The Subtexts of War Culture, oil, and reckless dissent.

The Subtexts of War Culture, oil, and reckless dissent.

by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Throughout this war there are various truths generally recognized, but
rarely voiced.

First, before 9/11 the Western hard right-wing allowed radical Islam a
pass - and then afterwards the Left did worse. That fact helps to
explain the strange exemption given radical Islam in the West even
today.

In the 1980s some conservatives saw the jihadists in Afghanistan or the
Wahhabis in the Gulf as valuable bulwarks against global Communism. On
the Western domestic front, even extremist Muslims - in their embrace
of family values and resentment against modernism - were considered
bedrock conservatives. Supposedly, they shared the same understandable
concern about Western "decadence," such as promiscuity,
homosexuality, crass popular culture, and family dissolution.

So, despite clear evidence that many conservative mosques in the West
were promulgators of a sick backward extremism, many social
reactionaries hardly wished to upset their fellow travelers. Add in
common distrust of Israel , and no surprise that the pages of The
American Conservative will still sometimes resemble those of the
Nation.

But with the fall of Communism, and the subsequent revelation that
Islamists did not worry about the unfortunate direction of contemporary
Western culture so much as they wished to destroy it, culpability then
mostly fell to the Left.

Multiculturalism (no culture is worse than the West's) and its twin
of cultural relativism (those with power have no right or ability to
judge others) gave a wide pass to radical Islam and its 7th-century
primitivism. Apparently most Leftists thought the dearth of women in
the clubhouse at the Masters Tournament at Augusta National was far
worse than the Arab world's honor killings, burqas, and coerced
female circumcision.

Indeed, a radical Leftist always faces a dilemma when a fellow
anti-American sounds fascistic. The usual course, as we have seen since
September 11, is either to keep silent about such embarrassing kindred
spirits, or to weasel out by suggesting our own hegemonic tendencies
pushed a once reasonable "Other" in lamentable directions.

The result? Killers and terrorists have been able to operate openly in
European capitals. Here in North America, in the 58 months after the
Twin Towers fell, numerous cadres of terrorists still continue to be
rounded up - without a peep of condemnation from mainstream Muslim
groups, who have instead crafted an ingenious cult of victimization,
predicated on sympathy from the Left. Ask yourself: In the fifth year
since September 11, is it more likely that Islamic associations in
Canada or the United States will condemn global Islamic extremism or
complain about purported Islamophobia and the sins of "Zionism"?

Another undercurrent to this war is the abject failure to do anything
about imported petroleum - the hundreds of billions that accrued to
the Middle East and Gulf when petroleum skyrocketed from $30 to $70 a
barrel. Without such excesses of free-floating and impossible-to-trace
petrodollars, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Al-Zarqawi would have remained
clownish portraits on the pathetic street posters of a Jericho or
Zarqa. Instead, we are indirectly paying for their IEDs.

The truth is that as long as American petroleum demand, coupled with
restrictions on our own energy development, helps drive the world oil
price up, we are simply funding psychopaths who otherwise would have no
viable economic means of support. Without Saudi petrol money,
Wahhabism, the godhead of Islamic fascism, devolves into just another
localized lunatic sect. So we talk seriously about new alternative
energy, and seriously do nothing - in the vain hope that the price
soon collapses or, barring that, we can stop the guy on a motorbike in
Damascus or Ramadi from delivering millions in cash satchels from Saudi
financiers to al Qaeda killers.

Yet, when the fifth anniversary of this war approaches this September,
we are no closer to energy independence than we were in 2001. There is
no better proof of this than our continual appeasement of rich sheiks
who have ensured that the venom of their own incoherent imams reaches
billions.

Finally, there are a number of influential Americans - let us be
frank - who want us to forfeit this effort in Iraq . For some
prominent Democrats, like a Sen. Kennedy or Sen. Durbin, who compares
our wartime military on occasion to Saddam's Baathists or Nazis, it
is an issue of simple partisanship. If Iraq blows up in the face of the
United States , and we can still avoid another September 11, then they
wager that Bush and his cohorts, in the manner of a wrecked Johnson or
Nixon administration, might alone suffer the political consequences.
For them, collateral damage to America is worth the risk incurred by
their own sleazy rhetoric.

Others of the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan brand are far more
unbalanced, of course. They have either praised the enemy outright
(jihadists as "Minutemen") or slurred the present administration
(Bush as "world's greatest terrorist") as consistently as any al
Qaedist mouthpiece. Still, we can't call these folk exactly
fringe-types - not when the Democratic elite queue up for Moore 's
premiers or praise Sheehan's madness. Just as mainstream Muslim
organizations don't rush to condemn Islamic radicalism, so too
liberal Democrats rarely denounce the rhetoric of their own fanatical
Left.

True, during the 1998 Balkans campaign, there were right-wing
Lindbergians who wanted Clinton to fail and the United States to get
stung in the Balkans and return to its 1930s isolationism. But these
critics were small in numbers, isolated from the mainstream political
opposition, and quickly silenced by the brevity and economy of warfare
waged solely from 30,000 feet.

There is a final unspoken truth as well. Al Qaeda might not go away
soon. The Europeans, as in the Clinton years, will always triangulate.
North Korea and Iran , both of whom started nuclear programs in the
1990s, will still issue unhinged threats. Barring its discovery of some
clandestine government effort to monitor radical Christian
fundamentalists better left secret, the New York Times will keep
leaking confidential national-security measures. But the time will come
when there is once again a Democratic administration.

In that climate, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, and Howard
Dean, or their epigones, will still have to persuade the American
people that radical Islam means to destroy us. They can't say their
war is cooked up in Texas , but will instead have to deal with the
Sheehanites and the loose-cannon bloggers they either appeased or
encouraged.

Who knows - perhaps President Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State
John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Wesley Clark, and Attorney General
John Edwards may soon appear on television extending support for
democrats in Baghdad or deploring unlawful disclosures that emboldened
terrorists plotting to blow up Washington .

Because this generation of the opposition, in a foolish and
short-sighted manner, has turned an American struggle into George
Bush's futile war, it will either have to abandon the democracy in
Iraq or recant and assure the rest of us that its past hateful and
extremist rhetoric was just politics, and they are now going to unite
us and lead us on to victory over the primevalists after all.

Good luck.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

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