The Enemy At Home

by Dinesh D'Souza

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

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

  ELEVEN

  Battle Plan for the Right

  How to Defeat the Enemy at Home and Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  LET US EXPLORE these themes in greater detail. First I want to examine how conservatives can use the culture war to win the war against Islamic radicalism. If the American left is covertly allied with the radical Muslims, the American right should openly ally with traditional Muslims. Former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht is one of the few people to recognize that “these religious traditionalists—and not the liberal secularists—are the most valuable allies the United States has.”1

  Traditional Muslims are in a difficult position. Numerous surveys such as the Pew Research study have shown that the vast majority reject terrorism. At the same time they don’t want their condemnations of terrorism to sound like an endorsement of Western secularism and moral depravity. In general the traditional Muslims also reject violence, although some will approve violence that is used in what they consider “wars of national liberation.” Moreover, the Pew survey shows that very few Muslims consider democracy a “Western way of things that would not work here.” The World Values Survey shows that in most Muslim nations support for self-government is just as high as in the West. In some countries more than 90 percent of Muslims endorse democracy—a higher percentage than in the United States.2 Muslims want democracy, but at the same time they want real democracy. They want governments that reflect Muslim interests, not American or Israeli
interests.

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

  What traditional Muslims identify as the sins of the United States, however, are really the sins of the cultural left. Traditional Muslims don’t see the Americans who work hard, go to church, and look after their families. Instead they turn on their TV sets and witness the perverted lifestyles that Hollywood presents as sophisticated, admirable, and typical of “the American way.” In the United Nations and elsewhere, Muslims confront feminists, zero-population-growth activists, and sexual libertines who present themselves as champions of American and indeed universal values. This is America’s face to the non-Western world as portrayed by the left. As a consequence of the left’s prominent role in international activism and popular culture, traditional Muslims see one America and do not realize that there are two Americas. They see the immorality of blue America and take it to be representative of all of America. The Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol points out that this ignorance is exploited by bin Laden and his allies. “The masterminds of Islamic radicalism work hard to mask the religiosity and decency of average Americans.”3

  In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet. Conservatives should also reject Huntington’s doctrine of a “clash of civilizations.” This, too, sets up a false division between the Islamic world and the West, placing traditional Muslims and radical Muslims in the same camp, which is exactly where bin Laden wants them. Moreover, Huntington ignores the clash of civilizations within the West, and he wrongly assumes that a social or religious conservative in America would have more in common with an American or European leftist than with a traditional Muslim. Admittedly some on the right may feel uncomfortable about teaming up with Muslims. Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.

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

  If conservatives hope to make friends in the Muslim world, they must stop holding silly seminars on whether Islam is compatible with democracy. In reality, a majority of the world’s Muslims today live under democratic governments—in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Turkey, not to mention Muslims living in Western countries. There is nothing in the Koran or the Islamic tradition that forbids democracy. Islam calls for the Muslim community to be governed by a caliph who is God’s viceregent on earth, but no procedure is specified for who should be the leader or how he should be chosen. The Koran does call for governance to be done by shura, or consultation, and as the Muslim historian Hamid Algar writes, “An election is nothing more than a mechanism for the implementation of this general Koranic principle.” Even Islamic radicals like Qutb and Mawdudi admit this. The only caveat, as Khaled Abou El Fadl points out, is that “a case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God’s sovereignty. It cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty but must instead show how popular sovereignty…expresses God’s authority, properly understood.”4 This mirrors the Declaration of Independence’s argument that it is the Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights, and thus it is a perfect expression of the conservative understanding of American democracy.

  A SECOND WAY for conservatives to build ties with traditional Muslims is to let them govern their own societies. This is the meaning of Islamic democracy—Muslims must choose their own way. Iraq is the test case for this. If the people of Iraq want Islam to be the state religion, we should allow it to happen. If they want sharia, let them have it. But wouldn’t all this be a violation of true democracy? Not at all. As Noah Feldman points out, England has an established church, so religious establishment is not incompatible with religious toleration. Israel is simultaneously a democracy and a Jewish state. Moreover, most European countries have democratically chosen to relinquish some of their economic liberties in the interest of economic security. So why can’t Muslim countries choose to give up some of their civil liberties in order to promote civic morality? Just as democracy has enabled Japan to establish a very different kind of society than France or America, so democracy will enable Muslims to define their own civilization. As philosopher Charles Taylor says, we should recognize the concept of “multiple modernities.”5 This is multiculturalism in its truest and best sense, and it deserves conservative support. The right should recognize, as the left does not, that democratization does not mean Westernization.

  In this context, it is time for conservatives to retire the tiresome invocation of Turkey as a model for Islamic society. No Muslim country is going the way of Turkey, and even Turkey is no longer going the way of Turkey. Atatürk thought of himself as a European, and what he did in Turkey was anomalous and, in all candor, ridiculous. Atatürk abolished the religious courts in favor of the Swiss legal code, ended religious education in schools, legalized gambling and alcohol, replaced existing commercial laws with the German commercial law, outlawed Islamic dress in public buildings, abolished the Islamic calendar, changed the alphabet, and converted the great mosque of the Hagia Sofia into a museum. As the liberator of Turkey—a kind of Turkish Gandhi—Atatürk could in his lifetime get away with these extreme measures. But now his militant secularization of Turkey is being reversed, and on balance it is a good thing. Muslims have the right to live in Islamic states under Muslim law if they wish.

  Support for democracy does not mean that conservatives need a worldwide campaign to overthrow unelected regimes. While democracy is desirable as a long-term goal, it is not always in America’s interest to have democracy now. Foreign policy is not philanthropy, but rather a way for the United States to promote its interests worldwide. America is not obliged to use its resources to produce anti-Americ
an outcomes. There are hereditary monarchs in the Middle East, as in the Gulf kingdoms, who are pro-American and enjoy fairly high levels of popular esteem. It would be imprudent under current circumstances to pressure these kingdoms to democratize or liberalize. (They are already quite liberal by Middle Eastern standards.) Nor should America seek to coerce tyrants like Musharraf, Mubarak, and the Saudi royal family to become more liberal or secular. If they do, they will become further alienated from their people and become more vulnerable to being overthrown. When there are democratic results, as with the election victories of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, America must recognize the legitimacy of the people’s choice. But this imposes no obligation on the United States to provide aid or support to governments that oppose American interests and threaten American allies.

  It is necessary to show that democracy works in the Middle East, and then to let the traditional Muslims pursue it for themselves. Iraq represents America’s initiative not to establish democracy everywhere but to establish democracy somewhere. This is a good time for conservatives to revive a new form of the Reagan doctrine, which held that people should fight for their own freedom, and if they do, then America will help. In Iraq, of course, there was no prospect of the Iraqi people overthrowing Hussein on their own. But even in Iraq American policy is moving toward the Reagan doctrine. Increasingly Iraqis are protecting their own freedom while America moves into a supporting role. An updated Reagan doctrine would also be a good policy for the United States to employ in Iran. As Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons and promote Islamic radicalism on the world stage, diplomacy and the threat of sanctions cannot in the long term deter the mullahs from doing what they are clearly determined to do. Consequently the best option for America is to work with pro-democracy forces to overthrow the existing regime. Such forces do exist, but until now they have lacked organization, confidence, and most of all opportunity. This could change rapidly. If Iranians are willing to challenge the authority of the ruling mullahs, America should stand ready to assist them with material, financial, and if necessary military support. Replacing the mullahs’ regime in Iran should be an important priority for America because Iran is the one major country that the Islamic radicals now control.