement of the Security Council resolution. To meet this opposition Tony Blair pleaded with President Bush to go back to the U.N. Security Council and present whatever intelligence information was required to get a second – albeit entirely superfluous – UN resolution. This, in itself, was an appeasement of Saddam who had brazenly defied the UN resolution. But because Tony Blair was such a loyal ally the President said yes.
In retrospect, he should not have done so. First of all, because after Colin Powell’s presentation of new evidence to the UN, the French informed him, that no evidence would persuade them – that they would not vote for a resolution to go to war “under any circumstances.” We now know that the French had been bribed with millions of dollars stolen from the UN Oil-for-Food program and the promise of billions of dollars in oil contracts from Saddam. But this was hardly necessary for their opposition to action on the resolution they had voted for, since they had been Saddam’s allies for decades.
There was a second and far more important reason not to go to Security to persuade its unpersuadeable members (Russia and China were also Saddam’s allies with a veto over the decision) to vote for another superfluous resolution. In order to make his case to the recalcitrant left, Powell had to stretch the available evidence and make claims about the existence of actual weapons of mass destruction that proved unsustainable. The reason to go to war was the defiance of the UN ultimatum (and of sixteen previous UN resolutions). But Colin Powell’s presentation gave enough of an impression that the reason for war was the existence of stockpiles of wmds as to cloud and confuse the entire debate about the war. It was Colin Powell’s presentation that became the basis for the left’s unprincipled attack on the President for allegedly “misleading” the nation into war.
The war in Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction; it was about Saddam Hussein’s ten-year defiance of international law and his manifest determination to break the UN’s arms control arrangements in order to acquire weapons of mass destruction. There was no rush to war, but rather a deliberate march to war authorized by both political parties and a unanimous vote of the Security Council (which France and Russia and China had no intention of honoring). It was not unilateral, and it was not about a “non-existent imminent threat,” as the party of appeasement has claimed.
In his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003, right before the fighting began, the President said in so many words that we were not going to wait until Saddam Hussein became an imminent threat. We were not going to wait until Saddam already had the weapons in place and the plan to attack us was afoot. We were not going to wait until he struck us first. “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.”[5]
This was the president’s message: Saddam will comply with the UN ultimatum. He will disarm and prove that he has disarmed, or we will disarm him.
The Party of Appeasement
It was this policy that the Democratic Party and its leaders reluctantly supported and then opposed after the fact, weakening the war to consolidate the victory and establish a democratic regime in Iraq. How did the Democratic Party come to be a party of appeasement in the approach to war, and a saboteur of the war effort after the fighting has started? How did it come so powerfully under the influence of an historically anti-American left?
It is not difficult to date the leftward slide of the Democratic Party. It began with the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, whose slogan was “American come home,” as though America was the problem and not the aggression of the Communist bloc. The McGovern campaign drew in the rank and file of the anti-Vietnam left much as the anti-Cold War Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign of 1948 and the Howard Dean anti-Iraq campaign of 2004. McGovern himself was a veteran of the Wallace campaign and, virtually all the leaders of the anti-Iraq movement, including most of the Democratic Party leaders who supported it are veterans of the anti-Vietnam campaign.
I have lived this history as both spectator and actor. My parents were Communists, and my first political march was a Communist Party May Day parade in 1948 supporting the the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party campaign against the Cold War, which meant against America’s effort to contain Communism and prevent the Stalin regime from expanding its empire into Western Europe. Our change was this: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want another war/Five, six, seven, eight, win with Wallace in ’48.”
This campaign was the seed of the anti-war movement of Vietnam, and thus of the political left’s influence over the post-Vietnam foreign policy of the Democratic Party. The Wallace campaign marked an exodus of the anti-American left from the Democratic Party; the movement that opposed America’s war in Vietnam marked its return. As a post-graduate student at Berkeley in the early Sixties, I was one of the organizers of the first demonstration against the war in Vietnam. It was 1962 and the organizers of this demonstration as of all the major anti-Vietnam demonstrations (and those against the Iraq war as well) was a Marxist and a leftist. The organizers of the movement against the war in Vietnam were activists who thought the Communists were liberating Vietnam in the same way Michael Moore thinks Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is liberating Iraq.
In 1968, Tom Hayden and the anti-war left incited a riot at the Democratic Party convention which effectively ended the presidential hopes of the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President was a supporter of the war. This paved the way for George McGovern’s failed presidential run against the war in 1972.
The following year, President Nixon signed a truce in Vietnam and withdrew American troops. His goal was “peace with honor,” which meant denying a Communist victory in South Vietnam. The truce was an uneasy one depending on a credible American threat to resume hostilities if the Communists violated the truce.
Three years earlier, Nixon had signaled an end to the draft and the massive national anti-war demonstrations had drawn to a halt. But a vanguard of activists continued the war against America’s support for the anti-Communist war effort in Vietnam. Among them were John Kerry and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. They held a war crimes tribunal, condemning America’s role in Vietnam and conducted a campaign to persuade the Democrats in Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia. When Nixon was forced to resign after Watergate, the Democrats cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell.
The events that followed this retreat in Indo-China have been all but forgotten by the left, which has never learned the lessons of Vietnam, but instead has invoked the retreat itself an inspiration and guide for its political opposition to the war in Iraq. Along with leading Democrats like party chairman Terry McAuliffe, George McGovern called for an American retreat from Iraq even before a government could be established to deny the country to the Saddamist remnants and Islamic terrorists: “I did not want any Americans to risk their lives in Iraq. We should bring home those who are there.” Explained McGovern: “Once we left Vietnam and quit bombing its people they became friends and trading partners.”[6]
Actually that is not what happened. Four months after the Democrats cut off aid to Cambodia and Vietnam in Jaunary 1975, both regimes fell to the Communist armies. Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered two and a half million peasants in the Indo-Chinese peninsula, paving the way for their socialist paradise. The blood of those victims is on the hands of the Americans who forced this withdrawal — John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean and George McGovern, and anti-war activists like myself.
It is true that Vietnam eventually became a trading partner (“friend” is another matter). But this was not “once we left and quit bombing its people.” Before that took place, a Republican President confronted the Soviet Union in Europe and Afghanistan and forced the collapse of the Soviet empire. It was only then, after the Cold War enemy and support of the Vietnamese Communists had been defeated that they accommodated themselves to co-existence with the United States.
The “blame America first” mentality so manifest in this McGovern statement is endemic to the appeasement mentality that the progressive Senator so typifies: “Iraq has been nestled along the Tigris and Euphrates for 6,000 years. It will be there 6,000 more whether we stay or leave, as earlier conquerors learned.” In McGovern’s Alice-in-Wonderland universe, Iraq did not invade two countries, use chemical weapons on its Kurdish population, attempt to assassinate a U.S. president, spend tens of billions of dollars on banned weapons programs, aid and abet Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the West, and defy 17 UN resolutions to disarm itself, open its borders to UN inspectors, and adhere to the terms of the UN truce it had signed when its aggression in Kuwait was thwarted.
The “blame America first” mentality so manifest in this McGovern statement is endemic to the appeasement mentality that the progressive Senator so typifies: “Iraq has been nestled along the Tigris and Euphrates for 6,000 years. It will be there 6,000 more whether we stay or leave, as earlier conquerors learned.” In McGovern’s Alice-in-Wonderland universe, Iraq did not invade two countries, use chemical weapons on its Kurdish population, attempt to assassinate a U.S. president, spend tens of billions of dollars on banned weapons programs, aid and abet Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the West, and defy 17 UN resolutions to disarm itself, open its borders to UN inspectors, and adhere to the terms of the UN truce it had signed when its aggression in Kuwait was thwarted.
During the battle over Vietnam policy, thirty years ago, Nixon and supporters of the war effort had warned the anti-war left of the consequences that would follow if their campaign was successful. If the United States were to leave the field of battle and retreat, the Communists would engineer a “bloodbath” of revenge and to complete their revolutionary design. When confronted by these warnings, George McGovern, John Kerry and other anti-Vietnam activists dismissed them out of hand. This was just an attempt to justify an imperialist aggression. Time proved the anti-war activists to be tragically, catastrophically wrong, although they have never had the decency to admit it.
If the United States were to leave the battlefield in Iraq now, before the peace is secured (and thus repeat the earlier retreat), there would be a bloodbath along the Tigris and Euphrates as well. The jihadists will slaughter our friends, our allies, and all of the Iraqis who are struggling for their freedom. Given the nature of the terrorist war we are in, this bloodbath would also flow into the streets of Washington and New York and potentially every American city. The jihadists have sworn to kill us all. People who think America is invulnerable, that America can just leave the field of this battle and there will be peace, do not begin to understand the world we confront.
Or if they understand it, they have tilted their allegiance to the other side. McGovern’s phrase “as earlier conquerors learned,” speaks volumes about the perverse moral calculus of the progressive left. To McGovern we are conquerors, which makes the Zarqawi terrorists “liberators,” or as Michael Moore would prefer, “patriots.” The left that wants America to throw in the towel in Iraq is hyper-sensitive to questions about its loyalties but at the same time can casually refer to our presence in Iraq as an “invasion and occupation.” It wants to use the language of morality but it only wants the standard to apply in one direction. There is no one-dimensional such standard, and a politics of surrender is not a politics of peace.
The War At Home
The root cause of the division over the war in Iraq, as over the war in Vietnam, is a left that is alienated from the national purpose and believes that mankind will be better off if America loses the war with radical Islam. In the Cold War, this same left gave moral and political support to our Communist enemies; in this war it has entered an “unholy alliance”[7] with radical Islam to defeat us in the war on terror.
Its opposition to America’s wartime agendas is not limited to our efforts abroad or in Iraq; it is also at war with our homeland security defenses. There are already more than 350 American cities, which under the instigation of the political left have signed pledges refusing to cooperate with Homeland Security, particularly in regard to the protection of the nation’s borders. This movement is spear-headed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the legal left which provides not only intellectual leadership but active counsel for indicted terrorists.
The inspirer of the movement against the Patriot Act is himself an indicted terrorist, Sami al-Arian, former professor of engineering at the University of South Florida and head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a suicide bombing cult responsible for the murders of more than a hundred innocent people, including two Americans. In 1996, al-Arian founded an organization called the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Its purpose was to oppose the precursor of the Patriot Act — an anti-terrorism bill proposed by the Clinton administration in the wake of the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Al-Arian became a leading figure in the civil liberties left, embraced by his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild, organizations with long histories of obstructing America’s national security organizations.
Al-Arian opposed the anti-terrorist act because it outlawed “material support for terror” and allowed the use of secret evidence in terrorist cases. But constitutional issues were hardly the motivating factor for al-Arian whose real motive in opposing the measure was that his brother-in-law and co-conspirator had been arrested under its provisions, as a principal in the terrorist organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Sami al-Arian is still defended by the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, one of whose chief executives, Kit Gage, now heads Al-Arian’s organization. This “legal left” regards him as a victim of racial profiling and the Bush Administration’s over zealous prosecution of the war on terror and alleged disregard for the Bill of Rights. Said al-Arian on his arrest: “I’m a minority. I’m an Arab. I’m a Palestinian. I’m a Muslim. That’s not a popular thing to be these days. Do I have rights, or don’t I have rights?”
The indictment of al-Arian is 120 pages long and consists of years of tapped phone transcripts showing him involved in planning and financing suicide bombings in the Middle East. Although he was exposed by journalists at the Miami Herald in the early 1990’s, the federal government could not arrest him because of legal obstacles that blocked their investigations, obstacles that had been put in place by anti-Vietnam Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s and that were only removed by the Patriot Act. For nearly a decade, al-Arian was protected by the president of the University of South Florida, Betty Coster, the Democratic Party’s senatorial candidate in the 2004 elections.
Sami al-Arian is hardly unique. National Lawyers Guild attorney and veteran leftist, Lynne Stewart, has also been indicted by the Justice Department. Like Al-Arian, Stewart is actively defended by the ACLU, the legal left and the politically sympathetic American Association of University Professors, as well as radical magazines like Salon.com and The Nation. Stewart is under indictment for helping her client, the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, conduct terrorist activities in Egypt. Rahman is the leader of the Islamic Group, a terrorist cult that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Lynne Stewart is on record saying she believes the terrorists are liberationists and freedom fighters. “They are basically forces of national liberation,” she told the Marxist publication Monthly Review; “and I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination. … My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries … to liberate.”[8]
How is it possible that people who think of themselves as advocates of social justice can lend aid and comfort to Islamic radicals who behead people and blow women’s heads off with AK-47s when they are suspected of having sexual relations outside of marriage? How can self-styled progressives embrace such people? They can under the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In 1993, Stewart was honored by the National Lawyers Guild at its annual convention and told her adoring audience: “We have in Washington a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. We now resume … our quests … like David going forth to meet Goliath, like Beowulf the dragon slayer, … like Sir Galahad seeking the holy grail. And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us, ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.’”
The unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American left is forged by their perception of a common enemy, which is the United States. They act under the delusion that is common to all radicals who believe they can “change the world,” that they can give birth to new world in which “social justice” prevails. This idea of a socially just world is the contemporary vision of communism and socialism. It is the secular analog of the 72 virgins that await Islamic jihadists in Muslim heaven.
Muslim martyrs commit mass murder in order to get into paradise. This is a precise description of the progressive agenda. Why does the left want help the Islamic radicals to destroy America? To get into paradise. Call it socialism; call it Communism; call it social justice. It is a dream of the future that is so enticing it will justify any crime required to achieve it.
The radical left does not understand that the root cause of the social problems that confront is humanity itself. We are the root cause of the inequalities and injustices that we face. There will never be a socially just world because the “new” world that revolutionaries create will be run by the same human beings, who are corrupt and selfish and fallible by nature. A hundred million corpses in the Twentieth Century, the human detritus of the socialist experiment attest to this fact. To ignore it – and this is the basis of the revived political left – is delusional, but that does not make it any less dangerous. Radicals have a parallel goal to the goal of the jihadists, which is paradise on earth. And they have the same enemy, which is the Great Satan, i.e., the United States.
To confront this enemy in our midst we must reverse its perceptions. The mantra of the left is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” To defend ourselves we must adopt the view that the friend of my enemy is my enemy.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, NY 2004, p. 109
[2] Blix, Disarming Iraq, pp. 106 et seq. Unholy Alliance: “When the deadline arrived, the Iraq regime provided a report that was generally conceded not to have met the terms of the ultimatum. U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix summarized the Iraqi submission: ‘The chemical area of the text was an updated version of a declaration submitted in 1996. The missile part also had largely the same content as a declaration of 1996, with updates added. I reported to the Council that our preliminary examination of the declaration had not provided material or evidence that solved any of the unresolved disarmament issues.’ These included the fact that ‘8,500 liters of anthrax, 2,100 kilograms of bacterial growth media, 1.5 metric tons of VX nerve agent and 6,500 chemical bombs’ that the U.N. inspectors had ascertained were at one time in Saddam’s possession were unaccounted for.[2] Resolution 1441 had called on Saddam Hussein to document their destruction. Even the French ambassador noted that ‘there was no new information in the declaration,…’[2] Afterwards Blix wrote of the declaration, ‘My gut feelings, which I kept to myself, suggested to me that Iraq still engaged in prohibited activities and retained prohibited items, and that it had the documents to prove it.’”
[3] Cited in David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance, p. 227
[4] Unholy Alliance, op. cit. p.216; cf. William Shawcross, Allies: The US, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq, NY 2004 p. 148
[5] Cited in Unholy Alliance, p. 227
[6] Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2004
[7] David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery 2004
[8] Monthly Review, November 25, 2002. Reprinted in www.frontagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=4764
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