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its stance in the American war on terrorism. My answer is that the cultural left opposes the war against the radical Muslims because it wants them to succeed in defeating President Bush in particular and American foreign policy in general. Far from seeking to destroy the movement that bin Laden and the Islamic radicals represent, the American left is secretly allied with that movement to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy. The left would like nothing better than to see America in general, and President Bush in particular, forced out of Iraq. Although such an outcome would plunge Iraq into further chaos and represent a catastrophic loss for American foreign policy, it would represent a huge win for the cultural left, in fact the left’s greatest foreign policy victory since the Vietnam War.
    The notion that the American left seeks victory for Islamic radicals in Iraq may at first glance seem implausible. One person who does not think so, however, is bin Laden. In his October 30, 2004, videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential election, bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced Bush for election rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil companies and contractors like Halliburton, for curtailing civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to school-children while the World Trade Center burned. 20 Apart from the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” bin Laden sounds exactly like Michael Moore. And why not? In opposing President Bush and American foreign policy, they are both on the same side.
    Moreover, several leading figures on the left are very candid about what they are fighting for. Moore writes, “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Author James Carroll commends the insurgents for exemplifying “the simple stubbornness of human beings who refuse to be told what to think and feel.” Writing in salon.com, Joe Conason calls on Bush to enter into a “negotiated settlement” with the Iraqi insurgents, an outcome Conason concedes would be a “defeat for the United States and a perceived victory for Al Qaeda and its allies.” Gwynne Dyer states in a recent book, “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.” Activist Arundhati Roy declares on behalf of the left, “We must consider ourselves at war.” 21 What she means is that the left is fighting a political battle not against Al Qaeda or Islamic fundamentalism but rather against the Bush administration.
    In placing the cultural left and the Islamic fundamentalists on the same side, I am not trying to score a partisan or even an ideological point. In fact, if the political left and the Islamic fundamentalists are in the same foreign policy camp, then by the same token the political right and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the same wavelength on social issues. The left is allied with some radical Muslims in opposition to American foreign policy, and the right is allied with an even larger group of Muslims in their opposition to American social and cultural depravity. This is the essential new framework I propose for understanding American foreign policy and American social issues. I conclude by spelling out the implications of these alignments for American conservatives.
    In a way, conservatives are in the best position to understand why traditional cultures fear and hate America. That’s because conservatives share many of the moral concerns of traditional people. The right should not be deaf to complaints about the dissolution of religious and family ties, because it worries about those things in this country.