DAR AL HARB - U.S.A. - CALIFORNIA: OBAMA BIN LADEN & PELOSI'S TEAM HAVE COMMON GOALS

Pelosi's crew and Osama bin Laden share common goal
Dinesh D'Souza

The Pelosi Democrats sometimes appear to be just as eager as Osama bin Laden for President Bush to lose his war on terror. Why do I say this? Because if the Pelosi Democrats were seeking Bush's success, then their rhetoric and actions now and over the past three years are pretty much incomprehensible. By contrast, if you presume that they want Bush's war on terror to fail, then their words and behavior make perfect sense.

Shortly before the November election, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke about the American effort to capture or kill bin Laden. "Even if he is caught tomorrow, it's five years too late," she said. "He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But in fact, the damage that he has done is done. And even to capture him now I don't think makes us any safer."

From the point of view of new House Speaker Pelosi and her fellow liberal Democrats, bin Laden today is, well, a small problem.

Listen to Pelosi and her colleagues on the left speaking about Bush, however, and it's clear they regard him as a very big problem.

Sen. Robert Byrd compares Bush to Hermann Goering and the Nazis. Hillary Clinton accuses him of "turning back the clock on the 20th century ... systematically weakening the democratic tradition. ... There has never been an administration more intent upon consolidating and abusing power." Sen. Ted Kennedy charges that "no president in America's history has done more damage to our country than George W. Bush."

What emerges from these comments is the indignation gap -- the vastly different level of emotion that leftists and liberals employ in treating bin Laden and his allies as opposed to Bush and his allies. First there is the ritual qualification. "I'm no fan of bin Laden" or "Bin Laden is not a very nice guy." Having gotten these hedges out of the way, the leftist proceeds to lambaste Bush and the conservatives with uncontrolled ferocity.

Something very strange is going on here, and nobody seems willing to call it what it is. Pelosi is championing a congressional resolution strongly opposing Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. "There's not a carte blanche, a blank check for him to do whatever he wishes there," she said. A Bush spokesman, Alex Conant, welcomed Pelosi's participation in the debate and said, "We're glad the speaker wants us to succeed in Iraq."

This is typical Washington doubletalk. What Conant cannot say is that Pelosi no more wants Bush to succeed in Iraq than bin Laden does. Whether it realizes this or not, the Bush administration is facing a kind of liberal-Islamic alliance: a sympathetic relationship that leading leftists in America have with Islamic radicals around the world.

I'm not suggesting the two groups actually like each other. Actually, they despise each other. Leftists like Pelosi, Barney Frank and Michael Moore despise bin Laden and his fellow radicals because they are religious fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic holy law. That means goodbye to women's rights and gay rights and, in all candor, goodbye to people like Pelosi, Frank and Moore. By the same token, Islamic radicals like bin Laden detest the American left because, as they see it, the left is the party of atheism, family breakdown and cultural depravity. The left is in the vanguard of imposing secularism, no-fault divorce, gay marriage and libertine social values not only in America but also abroad.

But the man who threatens the Islamic radicals and the American left even more than either group threatens the other is Bush. Leftists don't like radical Muslims like bin Laden but they absolutely hate Bush. Why? Because from the left's point of view, bin Laden threatens to impose sharia in Baghdad but Bush threatens to impose sharia in Boston. Bin Laden is the far enemy but Bush is the near enemy.

In the past generation, the left has gone from a party that mainly cares about working people to a party that mainly cares about sex. Labor unions are now a low priority, and abortion and gay rights have become the centerpiece of the left's social agenda. Bin Laden doesn't threaten these rights, but Bush does. One more Supreme Court appointment by Bush, and Roe vs. Wade might be jeopardized. The biggest obstacle to gay marriage today is the president and his allies on the religious right.

Consequently the left seems to have developed a devious strategy to share the aims of the enemy abroad in order to defeat the enemy at home. It started in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Leading leftists like Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollit, Jane Fonda, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and others took out full-page newspaper ads to galvanize public opposition to Bush's planned invasion of Afghanistan. The left organized more than 100 rallies to stop this action. If the left had been successful, the Taliban would still be in power and the al Qaeda training camps might still be in operation.

The left could not stop Bush in Afghanistan, but it is on the verge of stopping him in Iraq. Now that Iraq has become the central front in the war on terror, the left is working overtime to engineer a Saigon-style evacuation of the American military. The left's view was passionately stated some time ago by Moore. "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'terrorists' or the 'enemy.' They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win." It's pretty obvious whose side Moore and his fellow leftists are on.

Of course as an elected official, Pelosi can't admit she wants America to lose in Iraq, but what she can do is erect obstacles at every juncture so that it's impossible for Bush to succeed there. First, try to block the request for more troops. Then, try to block the call for needed additional funds. Then, when the time is right, push to redeploy American troops away from the fighting and to places in the Middle East, where they are powerless to stop the insurgency from toppling the elected Iraqi government.

Who knows what will happen next? It seems likely that Islamic radicals of one sort or another will assume power in Iraq. But an even safer bet, if Pelosi succeeds, is that Bush's Middle East policy will fall into ruins, he will go down in history as a president as bad as Nixon, and conservative foreign policy will be disgraced for a generation.

Since foreign policy has traditionally been a political strength for the Republicans, what could be better from the left's point of view than to turn the war on terror into a millstone around the neck of the right? Yes, we may lose Iraq to the Islamic radicals and this would further jeopardize American interests in the Middle East, but all of this would be a price worth paying for inflicting a cataclysmic political defeat on Bush and the right wing. Hillary could walk into the Oval Office in '08.

...

So Bush faces two kinds of enemies: the radical Muslims abroad and the Pelosi left at home. The two groups, whose values are sharply opposed and who never speak a word to each other, are nevertheless working in a kind of scissors motion, each prong operating separately, but toward the same end. Bush may discover that his enemy at home is no less dangerous than the enemy abroad. The war on terror might be lost not on the streets of Baghdad but in the corridors of Congress.


Pertinent Links:

1) Pelosi's crew and Osama bin Laden share common goal

2) "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11" by Dinesh D'Souza