The Enemy At Home (8 page)

The war against terrorism has provided a dangerous excuse for human rights abuses and social controls.
This liberal indictment can be summed up in a few phrases. The Patriot Act. Guantánamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. Domestic spying. Haditha. Liberals recognize that after 9/11, some things had to change. But from the beginning liberals insisted that if we fight the enemies of freedom by restricting freedom in America, we become more like the terrorists. The Patriot Act, many liberals insist, goes too far. Author Gore Vidal warns, “The Patriot Act makes it possible for government agents to break into anyone’s home when they are away, conduct a search and keep the citizen indefinitely from finding out that a warrant was issued. They can oblige librarians to tell them what books anyone has withdrawn. If the librarian refuses, he or she can be criminally charged.” By the count of the late Edward Said, “The Patriot Act…suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments.”
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Nor did liberals have to wait long for their theoretical fears to materialize. For many liberals, the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrated the naked abuse of power: captives being stripped, humiliated, and forced to perform sex acts in the name of interrogation. Similarly, in the liberal view, Guantánamo Bay—where hundreds of prisoners are held without charge, without access to lawyers, and indefinitely at the whim of the U.S. government—reveals the abuses of basic constitutional liberty that occur when the Bush administration is given unchecked power. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls the Guantánamo Bay camps a “national disgrace.” Amnesty International termed the camps “the gulag of our time.”
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Liberal groups routinely produce evidence that the U.S. military is engaged in the wanton killing of civilians, as at Haditha, or in various forms of torture that allegedly violate the Geneva Convention and international human rights codes. Some torture techniques are highlighted by human rights advocate Mark Danner: “heat and light and dietary manipulation…sleep and sensory deprivation…water-boarding, in which a prisoner is stripped, shackled, and submerged in water until he begins to lose consciousness, and other forms of near-suffocation.”
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Then there were reports of the U.S. government secretly taping conversations between American citizens and terrorist suspects abroad. Not only did the secret surveillance seem a clear violation of American law, but in the liberal view it also jeopardized the privacy rights of all Americans. Many liberals were outraged when the Bush administration asserted its right to perform such surveillance and insisted that it would continue doing so.

For liberals, all of this adds up to a truly frightening situation. Let’s recall that many liberals have never considered Bush a legitimate president. He lost the popular vote in 2000 and was installed in power by the Supreme Court. By becoming a war president Bush was able to dispel liberal opposition and even to win reelection by a margin of several million votes. Many liberals openly allege that Bush used the war on terrorism to consolidate his political position. Even more infuriating for liberals, the war against terrorism gives the Bush administration virtually unlimited power that it can use to undermine liberal principles and to threaten liberals in their own country. “We will all be under surveillance,” warns columnist Wendy Kaminer. “We are all suspects now.” Anthony Lewis alleges that never before has the threat to civil liberties been greater because in previous cases of wartime repression, the repression ended when the war ended. “But it’s hard to envisage an end to the current war…. So repressive measures may go on indefinitely.”
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The deeper problem is the global danger posed by religious fundamentalism.
Liberals argue that 9/11 was a horrible illustration of the damage that can be wrought by a phenomenon that is rising throughout the world—religious fundamentalism. And if Islamic fundamentalism produced a terrible tragedy that cost three thousand American lives, liberals fear that the fundamentalism of Bush and his political allies is producing the horrible results—the gratuitous invasions and mass killings, the abuses of power and use of torture, the suspensions of domestic civil liberties—that are justified in the name of a phony war against terrorism.

Many liberals profess to see little meaningful difference between Islamic fundamentalists and American religious and social conservatives. Richard Falk writes, “The Great Terror War has so far been conducted as a collision of absolutes, a meeting ground of opposed fundamentalisms.” Social critic Edward Said found in both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism the same traits of “magical thinking” and “lying religious claptrap” leading to “bloody solutions.” Political scientist Benjamin Barber warns of “an American jihad being waged by the radical right. These Christian soldiers bring to their ardent campaign…all the purifying hatred of the zealots in Tehran and Cairo.”
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In the liberal view, both Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists are implacably opposed to basic civil liberties, to women’s rights and homosexual rights, and to separation of church and state. These are the people who “talk to God” and invoke his name to justify their punitive agenda. Both can become violent and dangerous when they do not get their way. It is impossible to argue with such people, who are fundamentally irrational and fanatical. The only viable solution is to defeat and marginalize these extremists.

How to fight the war against the war against terrorism.
In Iraq the liberal solution is obvious: America should get out before more lives are lost. Some liberals recognize that a U.S. withdrawal would mean a stunning victory for the insurgents—a fulfillment of their objectives. This prospect does not deter the liberal leadership in Congress, and of the activist wing of the Democratic Party, because of their conviction that America is losing Iraq in any case.

Simply by occupying Iraq and staying there, many liberals say, America is strengthening the insurgency. A central premise here is that the war against terrorism is producing more terrorists. Congressman John Murtha has said many times that the Iraqi people don’t want America there. In Murtha’s view, America should leave before the situation deteriorates even further. Each liberal has his own timetable. Columnist Nicholas Kristof wants “every last soldier” home by the end of 2007. Columnist Robert Scheer advocates immediate withdrawal: “It is time we called a halt to our mindless messing in other people’s lives.”
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Turn the place over to the Iraqis, or to the United Nations—the people who should have handled it in the first place.

Although most liberals are opposed to the Iraq war, they are not opposed to American action to fight terrorism or to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. Liberals emphasize that they support a targeted and focused campaign to capture or kill “the people who did 9/11.” This means going after bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, and it means rooting out Al Qaeda. It means taking reasonable steps to prevent terrorists from launching further attacks. But liberals firmly believe that the Patriot Act will have to be drastically revised. They insist that Guantánamo Bay should be dismantled and the prisoners moved into a different program where their legal rights are upheld. Liberals want no more domestic surveillance without proper court warrants.

Most of all, liberals do not want to invade any more countries. They don’t even want to hear about it. The ongoing rhetoric of “war” makes them uncomfortable. As these liberals see it, we are not in a state of war and we need a new way to think about how to fight terrorism. Instead of a war, author James Carroll contends that America should pursue “an unprecedented, swift, sure, and massive campaign of law enforcement.” Robert Reich, a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration, agrees: “Fighting international terrorism is not like fighting a war. It’s more like controlling crime.” Philanthropist George Soros echoes these sentiments: “Crimes require police work, not military action.”
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Liberals do consider themselves to be at war, but it is more in the nature of a political battle. The enemy is religious fundamentalism in general, and the fundamentalism of the Bush administration and its supporters in particular. Liberals like Reich call for the forces of “reason” (by which he means liberals) to unite against the nefarious influence of both Islamic fundamentalism and the fundamentalism espoused by President Bush and his Christian allies. But the practical thrust of the liberal political campaign is at home. With an intensity that we have not seen on the left since the 1960s, liberals are agitating to evict conservatives from the corridors of power. This, for them, is not just a matter of partisan politics. Many liberals believe that the fate of their deepest beliefs, of liberalism itself, is at stake.

TAKEN AS A
whole, the liberal critique of the war against terrorism is a powerful indictment, one that the Bush administration has not adequately answered. I will examine each of the central liberal themes in this book. Here I just want to raise a single paradox. Usually when liberals are confronted with a problem, such as poverty or racism or violence, they are not content to merely tackle its surface symptoms. Typically liberals demand that the problem be attacked at the level of “root causes.” Only by getting to the bottom of it, only by confronting the reason behind it, do liberals expect to correctly diagnose a problem and remedy it. When there is a real social evil, such as poverty, liberals have not hesitated to declare a “war on poverty” to try and eliminate it.

But this approach is the very opposite of the one that liberals adopt when it comes to fighting Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Liberals know as well as anyone else that the crisis of 9/11 was not a simple matter of a group of bad guys planning an especially serious crime: catch the bad guys and the problem goes away. Liberals are fully aware that 9/11 was only the latest and most successful of a string of attacks against American lives and American interests. There have now been numerous terrorist attacks in other Western countries, as well as in Muslim countries friendly to the United States.

Many liberals also recognize that Al Qaeda’s terror network draws its support from the community of Islamic radicals and fundamentalists. The radicals are in control of one country, Iran, that seems resolved to develop a nuclear capability. Everywhere else in the Muslim world, even in relatively moderate or secular countries, Islamic fundamentalism has made political gains. Every year there are hundreds of thousands of young Muslims who emerge from madrassas and mosques imbued with an animus toward America and the West. Even in the West, Islamic radicalism has been implicated in murders, such as the fatal stabbing of Theo van Gogh, and bombings, of the kind we saw in Madrid and London.

Moreover, this rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism, and the violence it breeds, is the product of the most illiberal ideology in the world today. Soviet communism, for all its repressive practices, at least identified ideologically with liberal goals such as equality and social justice. By contrast, Islamic fundamentalism has no affinity with liberalism at all. Christopher Hitchens notes that what Muslim fundamentalists hate about America “is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend…but what they do like and must defend.”
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As liberals have seen in Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere, when Islamic fundamentalists are in power, they imprison dissidents, flog emancipated women, stone adulterers and homosexuals, and pronounce death sentences on blasphemers. Michael Moore himself pointed out that the chief target of 9/11, the World Trade Center, was in liberal New York.

One might expect American liberals to want to eradicate not just “the guys who did 9/11” (the actual perpetrators, liberals do not need reminding, are already dead) but the illiberal ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and the reactionary regimes that support Islamic terrorism. That ideology, those regimes, are the root cause behind 9/11. If there is anything that stimulates liberals to go to war, this should be it. But, if anything, liberals have mobilized against America’s war to fight Islamic radicalism. It is possible, of course, for liberals (and even conservatives) to oppose this feature or that feature of Bush’s war on terror. There are reasonable arguments to be made against Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or how America is managing the intricate situation there. It is even possible for liberals to want to fight a very different kind of war, with a very different strategy, but with the same goal of defeating Islamic radicalism and terrorism.

The mystery is that liberals seem to oppose virtually every aspect of Bush’s war, both on the domestic and the foreign front, without offering any comprehensive strategy of their own. Rather, liberals seem increasingly united in a political effort to restrict the scope of the fight against the foreign foe that has inflicted unprecedented harm on the United States. Opposition to Bush’s war on terrorism is now a central feature of American liberalism. We are left with a profound paradox: today on the world scene, it is conservatives who are fighting to undermine illiberal forces and secure liberal values in the Muslim world. American fundamentalists are the ones who are most eager to go after Islamic fundamentalists, and American liberals are the ones who are most eager to stop them.

AS WE CAN
see from this chapter and the previous one, there is a fundamental divide in America over foreign policy. Author Jonathan Franzen writes, “One half of the country believes that Bush is crusading against the Evil One while the other half believes that Bush is the Evil One.” And this is only part of the chasm that has opened up between liberals and conservatives. The real divide is over the meaning of America itself. Recognizing this, Bill Moyers said in a recent speech, “Yes, there’s a fight going on against terrorists around the globe, but just as certainly there’s a fight going on here at home, to decide the kind of country this will be during and after the war on terrorism.” Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concurs. “The country is now divided both politically and culturally with distinct and counterpoised views about government, values, the family, and the best way of life.”
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In some ways, of course, it has always been so. But today the differences are deeper, perhaps deeper than the country has seen in a century and a half, and the nature of the divide is new as well.