Bin Laden, The Left and Me-By Dinesh D'Souza

[deveil]

----------------- OR -------------------
trying to figure out where the hell they get all their passion.
or
fitting a square peg into a round hole
or
when you start with an agenda, the possibilities...err, the certainties...err, the persecution becomes a welcome, validating, self-fulfilling prophecy.
or
"They HATE ME! They really really HATE ME! (alla sally fields/academy award acceptance) - therefore, i MUST be right!"
or
'understanding marco", as told by his soul brother.
or
if i hate them, therefore they must hate me(and THEY started it!).

heck, i could go on forever (yeah, i know - tell you something you don't already know).

BUT REALLY! this is revelatory. (my fixation is not with marco, per se, but rather 'his kind')(hey, if you're buying, i'm selling).


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 24_pf.html

Bin Laden, The Left and Me
By Dinesh D'Souza
Sunday, January 28, 2007; B01

As a conservative author, I'm used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, "The Enemy at Home," has felt, well, a little hysterical.

"Ratfink writes new book," James Wolcott, cultural critic for Vanity Fair, declares in his blog. He goes on to call my book a "sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie."

In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I "hate America" and have "taken to heart" Osama bin Laden's view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work "a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest." I am "a childish thinker" with "no sense of shame," he argues. "D'Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists."

It goes on. The Washington Post's Warren Bass writes that I think Jerry Falwell was "on to something" when he blamed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on pagans, gays and the ACLU. Slate's Timothy Noah diagnoses "Mullah envy," while the Nation's Katha Pollitt calls me a "surrender monkey" and the headline to her article brands me "Ayatollah D'Souza." And in my recent appearance on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," I had to fend off the insistent host. "But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don't you?" Stephen Colbert asked again and again.

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks. President Jimmy Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, for example, helped Ayatollah Khomeini's regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state; and President Bill Clinton's failure to respond to Islamic attacks confirmed bin Laden's perceptions of U.S. weakness and emboldened him to strike on 9/11. I also argue that the policies that U.S. "progressives" promote around the world -- including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights -- are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.

The reaction I'm eliciting is not entirely new to me. As a college student in the early 1980s, I edited the politically incorrect Dartmouth Review and was frequently accosted by left-wing students and faculty. They called me names back then, too. And at the time I didn't care. I often informed them that taking on our iconoclastic paper was like wrestling a pig: Not only does it get everyone dirty but the pig likes it.

One of my earlier books, "The End of Racism," explored why nonwhite immigrants to the United States (like me) tend to succeed academically and economically compared with African Americans who are born here. I received lots of abuse for playing down racism -- as a "person of color," no less -- and taking sides with the white man. Some of my fellow immigrants from India advised me to "decolonize" my mind.

But the personal attacks have reached new heights with "The Enemy at Home." So much so, in fact, that I feel compelled to explain why I wrote this book, what it does and doesn't say and why I think it prompts people to threaten me with hospitalization.

First, and I feel silly having to say it: I don't hate America. My last book was called "What's So Great About America," and there is no question mark in the title. If I hated this country, why would I have left my family and friends in India and moved to the United States, married an American and become a U.S. citizen? I came here because the United States gives me the freedom to make the life that I could not have made in India. And just last week a Midwestern chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution offered to award me its annual "Patriot of the Year" prize -- an honor that I presume is not typically bestowed upon people who hate America.

If I am a patriot, however, I am a rational patriot. I don't believe in "my country right or wrong." Mine is not the patriotism of David Warren, who says he tasted the dust of 9/11 and places my criticism of the American left in the same category as those who say "Death to America." Rather, I uphold Edmund Burke's view: "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely."

Immediately following 9/11, there was a wondrous moment of national unity in which the American tribe came together. "Why do they hate us?" some wondered, but no one wanted to comprehend the enemy -- only to annihilate him. And I shared this view.

But five years later, that unity has dissolved amid a furious national debate over the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. I thought it was time to go back and reconsider 9/11; in so doing, I concluded that the prevailing conservative and liberal theories explaining Muslim rage were wrong.

Contrary to the common liberal view, I don't believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn't upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.) He isn't upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East? It isn't all about Israel. (Why hasn't al-Qaeda launched a single attack against Israel?) The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality -- and that the United States is leading that attack.

Contrary to President Bush's view, they don't hate us for our freedom, either. Rather, they hate us for how we use our freedom. When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values. When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world's people are violated.

This argument has nothing to do with Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's judgment on the ACLU and the feminists for their sins. I pose a simple question: Why did the terrorists do it? In a 2003 statement, bin Laden said that to him, the World Trade Center resembled the idols that the prophet Muhammad removed from Mecca. In other words, bin Laden believes that the United States represents the pagan depravity that Muslims have a duty to resist. The literature of radical Islam, such as the works of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, resonates with these themes. One radical sheik even told a European television station a few years ago that although Europe is more decadent than America, the United States is the more vital target because it is U.S. culture -- not Swedish culture or French culture -- that is spreading throughout the world.

What would motivate Muslims in faraway countries to volunteer for martyrdom? The fact that Palestinians don't have a state? I don't think so. It's more likely that they would do it if they feared their values and way of life were threatened. Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values. The liberal "solution" to Islamic fundamentalism is itself a source of Islamic hostility to America.

Contrary to the accusations of Alan Wolfe and others, I have no sympathy for bin Laden or the Islamic radicals. But I do respect the concerns of traditional Muslims, the majority in the Muslim world. In fact, the United States cannot defeat terrorism without driving a wedge between radical Islam and traditional Islam, because the latter has been the main recruiting pool for the former.

All my arguments can be disputed, but they are neither extreme nor absurd. So why has "The Enemy at Home" been so intemperately excoriated? I can imagine only two reasons. The first is given by James Wolcott himself. I am not, as he says, an unqualified right-wing hack. Rather, I am a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, so Wolcott fears that I will be taken seriously.

The second reason can be gleaned from the common theme in the reviews: that mine is a dangerous book. But if a book says things that are obviously untrue and can be disproved, then it is not dangerous -- it is merely fiction and should be ignored. A book is dangerous only if it exposes something in the culture that some people are eager to keep hidden.

And what is that? It is that the far left seems to hate Bush nearly as much as it hates bin Laden. Bin Laden may want sharia, or Islamic law, in Baghdad, they reason, but Bush wants sharia in Boston. Indeed, leftists routinely portray Bush's war on terrorism as a battle of competing fundamentalisms, Islamic vs. Christian. It is Bush, more than bin Laden, they say, who threatens abortion rights and same-sex marriage and the entire social liberal agenda in the United States. So leftist activists such as Michael Moore and Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan seem willing to let the enemy win in Iraq so they can use that defeat in 2008 to rout Bush -- their enemy at home.

When I began writing my new book, this concern was largely theoretical, because the left was outside the corridors of power. Now I fear that the extreme cultural left is whispering into the ears of the Democratic Congress. Cut off the funding. Block the increase in troops. Shut down Guantanamo Bay. Lose the war on terrorism -- and blame Bush.

Pointing this out is what makes me dangerous.

dineshjdsouza@aol.com

Dinesh D'Souza, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of "The Enemy at Home" (Doubleday).

[Marco Zee]

Hey Dinesh,
I feel your pain (using Slick Willy's drawl).
Stop stealing my ideas and analysis ( I know you are reading my posts here) , but keep up the good work otherwise.
Marco

[deveil]

soo....let's see if i got this straight (since i seem to have to take up your side as well as mine ).

it's the nature of man, the nature of all things, to 'have' the desire to prevail, prevail over all that is encountered. basic darwinisn (bear with me you 'gods will' people).
i.e., those that inherently have a make-up that directs them to prevail, will, by definition, suceed over those that don't have such a make-up.
those that don't have such an internal directive to prevail, will, again by definition, fade from the scene.
and just as all things naturally divide up into groups of 'us' and 'not us' (again, such groupings having a survival advantage over those not inclined toward forming such groupings) - we have evolved, naturally, into 'our country', 'our religion', 'the heritage of our civilization'.
and, consistent with darwinism, that culture, that heritage, has evolved to include definitions of 'us' and 'not us'.
those who are 'not us', have had the time and room (it used to be a big world) to also evolve along the same principles. (of course, 'we', are their, 'not us').
so, now, as the world has evolved into a smaller place, 'us' and 'not us' are destined to continue following the same inherent directives to prevail.
and it doesn't (never did as a point of fact) matter whether anyone is now a 'christian' or a 'muslim' or a 'whatever'. by the tyranny of darwinism, 'we' could 'do' nothing other than evolve divided, into some form of 'us' and 'not us'.

and so, Someone WILL prevail (by definition).
and them that don't, well, they'll not be around to worry about(!)
and anyone who doesn't think it should be 'us' that prevails is beneath contempt - to those that prevail (again, virually by definition).

thus the contempt of those 'we must be the prevailers' for those they deem not to be 'with them'.
those 'not with them' would (again, almost by definition) rightly be placed in the 'not us' grouping.

so, everyone's god is actually a mechanism (and probably a darwinian mechanism), a device, to make the ruthlessness of darwinism more palatable (an aid to those who hope to prevail, if you will).
'not saying that if i had to deal with sending a loved one off 'to prevail' over those 'not us', that i wouldn't want 'god on my side'.
take this argument to its logical end and one would necessarily have to conclude, imo, that those who can't sincerely accept and believe in their cultures god is, by definition, a friggin loser and a detriment to their culture!

Damn! i just logically(?) proved to myself that i am a born loser and deserving of all the scorn that cheney and rummy and souza and marco can heap upon me!?

F**K!

but, if you think That sounded grim, consider this - the story ends with each one of us individually 'checking out', in a capricious manner for the most part. so why should anyone have a problem with grim? basis of religion , right?

well, actually, i sort of do.
there's Got to be another way to put this together(!)
let me rethink this. that all sounded an awful lot like "Accept Me as Your Savior, OR...Life Sucks and then You Die".

[Matthew]

Well, there's someone who has overlooked the obvious. The extreme Muslem countries hate us for our liberal policies regarding women. They basically enslave women in fundamentalist regimes and they fear our policies will get rid of their de facto slaves.


Matthew

[brianvh]

I Sousa's made some good and thoughtful points. But I don't think he's use them to justify invading Iraq. Don't know, haven't read the book, but I just get the feeling he's not a blind right leaner. And I don't think he's saying the culture of the left is morally wrong, just that it's inflamed fundamental islam.

I think most of what he says is on target. I don't want to give up the things that Sousa says is inflaming the fundamentalists...many I'd consider to be basic human rights.

To paraphrase Voltaire (or some other French guy): "I don't want to kiss a man, but I'll defend to the death your right to do so".

[deveil]

"... I argue that the American left bears ... responsibility for the ...anger from the Muslim world .. . President Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, ... helped Ayatollah Khomeini's regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state;..."
the shah of iran was our puppet. how does it follow that removing him would make the muslim world angry? this is precisely what souza just said. it may be argued that carter gave the radical islamists control of a major state and thereby facilitated the attack on the u.s., but that is not the point that he made.

"I also argue that the policies that U.S. "progressives" promote around the world -- including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights -- are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage."
this argument is so broad as to be applicable to any activity by anyone at any time.

"I thought it was time to go back and reconsider 9/11; in so doing, I concluded that the prevailing conservative and liberal theories explaining Muslim rage were wrong."
conveniently, he gets to chose (create?) the theories, determine whether they are 'prevailing', and thus create his own straw man which he can then successfully(?)dismantle.

for example, he blithely makes an overly precise(?) and therefore erroneous, statement of others beliefs. it is such a sophomoric statement, that the extent of sophistication required to rebutt it is to simple say "NOT!"
" Bin Laden isn't upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.)"

and: "He isn't upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East?"
by stating the argument is the present tense, again, the extent of sophistication required to rebutt it is to simple say "NOT!"

i'll not bother to continue with examples.

if an author, any author, is satisfied and confident that such statements sufficiently make his case (in a major daily paper no less), then i personally feel no compunction to consider further Anything that he would say, as it would be too tedious to parse every damn word.

you know, just my opinion.

[deveil]

it's the crankiness - it's still coming through isn't it?
sorry. i've entered 'rehab' - haven't watched, listened to, or read anything regarding national or international news ffor the past two days. normal levels of cantankerousness should soon be established.

[brianvh]

tried to send this a couple days ago, but the list was down.

I can neither confirm or deny that the actions of Carter and Clinton made terrorist types smell an opportunity, but that's not the part of Sousa's argument that interests me. I think his main point was that if we were seen as god-fearing, self-righteous abortion clinic bombers, the muslim fundamentalists would say "Ah, more of our kind of people!" and not be so inclined to wipe us off the face of the earth.

Hence liberalism is in a way inflaming terrorists. This may be perilously close to Bush's statement "they hate freedom", except that it paints liberals as the good guys who really piss off the bad guys.

I don't know if that's the way Sousa really meant to say it, but put that way it does have certain charm.

[deveil]

...my arguments ... are neither extreme nor absurd...
... mine is a dangerous book...
...And (why) is that? It is that the far left seems ... willing to let the enemy win in Iraq ... and blame Bush.
Dinesh D'Souza

retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan:"Vindication is not pleasing," he says. "Even some of my friends have noted: the more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I become."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01373.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 73_pf.html

No I-Told-You-Sos
Opponents of the Iraq War Voice Pain, Not Vindication, At Predictions They Could Only Hope Would Be Wrong

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; D01

Sweet vindication. Who wouldn't want it? To be right. To be free of criticism and upheld by evidence, by actual proof, that one's predictions about a controversial war were correct.

It is the culture of this town -- trafficking in rightness. People clamor day in and day out, in that polished and politic way of the Washingtonian, to be proved right.

But on Iraq , the vindicated are pained. There is no gloating -- not with thousands of people dead, Americans and Iraqis; not with the Iraq war precipitating an ongoing foreign policy crisis that has left the United States' global image in tatters.

For people who were pilloried, penalized or warned to be careful because of their opposition to a powerful president's war, vindication is nothing to celebrate. It is a victory most bitter.

"Emotionally, it's a very traumatic and unhappy outcome." That is retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan. "How can you be happy about being right about the disaster that's been created?"

It weighs on him.

"Vindication is not pleasing," he says. "Even some of my friends have noted: the more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I become."

Back before the war even began, Odom said its aims were wrong. He criticized the doctrine of preemption, said al-Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq and predicted that democracy could scarcely take hold there. A year after the war began, he was quoted calling it a failure -- and heard soon thereafter that he'd been dubbed a Benedict Arnold for his views. To dissent, back then, was risky. Not like now, when the conventional wisdom about the conflict has made a U-turn in a political climate where anger over the war toppled the majority party in Congress. The president sounded almost plaintive in his State of the Union address, saying, "This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in."

Lots of people predicted things would turn out this way. They are military brass and lawmakers and foreign policy intellectuals, the kind of wise ones whose counsel is routinely sought and respected. In the run-up to this war, their concerns carried no weight against a swelling of patriotism, a backdrop of fear and an administration determined to oust Saddam Hussein. Their warnings that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11 were ignored. Worse, some were shunned and scolded.

As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, raised hard prewar questions about the looming Iraq engagement. They predicted Iraq would become a long occupation and recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and would damage U.S. relations with the Muslim world. And: No weapons of mass destruction would be found.

One day back then, one of Matthews's colleagues ran into an acquaintance on the street, and that acquaintance warned: " 'What is your boss doing? Nobody at Carnegie is ever going to get through another Senate confirmation.' " And Matthews was herself admonished by a colleague at another think tank, who told her: "You're going to make Carnegie irrelevant. The war's going to happen and you ought to have Carnegie working on the after-war rather than on 'we shouldn't go to war.' "

Amid what she calls the "seemingly inexorable roll" toward war, the clear message was "you better get on the bandwagon or you'll never be taken seriously in this town again."

Instead, she looks like an accurate prognosticator. But, "you can't take any pleasure in having been right," says Matthews, "because this is a catastrophe for the United States and people are dying and didn't have to die, and it's going to take us years and years and years to dig out of this, and it's been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people."

Also repudiated were people who supported the war but diverged from the official administration line. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, was sharply rebuffed in early 2003 for publicly saying that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed to keep the peace in Baghdad.

Now, as President Bush seeks additional troops for Iraq, it is widely agreed that the war was indeed prosecuted with too few troops -- a seeming vindication for Shinseki, though he did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Vindication is a difficult and complex concept and one that has to be considered with many caveats, such as those presented by Zbigniew Brzezinski when asked if he felt vindicated.


"If vindication was accompanied by a sense that America is likely to undo the damage they have done and can dis-embarrass itself of the tragic involvement, then my answer would be yes."

But Brzezinski, former national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, scarcely believes such course corrections will happen.

He opposed Bush's doctrine of preemption and assessed the war policy as one that "was propelled forward by mendacity." He spoke out before and during the war, and he believes his criticisms began to sting as the war began to falter. As a result, he says, he was ultimately shut out of high-level Defense and State Department briefings he had often attended and was publicly upbraided by a foreign policy peer.

Despite the broad sea change in opinion among the political and policy class, Brzezinski's sense of vindication has its limits, he says, because "I have the feeling that the president's team is hellbent on digging itself in more deeply and if it does not succeed in Iraq some of its wilder policymakers seem to be eager to enlarge the scope of the war to Iran."

"I'm saddened," he said, "because I think it's doing terrible harm to America. But more than being sad, which is an emotion, I'm worried."

From Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran? Could this scenario actually play out? It is, among the vindicated, not at all absurd, for official Washington's sights have turned to Iran with "the same signs, a very similar drumbeat" as that which preceded the war in Iraq, says Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).

Lee saw it coming -- not Iran, but Iraq. Back in September 2001, days after the terror attacks, she saw the broadly worded congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force to fight terrorism as giving him a dangerous degree of carte blanche.

That early resolution allowed the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

It is language that haunts her still.

"I said then it was giving the administration a blank check to use in perpetuity," Lee says. "If you read that resolution, it's very clear that it was the beginning of a march to war."

She voted against that resolution -- the only member of Congress to do so -- and then took the barbs.

"It was a very tough period," she says. "To call me unpatriotic was the lowest of the low," especially considering that her father, an Army lieutenant colonel, served for 25 years and saw duty in World War II and Korea.

Now, she says, people are eager to tell her she was right. But "it's not about feeling vindicated," she says.

"I want people to understand that this is a very dangerous foreign policy, the administration's foreign and military policy is very dangerous, that the notion of preemptive war is very dangerous and that we need to support more rational approaches to our foreign and military policy."

Lee, like Odom and many others, is calling for the war to end. They are strange bedfellows -- she, a progressive liberal; he, a usually hawkish conservative.

For months, Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has been pushing a "cut and run" policy. He even wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in October headlined "How to Cut and Run," in which he wrote, "We must cut and run tactically in order to succeed strategically."

He advocates troop withdrawal coupled with a diplomatic engagement with Iraq's neighbors, especially Iran, with whom the United States actually has common interests, nukes notwithstanding.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, formerly the top U.S. military man in the Middle East, started where Odom started -- in opposition to the war. Zinni argued that going into Iraq would destabilize the region and distract from the fight against al-Qaeda.

For his opposition, he says he was accused by some fellow officers of having political motivations and was disinvited from attending meetings at the Joint Forces Command, where he'd been a regular as a senior mentor for more junior officers.

But he diverges from most early critics of the war, because he now is arguing that withdrawing from Iraq would destabilize the region. Instead, he says, a new strategic framework for the war is needed -- something far broader than the increase Bush has proposed, which Zinni calls a "half-step."

"It's breaking my heart, watching it," he says of the war. "I was praying somehow I'd be wrong, but in my heart of hearts I knew it would happen this way -- the bad decision-making, the insufficient troops."

Congress now is mulling varying resolutions on the war, but Zinni complains that "the debate is wrong. I think Congress is debating the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic."

But the ship, he argues, doesn't have to go down.

As the debate now centers on what can be salvaged from the U.S. engagement in Iraq, a cynical Washington exercise is underway, some of the vindicated say. It's a snake-like shedding of skin, a policy metamorphosis in which people who once were prominent cheerleaders for the war now are cozying up with the war's early opponents and distancing themselves from their earlier roles.

Matthews has seen it and fears it may warp the crucial debates about the way forward in Iraq and toward Iran.

"So many of the people who were wrong have gone on to being very visible pundits without ever admitting how wrong they were," Matthews says.

Brzezinski says there are some people -- and he's talking "outside of the administration, of course" -- who have embraced his positions in the oddest and most disingenuous way.

They say "that they are happy to have associated themselves with these views . . . ," Brzezinski says. "That is the funny part, because you meet people who say, 'Oh, I was with you all along.' "
© 2007 The Washington Post Company