The Enemy At Home (29 page)

The logic can be tested by applying the premise to any area other than religion. If the government puts up a monument to Abraham Lincoln, is it violating the freedom of those who detest Lincoln? It would seem not. If the government decides to make a treaty with Pakistan, is it violating the rights of Americans who think the government should instead be making a treaty with India? Certainly not. If a public school advocates one set of beliefs, is it infringing on the liberty of students who espouse a different set of beliefs? Absurd. If the government funds farm subsidies, is it “establishing” farming as a national occupation and discriminating against unemployed steel workers and travel agents? The notion is laughable. One’s right to espouse a belief system does not require every institution of government—including every agency, every employee, every public-school program—to abstain from supporting a different set of views. And so it is with religion. No wonder that America’s radical church-state doctrine, which defines “establishment” to cover virtually all public expressions of religion, is viewed by many people outside the United States as “establishing” an official posture of state hostility to religion.

SO FAR-FETCHED ARE
the reasons given for secularism, and so intense is the ideological commitment to it, that there has to be a deeper explanation of why many liberals are so determined to eradicate all vestiges of religion from public life. Why are many liberals obsessed with whether there is a prayer at a school graduation or whether the local town hall has a Christmas crèche? What possible harm is being done by such things? Once the left-wing activists put aside the historical, constitutional, and sociological bunkum, they can speak candidly about what is really frightening them. The answer, it turns out, is the Christian right. As many liberals see it, the Christian fundamentalists are religious fanatics, just like bin Laden: they are “outside the mainstream.” Operating by the dictates of faith rather than reason, they seek to “legislate their morality” and “impose their values” on the rest of society. Their goal, according to Lewis Lapham, the former editor of
Harper’s,
is “to restructure the Supreme Court as an office of the Holy Inquisition.” If they succeed in their agenda, Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State warns, “We’d be close to a
de facto
theocracy.”
⁴¹

Now, it is possible to find in Christian fundamentalism tendencies that are illiberal and sometimes dangerous. I certainly do. There are some fundamentalists who want America to be governed by Old Testament law. These extremists should be resisted and marginalized, and they are. But when secular liberals say “fundamentalist,” they usually don’t really mean “fundamentalist.” As George Marsden points out, fundamentalism is a tiny subset of American Protestantism.
⁴²
Today liberals frequently use the term to try and discredit a much larger and quite different group—evangelicals. Many liberals routinely describe President Bush as a fundamentalist although he calls himself an evangelical. The term “evangelical” is not a denominational term. It refers to many different types of Protestants who share an emphasis on a personal experience of God and a desire to proclaim the teachings of Christ. In the nineteenth century, evangelicals were the ones who were in the forefront of the antislavery movement and the temperance movement. Evangelicals today include Northerners and Southerners, whites and blacks, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. According to pollster George Gallup, approximately one in four Americans fits the definition. These are the people that liberals want to dismiss as fanatics, theocrats, enemies of reason, and “outside the mainstream.”

But these accusations are hard to sustain. Consider the charge that Christian conservatives pose a threat to democratic debate because they argue positions based on “blind faith” and are therefore immune to reason. Admittedly many Christian conservatives derive their social views about topics like abortion and homosexuality largely from the Bible. The fact that the Christian derives his position from faith, however, does not mean he cannot give reasons for his belief. If a Christian learns not to steal or murder or dishonor his parents from the Ten Commandments, it hardly follows that there is no rational basis for these precepts. The charge of irrationality seems to rely on using the term “rational” as a synonym for “liberal.” In a recent book, appropriately titled
Reason,
former Clinton cabinet official Robert Reich thinks it is an obvious corollary of reason itself that government should regulate “public” conduct like insider trading and executive pay, but not “private” behavior like abortion and gay marriage.
⁴³
Once you agree with Reich about his distinction between the private and public domain, his conclusion seems obvious. But Reich never stops to consider that his premise is hardly uncontroversial. Many conservatives would argue that abortion and gay marriage have public consequences no less significant—some would say far more significant—than insider trading and corporate pay scales. Thus there is no logical necessity, no mere operation of “reason,” that propels one to Reich’s conclusions. In identifying liberal policy with reason itself, Reich is either deluding himself or adopting the juvenile tactic of dismissing his opponents simply by labeling them “unreasonable.” Reason, in this usage, comes down to “what I and my liberal friends think makes sense.”

But aren’t evangelicals, no less than fundamentalists, intolerant people who are trying to impose their values on the rest of society? Here it is necessary to clarify a widespread confusion about the term “tolerance.” Tolerance does not mean approval. Indeed, the concept of tolerance implies disapproval. Tolerance means, “I don’t like this, I find it reprehensible, my ordinary instinct is to suppress it, but I will put up with it.” Thus for an evangelical Christian to say, “I consider adultery and homosexuality morally reprehensible, and I do not think society should condone such actions, but at the same time I do not wish society to interfere in the private lives of people,” is a textbook demonstration of tolerance.

There is no valid basis for objecting to conservative Christians applying their religious and moral beliefs to politics. Every group—from evangelicals to civil rights activists to antiwar protesters—is trying to convert its moral principles into law. In a democratic society, no group can “impose” its values without winning a sufficient number of allies to its cause. Imposing values through popular assent is what democratic politics is all about. Don’t laws that outlaw racial discrimination force people, whether they agree or not, to conform to a certain code of behavior? Conservative Christians who apply their religious beliefs to the causes they support are no more violating the Constitution than Martin Luther King did when he applied his religious beliefs to the cause of civil rights.

My conclusion is that the procedural objections to the political role played by evangelical Christians are a smokescreen. Indeed the whole liberal doctrine that seeks fairness and impartiality through “separation of church and state” is a fraud. The real objective of the secularists is to marginalize traditional morality. In one respect the Muslims are right—there is a war against Islam—but it is the secular liberals who are waging it. In another respect the Muslims are wrong: secularists don’t hate Islam, they hate traditional religion in general. Karen Armstrong writes, “It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules.”
⁴⁴
From this statement we can infer that religion is hated not because of its canonical teachings, such as the Christian doctrine of the resurrection or the Muslim injunction to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Rather, it is hated because it upholds the traditional moral code, which is upheld by God in the next world and (even more scary to secularists) by law and social stigma in this one.

The founders of classical liberalism advocated three types of freedom: economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of thought and belief. These are the freedoms that are protected in the American Constitution. Many contemporary liberals want to add a new type of freedom to this list—moral freedom. Moral freedom means freedom from traditional morality. But this kind of freedom is controversial in America, and it is overwhelmingly rejected in the non-Western world. It is certainly not the kind of freedom that Muslims want. Traditional Muslims believe they have every right to maintain their religious societies, to keep religion as the basis of law, and to resist liberal efforts to impose bogus secular “reforms” on Islamic societies. The real culprits, in this case, are the Secular Warriors. Both in America and abroad, they are the ones who are trying to eradicate every public trace of the religious and moral values that most of the world lives by.

EIGHT

Emboldening the Enemy

How Liberal Foreign Policy Produced American Vulnerability

I
T IS ONE
thing for radical Muslims to hate America for its role in undermining Muslim religious, cultural, and family values. It is quite another for this group to convert that hatred into violent attacks, such as the attack on 9/11. We have seen some of the ways the cultural left has exacerbated Muslim anger toward America and the West. Now I wish to show the left’s role in emboldening Islamic fundamentalists to strike directly at America. Here it may be useful to distinguish conceptually between the “cultural left” and the “foreign policy left.” Cultural leftists tend to march for abortion rights and homosexual rights, while foreign policy leftists march against the war in Iraq. In general, though, these are the same people. Their banners and placards say “Save
Roe v. Wade
” on one side and “Impeach Bush” on the other! In the next two chapters I will focus on the foreign policy activism of the left. I intend to show the left’s continuing effort to undermine America’s war against radical Islam. Iraq has become central to the objectives of the Islamic radicals, and here I explore how the left is working to defeat the democratic process there. Bizarre though it may seem, the left seeks America’s most devastating foreign policy defeat, surpassing even America’s loss in the Vietnam War.

None of these issues can be considered without understanding the goals of the Islamic radicals in this war. Remarkably, there is still great confusion about what these are. Years ago Sayyid Qutb wrote in
Milestones
that Muslims who are serious about the Islamic restoration cannot simply promulgate theories; they must seek to realize the Islamic state in “a concrete form.” Since Islam in its authentic sense does not exist today, what is needed, according to Qutb, is “to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country.”
¹
In other words, the fundamentalists must take over a major state. This state would then provide a beachhead for launching the takeover of other Muslim countries. The ultimate objective, repeatedly stressed by bin Laden and others, is the unification of the Muslim community into a single Islamic nation, governed by Islamic holy law.

In 1979, Qutb’s goal was achieved when the ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and launched the first stage of the Islamic revival. Hamid Algar terms the Khomeini revolution “the most significant event in contemporary Islamic history.”
²
It was an event comparable in significance to the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Virtually no one predicted it, yet it overturned the entire imperial structure and created a new order, even a new way of life. The mullahs restored the Islamic calendar, abolished Western languages from the schools, instituted an Islamic curriculum, declared a new set of religious holidays, stopped men from wearing ties, required women to cover their heads, changed the banking system to outlaw usury or interest, abolished Western-style criminal and civil laws, and placed the entire society under sharia.

The importance of the Khomeini revolution is that it demonstrated the viability of the Islamic theocracy in the modern age. Before Khomeini, the prospect of a large Muslim nation being ruled by clergy according to eighth-century precepts would have seemed far-fetched, even preposterous. Khomeini showed it could be done, and his successors have showed that it can last. To this day post-Khomeini Iran provides a viable model of what the Islamic radicals hope to achieve throughout the Muslim world. Khomeini also popularized the idea of America as a “Great Satan.” Before Khomeini, no Muslim head of state had said this about America. Muslim leaders like Nasser might disagree with America, but they never identified America as the primary source of evil in the world. During the Khomeini era, there were large demonstrations by frenzied Muslims who cursed the United States and burned the American flag. For the first time, banners and posters began to appear all over Iran:
DEATH TO AMERICA
!
THE GREAT SATAN WILL INCUR GOD
’
S PUNISHMENT
!
USA
,
GO
TO HELL
!
AMERICA IS OUR NUMBER ONE ENEMY
! These slogans have since become the mantra of Islamic radicalism. Khomeini was also the first Muslim leader in the modern era to advocate violence as a religious duty and to give special place to martyrdom.
³
Since Khomeini, Islamic radicalism has continued to attract aspiring martyrs ready to confront the Great Satan. In this sense, the seeds of 9/11 were sown a quarter of a century ago when Khomeini and his followers captured the government in Tehran.

Khomeini’s ascent to power was aided by the policies of Jimmy Carter and his allies on the cultural left. The Carter administration’s own expert on Iran, Gary Sick, provides the details in his memoirs.
⁴
It’s a riveting story that has been largely erased from our national memory. Carter was elected president in 1976 by stressing his support for human rights. From the time he took office, the left contrasted Carter’s rights doctrine with the shah’s practices. The left denounced the shah as a vicious and corrupt dictator, highlighting and in some cases magnifying his misdeeds. Left-leaning officials such as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, and State Department human rights officer Patricia Derian pressed Carter to sever America’s long-standing alliance with the shah. Eventually Carter came to agree with his liberal advisers that he could not in good conscience support the shah.

When the shah moved to arrest mullahs who called for his overthrow, leftists in America and Europe denounced these actions. Former diplomat George Ball called on the U.S. government to curtail the shah’s exercise of power. Acceding to this pressure, Carter called for the release of political prisoners and warned the shah not to use force against the demonstrators in the streets. When the shah petitioned the Carter administration to purchase tear gas and riot control gear, the human rights office in the State Department held up the request. Some, like State Department official Henry Precht, urged the United States to prepare the way for the shah to make a “graceful exit” from power. William Miller, chief of staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said America had nothing to fear from Khomeini since he would be a progressive force for human rights. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, even compared Khomeini to Mahatma Gandhi, and Andrew Young termed the ayatollah a “twentieth century saint.”

As the resistance gained momentum and the shah’s position weakened, he looked to the United States government to save him. Sick reports that the shah discovered he had many enemies, and few friends, in the Carter administration. Increasingly paranoid, the shah pleaded with the United States to help him stay in power. The Carter administration refused. Deprived of his last hope, with the Persian rug pulled out from under him, the shah decided to abdicate. The Carter administration encouraged him to do so, and the cultural left celebrated his departure. The result, of course, was Khomeini.

The Carter administration’s role in assisting with the downfall of the shah is one of America’s great foreign policy disasters of the twentieth century. In trying to get rid of the bad guy, Carter got the worse guy. His failure, as former Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, was the result of being “unable to distinguish between America’s friends and enemies.” According to Moynihan, the Carter administration had essentially adopted “the enemy’s view of the world.”
⁵
Carter does not deserve sole discredit for these actions. The intellectual framework that shaped Carter’s misguided strategy was supplied by the left.

Of course, the primary force behind the shah’s fall was the fundamentalist movement led by Khomeini. But it is possible that the shah, with American support, could have defeated this resistance. Another option would have been for America to use its influence to press for democratic elections, an option unattractive both to the shah and to the Islamic militants. Even after the shah’s departure, an American force could have routed the Khomeini regime, an action that would have been fully justified given Iran’s seizure of the U.S. embassy and the taking of American hostages. Determined at all costs to prevent these outcomes, the left sought not only to demonize the shah but also to favorably portray Khomeini and his radical cohorts. In Sick’s words, Khomeini became “the instant darling of the Western media.” The tone of American press coverage can be gleaned from
Time
’s cover story on February 12, 1979: “Now that the country’s cry for the Ayatollah’s return has been answered, Iranians will surely insist that the revolution live up to its democratic aims. Khomeini believes that Iran should become a parliamentary democracy. Those who know the Ayatollah expect that eventually he will settle in the holy city of Qom and resume a life of teaching and prayer.”
⁶

Immediately following Khomeini’s seizure of power, leftist political scientist Richard Falk wrote in the
New York Times:
“To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. He has been depicted in a manner calculated to frighten. The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. His close advisers are uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals…who share a notable record of concern with human rights. What is distinctive about his vision is the concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice. Many non-religious Iranians talk of this period as Islam’s finest hour. Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third world country.”
⁷

The naïvety of Falk’s essay is of such a magnitude as to be almost unbelievable. Falk should have known better, and I believe he did know better. Sick notes that in terms of the kind of regime he wanted to institute in Iran, “Khomeini was remarkably candid in describing his objectives.”
⁸
As an expert on international relations, Falk was surely familiar with what Khomeini had been consistently saying for three decades. Along with Ramsey Clark, former attorney general in the Johnson administration, Falk met with Khomeini on his last day in Paris, before his triumphal return to Iran. Shortly after that meeting Clark held a press conference to champion Khomeini’s cause. Falk, too, seems to have acted as a kind of unpaid public relations agent for the ayatollah’s regime.

Upon consolidating his power, Khomeini launched a bloody campaign of wiping out his political opposition and reversing the liberties extended by the shah to student groups, women’s groups, and religious minorities. In one year the Khomeini revolution killed more people than the shah had executed during his entire quarter century reign. Despite the fact that many progressive figures were imprisoned, tortured, and executed, Khomeini’s actions produced a great yawn of indifference from America’s cultural left. The same people who were shocked and outraged by the crimes of the shah showed no comparable outrage at the greater crimes of Khomeini. They knew, as well as everyone else, that liberty would be largely extinguished in Iran, and they greeted this prospect with equanimity.

Even when radical students overran the U.S. embassy on November 4, 1979, and took more than sixty American hostages, the left’s sympathy was with the hostage takers. During this period three liberal clergymen—William Sloane Coffin of New York’s Riverside Church, National Council of Churches executive director William Howard, and Catholic bishop Thomas Gumbleton—visited the hostages. They looked on with approval as the Iranian militants forced the hostages to record anti-American statements for use as propaganda. The American religious leaders did not seem embarrassed at being used by the hostage takers. Many of the allegations against the United States launched by the Iranian radicals corresponded exactly with the views of these liberal clergymen. Going beyond the expectations of the hostage takers, Coffin even faulted his fellow Americans for “self pity” and urged them to hold hands with their captors and sing.
⁹
In the hostage crisis, these men quite consciously contributed to America’s humiliation.

By aiding the shah’s ouster and with Khomeini’s consolidation of power, the left collaborated in giving radical Islam its greatest victory in the modern era. Thanks in part to Jimmy Carter and the left, Muslim radicals got what they had been seeking for a long time—control of a major Islamic state.

HAVING SEEN HOW
the Islamic radicals captured their first major country, let us now see why they decided to strike America on September 11, 2001. This is an important question because, for at least two decades prior to 9/11, radical Muslims were focused on fighting in their own countries. Khomeini had called for “Islam without borders” but what he meant by this was a single Islamic nation encompassing the entire Middle East. Khomeini’s problem was twofold. First, Iranians are Persian and not Arab. Second, Iranian Muslims are Shia while the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni. Islamic radicals have fought hard since 1980 to replicate Khomeini’s success by taking over an Arab country within the heartland of the Middle East. They have sought to demonstrate that Iran was not an isolated case, that further victories would follow, and that eventually the entire Muslim world would fall into the grasp of Islamic fundamentalism.

The strategy of radical Muslims during the 1980s and early 1990s was articulated by Abd al-Salaam al-Faraj, an engineering graduate of Cairo University who was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Faraj’s tract,
The Neglected Duty,
argued that Muslims were prevented from establishing an Islamic state by their corrupt and apostate rulers. Faraj made the case for Muslims to fight against their rulers, what he called “the near enemy,” over distant countries like Israel or the United States, whom Faraj called “the far enemy.” He reasoned that it was a waste of time to take on remote adversaries when the people betraying Islam and thwarting radical Muslims were the ones ruling the Muslim countries.