Soft On Fascism: How The Left Has Got It Wrong

My e-mail, snail mail and fax machine are smoking with messages from people who want to set me straight about the wickedness of America. They all go more or less like this: "How can you deny that U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood?"

I am now well supplied with passages from Noam Chomsky describing the death squads of El Salvador and the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Several people have sent me copies of Arundhati Roy's piececondemning the American imperialists and equating the bombing of the World Trade Center with the 1984 toxic leak that killed 2000 in Bhopal, India. (They all point out that Ms. Roy won the Booker Prize.) What do I have to say about the 500,000 dead children in Iraq? What about Bill Clinton's senseless bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory? And what about blowback? Am I not aware that Osama bin Laden is America's own creature, armed by the CIA and run amok in the aftermath of the bloody war against the Soviets? So, it's their own fault after all. Gotcha!

Okay. I give in. I confess. U.S. foreign policy has sometimes been completely indefensible. The blockade of Iraq is wicked, and has made the awful plight of Iraqi children worse. (Don't believe that stuff about 500,000 dead, though. That's just propaganda.) Mr. Clinton should have been impeached for bombing the pharmaceutical factory, not for Monica.

The U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat was one of the greatest human-rights catastrophes of the decade, especially for women, and the United States didn't give a damn about the Taliban's brutal oppression of women or anyone else until Sept. 11. As for the Middle East, Palestinians live wretched lives in Gaza, and Israeli soldiers have used some for target practice.

It's all true. I know it. So please stop sending me that stuff.

People often have good reason to be anti-American. Some of my best friends don't like America, and sometimes I don't either. But the anti-Americans are deeply confused. They think America is so guilt stained that it has lost its moral right to respond to terrorism.

British journalist Christoper Hitchens, never known for saying nice things about U.S. foreign policy, calls these arguments nothing more than a rationalization for Islamist fascism. He argues that any comparison of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington with any act of U.S. foreign policy is intellectually bankrupt.

Why? Because the attacks were, quite simply, designed from the outset to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. There was no other objective and no other target. Their one and only aim was to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent, and the terrorists' one and only regret would have been that they did not kill 50,000 people instead of 5,000.

"In one form or another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor," he wrote in The Nation, generally a sanctuary for left-wing thought. "Even as we worry what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques."

That's why Mr. Hitchens calls the ideology of the terrorists "fascism with an Islamic face." That's why he argues that no settlement in the Middle East, or other attention to "root causes," or atonement by the United States for its various sins in the world, will placate or deter them. They are our enemies for life.

"I have no hesitation in describing this mentality as soft on crime and soft on fascism," he says of the Noam Chomskys and the Arundhati Roys and all the other pundits who continue to frame the attacks as a backlash (unjustifiable, they always hasten to add) against the awful Americans.

If you're looking for historic parallels, here's one. In 1933, some of the best young British intellectuals of their day got together for a debate at Oxford. The subject: Was it justifiable to fight for King and country? They concluded that their nation's brutal history of imperialism and colonial oppression was indefensible. Britain itself had sown the seeds of German fascism by imposing a vengeful and unjust peace. No wonder so many people supported Hitler!

There are many topics for legitimate debate in the times ahead. How can the United States avoid a Vietnam-like quagmire? Should we settle for a Taliban-lite regime in Afghanistan, or try the perilous job of nation-building? Do we have to knock off Saddam? How can we keep India and Pakistan from each other's throats? And what about the Americans' unholy pact with the Saudis, the biggest source of Taliban support?

Hard questions, terrible choices. But the moral necessity of fighting terrorism with force is no debate at all.

(Margaret Wente is a columnist for TheGlobe And Mail where this column appeared on October 16.