by Paul Kengor
Yes, the Pentagon had been bombed twice: in 1972, by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and their network of Communist-terrorist crazies, and now on September 11, 2001, the day of the Times article, by Osama bin Laden and his Islamist terrorist crazies.
The day of the 1972 Pentagon strike was idyllic in Ayers's memory. “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he wrote wistfully in his memoir, in a line the Times quoted. It had been a lovely day—just as September 11, 2001, had started. It had been a perfect day to bomb the Pentagon.
Would Ayers do it all again?
“I don't want to discount the possibility,” he told the Times reporter. He confessed that he found “a certain eloquence to bombs,” admiring their “poetry and pattern.” Ayers, explained the Times, could still wax poetic about “the wild displays of noise and color, the flares, the surprising candle bombs,” and especially for “the Big Ones, the loud concussions.”
There had never been a Big One, a loud concussion, on American soil quite like that on September 11, 2001.
A Career in Education
When Bill Ayers thus expounded in the September 11, 2001, edition of the New York Times, no one could claim he was a misled, crazy “kid.” He was fifty-six years old. He was now a “distinguished professor”—in the field of education, no less. He trained America's future teachers.
To gain such a position at an institution of higher learning, specifically the University of Illinois at Chicago, required an advanced degree. But what institution would have allowed Ayers into its educational program? This, after all, was a man that many—perhaps including Ayers himself—figured should have been in prison rather than graduate school. He had spent a decade and a half on the run, living in fifteen different states. During that time Ayers had used the names of dead babies in cemeteries as aliases.5 Would any graduate school even begin to consider his application?
Oh, yes. In fact, Ayers did not have to hunt for a backwater school. He could turn to a prestigious institution right in New York City: Columbia University. John Dewey's celebrated home was there to roll out the red carpet for Bill Ayers. He entered the doctoral program at Columbia Teachers College, eventually earning his doctorate in 1987. One wonders whether Ayers's application to Columbia included his previously authored works, such as Prairie Fire, or his infamous credo for the Weathermen: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.”6
In heading into higher education, Ayers followed the pattern of nearly every single one of the SDS-Weatherman fanatics. His bride, Bernardine Dohrn, also entered the academy.
As Dohrn had joined her husband as a fugitive in the 1970s, she had also joined the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. (See page 423.) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had dubbed her “the most dangerous woman in America” and “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.”7
By September 11, 2001, however, Dohrn had set down her bombing plans in preference for lesson plans: she had taken her unique training in law, beginning with the National Lawyers Guild in the 1960s, to Northwestern University School of Law, which made her a faculty member in 1991.8 Professor Dohrn began specializing in children at the law school's Family Justice Center.
To most observers, this would seem a poor match—an injustice at the Justice Center—for a person who once openly celebrated the mutilation of a pregnant woman by cheering, “Dig it! …They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!” Apparently, however, the deans and provost at Northwestern judged that the former Weather Underground terrorist had much to impart to their students.
A Bridge to Nowhere
In a perverse way, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn offer a bridge between America's twentieth-century foe—Communism—and its successor, the malevolent enemy that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001: Islamic totalitarianism. Just as in the Cold War, America's efforts to counter the adversary today are complicated by a range of people on the domestic front—not just true believers but also, far more numerous, left-leaning dupes, who fail to recognize the enemy, or who see the enemy only to the right.
Ayers, Dohrn, and other homegrown Communist terrorists went to violent extremes that most dupes did not during the Cold War, but still they were part of a larger contingent who repeatedly excused the other side. A similar phenomenon is occurring in the current confrontation against Islamic radicalism. Today we encounter plenty of dupes—including some of the same individuals from the Cold War—who chastise not the evil motivations of the violent extremists but, too often, the noble intentions of the Americans doing their best to stop the terror.
The tragic destiny of the dupe is to consistently, unwittingly defend the bad people on the bad side—the wrong people on the wrong side of history.
“Why Do They Hate Us?”
One way in which the political Left has apologized for Islamic fundamentalists/ terrorists has been to argue that Islamic militancy is a product of the policies of America, of the West, of Israel, or, even more generally, a result of poverty or inadequate education in the Muslim world. There is no shortage of blame to shovel at everyone and everything—except, too often, the fanatics themselves.
One wonders how Corliss Lamont might have explained September 11, 2001. Lamont, a lifetime New Yorker, was spared that horror. The atheist-humanist had departed this world six years earlier, in April 1995, at the ripe old age of ninety-two, leaving behind an endowed chair in civil liberties at Columbia Law School as well as his private papers and a Corliss Lamont Rare Book Reading Room named in his honor at the university. Nonetheless, until the day he died, even after the Cold War ended, Lamont was still blaming America for the faults of the totalitarian world, as he did during a June 1993 trip to Cuba—one of the final remaining bastions of Communist true believers.9
Lamont and his cohorts often blamed America for the latest Soviet action, or for Fidel Castro's woes, or for starting the Cold War. Recall how Lamont's mentor, John Dewey, wrapped up his final article in his 1928 series for The New Republic by arguing that Britain's withdrawal of recognition for Russia “had done more than any other one thing to stimulate the extremists and fanatics of the Bolshevist faith, and to encourage militarism and hatred of bourgeois nations.”10 In this astounding assertion, Dr. Dewey charged Britain with fueling Communist hatred, militarism, and extremism—rather than placing the guilt on Lenin and Stalin, who had unleashed a campaign that would kill tens of millions of Russians.
Lamont's “progressive” heirs similarly blamed America into the War on Terror. After September 11, 2001, and particularly after the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq, it became all too common to hear warnings from the Left that America was “stirring up a hornet's nest” in the Middle East, or that Uncle Sam had better be careful not to “anger” the “Muslim street.” We will only spawn terrorism and extremism, was a common refrain.
This line of argument did not take account of the fact that America and the West had been attacked by Islamic fanatics beginning long before September 11, 2001. The attacks went back more than thirty years at least, and included the Black September hijackings of 1970; the 1979–80 Iranian hostage crisis; the killing of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in October 1983; the torture of Americans abroad like William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, who was kidnapped in 1984 and eventually executed; the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro; the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; the 1993 World Trade Center attack; the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000; and on and on and on.
Somehow, though, Why do they hate us? became the question the handwringing Left so often asked—suggesting that America must be to blame for inciting such violence and extremism. And when the United States finally took action to defend itself against these repeated attacks, many on the Left suggested that America was fueling the hatred.
Curiously, the U.S. government was blamed even for inciting the hatred of the theocratic-terrorist state of Iran, since President Bush in
2002 declared the rogue regime part of an “axis of evil.” It didn't seem to matter that Iran had called America “the Great Satan” ever since the Shiite revolution in 1979. Nor did it matter that the ayatollah's theocracy had been among the world's leading sponsors of terrorism for the past thirty years—as the Clinton State Department had detailed throughout the 1990s in lengthy, formal reports to Congress. (The Clinton administration also identified Iraq as one of the chief sponsors of international terrorism.)11 This terrorism was well established years before September 11, 2001.
The terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 did so because they were terrorists. Those terrorists precipitated the War on Terror.
Bush Hatred
One way to inadvertently help the adversary is to eviscerate the man trying to stop that adversary. That is precisely what happened to President George W. Bush when he was commander in chief during the War on Terror.
Many American liberals were vitriolic in their condemnations of Bush and his policies. This is not to suggest that Bush should have been exempt from criticism; legitimate questions were raised about the president's handling of certain issues. Too often, however, the criticisms seemed to go beyond the usual dissent or a genuine articulation of policy differences. With Bush, it truly was an evisceration.
The far Left despised Bush more than any president since Richard Nixon. Many (but not all) of the most egregious statements regarding the War on Terror, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even post-9/11 policy toward Iran were more anti-Bush than pro-Iraq, pro-Saddam, pro-Iran, or pro-Islamist. In other words, some of the worst criticisms stemmed not from genuine conviction about the Islamist enemy but from political jockeying and an intense personal dislike for Bush.12
This represented a departure from the Cold War, when many critics of American presidents spoke out of sympathy or admiration for, if not loyalty to, Soviet Communism. Equally important, during the Cold War, Communists, whether stationed in Moscow or New York City, Prague or Chicago, deliberately sought to manipulate liberals through carefully crafted propaganda. By and large this has not been the case during the War on Terror; neither terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda nor terror-sponsoring regimes like Iran have undertaken international propaganda campaigns as widespread or precisely plotted as the Soviet Union's. Thus, whereas ridiculous statements by American liberals in, say, the 1930s were often prompted by Communist propaganda, ridiculous statements by American liberals in the War on Terror usually have not been the result of manipulation by the enemy.
It is crucial to understand this distinction. Wildly criticizing the American government does not by itself make a person a dupe; typically, a dupe is someone whose unthoughtful statements are deliberately prompted by the enemy.
That said, the bile aimed at Bush no doubt served the interests of America's adversaries. Example after example of that hostility could be cited from blogs or rants by everyday hard-left Americans. Unfortunately, some of the nation's top politicians joined in the reckless attacks. Former vice president Al Gore, for example, became positively unhinged. Perhaps not coincidentally, soon after losing the presidency to Bush in the bitterly contested 2000 election, Gore accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism—not a place to go for political healing or to learn political moderation. By February 2004 he seemed consumed by fury against Bush. No longer did it appear that he was simply critiquing Bush policy. Condemning President Bush during a speech in his native Tennessee, Gore shouted at the top of his lungs: “HE BETRAYED THIS COUNTRY!!! HE PLAYED ON OUR FEARS!!!”13
It was a frightening display by a former vice president who had won the popular vote for president. Saddam Hussein would have relished the attack, not because it was pro-Saddam but because it was so vigorously anti-Bush. It served anti-Bush interests everywhere, including the Islamists who wanted Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid also gave the Islamists what they hoped for when he publicly called the president of the United States “a loser” and later declared that the Iraq war was “lost.”14 What the enemy in the Middle East needed was for enough Americans and members of Congress to join Reid in his defeatism.
Reid insisted the war was lost even as President Bush's “surge” of troops was turning around the very difficult postwar reconstruction of Iraq. Despite Reid's vocal defeatism—which was backed by such Democratic colleagues as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—the surge worked. Even Bush's harshest critics, from Hillary Clinton to the New York Times, conceded as much.
Reid conceded little, however. The Democratic leader seemed eager to denounce the commander in chief. He declared flatly: “President Bush is a liar.” Echoing Al Gore, Reid added of Bush: “He betrayed the country.” Reid refused to apologize for these statements even when NBC's Tim Russert asked him whether such incivility was appropriate in a congressional leader. The senator replied, “I don't back off one bit.”15
And why would he? It became commonplace for liberal Democrats in Congress to publicly blast Bush as a liar. For example, a trio of California liberals—Representatives Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pete Stark—all called the president a liar. “The president is a liar,” declared Waters flatly, in remarks quickly published by People's World, formerly the People's Weekly World, the Communist organ and offshoot of the Daily Worker.16 Congressman Stark probably made the ugliest charges. Speaking from the House floor in October 2007, Stark—who earlier had called the U.S. action an “act of extreme terrorism” and a “terrorist act”17—not only called the president a liar but also ripped America's troops for allegedly “blow[ing] up innocent people.” Then he said Bush wanted to send more American boys “to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.”18 (Stark had made similar accusations against President Reagan regarding the Grenada invasion in 1983.)19
Some Democrats in Congress spoke as if they wanted to get rid of George W. Bush seemingly as much as (if not more than) they wanted Saddam Hussein gone. Just weeks into the Iraq war in the spring of 2003, John Kerry, the Vietnam-vet-turned-protester-turned-senator, said: “What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.”20 At the time, Kerry was angling to become the Democratic Party's next nominee for president.
A year later Kerry was even more blunt. “These guys” in the Bush administration, Kerry said, “are the most crooked … lying group I've ever seen. It's scary.”21
Our Troops Are Barbarians and Nazis
What was scary was the degree to which many American liberals reacted to the War on Terror by lambasting and undermining the Americans waging battle against terrorists.
Pete Stark's unfounded charge that U.S. troops were “blow[ing] up innocent people” was outrageous, but the congressman was hardly alone among elected Democrats in making irresponsible accusations. During the Vietnam War elected members of Congress like Senator Ted Kennedy, future senators like John Kerry, antiwar radicals like the SDS leaders, and dupes like Benjamin Spock had alleged the most terrible things about American soldiers. Now the Left was back—some-times the exact same voices—deriding the American troops who were fighting the terrorists as terrorists themselves.
Probably the worst offender was Senator Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat, who compared the thankless work of U.S. military interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay facility to the work of “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.”22 This was not a flip comment. Durbin said it on the floor of the U.S. Senate, reading from a text, on June 14, 2005, amid the single worst stretch of killings of American soldiers by terrorists inside Iraq. The terrorists’ goal was to subvert support for America's mission in Iraq and the War on Terror. Durbin had helped the cause.
The senator obviously knew nothing about Nazis, Soviets, or Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. It was absurd, and offensive, to compare the nonlethal interrogation of Islamist POWs to these sk
ull-laden killing fields. The senator's analogy was so grossly unfair that Durbin should have immediately apologized not only to U.S. troops but also to victims of the Nazis, of the Soviets, and of Pol Pot.
Blasting U.S. military personnel, whether at Guantanamo or in Iraq or in Afghanistan, was all too common among Democrats—again, much as during the Vietnam War. George W. Bush may have been the ultimate target, but in the process of attacking the president's handling of the war they accused U.S. troops of various atrocities.
Senator Barack Obama put it this way in August 2007: “We've got to get the job done there [Iraq]. And that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”23
Even Vietnam vets, now in Congress, were making such baseless allegations, reminiscent of John Kerry after Vietnam. Most egregiously, Congressman John Murtha accused U.S. Marines of killing “innocent” Iraqi civilians “in cold blood.” The Pennsylvania Democrat said that Marines from the Third Battalion were “cold-blooded killers” who “murdered innocent civilians.”
The exonerated and acquitted Marines found Murtha's comments so inaccurate that they sued the congressman for slander. They wanted to clear their good names. Even after that lawsuit was filed, and after Murtha denounced his own constituents as “racists” and “rednecks,” the congressman cruised to easy reelection a few weeks later. Only a few months later the U.S. Navy gave Murtha the Distinguished Public Service Award.24