Unholy Alliance:Radical Islam and the American Left.
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 23, 2004
frontpagemag.com
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, ninety-percent of America’s citizens supported their nation’s response – a War on Terror declared by President Bush whose first objective was to destroy the terrorist regime in Afghanistan. A year later, more than ninety-percent of the members of both political parties – Republicans and Democrats alike – again voted to authorize the President to go to war against a terrorist (and terrorist-supporting) regime, this time in Iraq.
In January 2002, President Bush declared that Iraq was part of an “Axis of Evil,” that America had to deal with. “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” Two weeks later, Al Gore gave his full-backing to the impending confrontation with Iraq: “Since the State of the Union there has been much discussion of whether Iraq, Iran and North Korea truly constitute an “Axis of Evil.” As far as I’m concerned, there really is something to be said for occasionally putting diplomacy aside and laying one’s cards on the table. There is value in calling evil by its name.”
This was the first time Gore had spoken on foreign policy issues since 9/11. He recalled the missed opportunity of the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein had been left in power. “In 1991, I crossed party lines and supported the use of force against Saddam Hussein, but he was allowed to survive his defeat as the result of a calculation we all had reason to deeply regret for the ensuing decade. And we still do. So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must prepared to go the limit.”
This was the voice of the consensus that led to the war to remove Saddam one year later. Both parties – Democrat and Republican – gave their backing to the war in a congressional vote. The resolution authorizing the war and regime change in Iraq was almost identical to the one requested by Bill Clinton four years earlier and similarly passed by an overwhelming congressional majority.
But only one year after that -- after America’s victory in Iraq in a shorter time and with fewer casualties than anyone had imagined -- the Democratic Party had turned its back on the war and its leaders had persuaded half the nation to turn their backs on the war as well. From Al Gore himself to Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, Democratic leaders had condemned the war in the most extreme terms, calling it a fraud and deception, and had attacked their own commander-in-chief as a liar who had led the nation into an unnecessary war that sacrificed American lives for nothing more than corporate gain. From the day Baghdad was liberated on April 10, 2003, Democratic leaders and a politically sympathetic media attacked the President without restraint and did everything possible to undermine the credibility of America’s efforts to consolidate its victory and defeat the pro-Saddam remnants in Iraq and the international terrorists who had gathered there to obstruct the peace.
This episode represents perhaps the most remarkable political about face in the nation’s history. It led to an unprecedented opposition to the national purpose in the midst of a shooting war. This was not like the war in Vietnam, moreover, which had spawned a similar bout of second thoughts and political opposition to an ongoing conflict. The Vietnam War had gone on for ten years without the prospect of a victory before the Democratic Party turned against it. Moreover, it was waged in behalf of a dictatorial regime that was resisting a Communist conquest. By contrast, the Iraq victory was swift, and the casualties are still relatively small. Moreover it was fought – and is still being fought – to overthrow a monstrous tyranny and to liberate 25 million people.
Unlike in Vietnam, America is not defending a dictatorship as the lesser of two evils, but has ended one of the most oppressive and evil regimes of the modern age. America has stopped the filling of mass graves, which already contained 300,000 corpses, and shut down the plastic shredders Saddam had used to dispose of his political enemies. It has established a military and intelligence base on the borders of two terrorist states – Syria and Iran. It has diverted the terrorist enemy to a battlefield thousands of miles from Washington and New York and other American cities which have consequently not suffered another terrorist attack since September 2001.
Yet despite all this good, a political left in America has managed to turn half the nation against its own commander-in-chief and half of all Americans against a war of liberation. How this was done and why it casts a dark shadow over America’s future in the War on Terror is the subject of Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. The “anti-war” movement, as this book shows, was not created overnight but sprang from deep roots in the leftwing movements that preceded and organized it – from the Communists who opposed America in the Cold War to the New Leftists who supported America’s enemies in Vietnam and Central America and the “Social Justice” progressives who condemn America today. These movements entered the Democratic Party during the McGovern campaign of 1972, a campaign whose slogan was “America Come Home.” The radical idea the slogan served soften was that the problem in the world was not totalitarian communism but America’s empire. This same anti-American animus provided the emotional fire of the Howard Dean campaign which has led to the transformation of the Democratic Party into an anti-war party even when the war is a war of liberation and the enemy is a religious terrorism whose leaders have condemned every American – man, woman and child – to certain death.
How this happened and what it portends are the subjects of this book.
Editor's note: The following are advance comments on David Horowitz' Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. Copies may be purchased here.
“An absolutely superb book. David Horowitz masterfully portrays the Hitler-Stalin Pact of our time. The totalitarian movements we defeated in the twentieth century have mutated. Now Islamist fanatics and today’s far left make common cause to the same end as their predecessors – the destruction of freedom.”
R. James Woolsey
Former Director of Central Intelligence
“Written with great zest and intellectual energy, David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance is primarily a devastating indictment of how the radical Left has responded to 9/11. But it is also--and more disturbingly--a precise description of how the ideas of the radicals have metastasized and are spreading into the liberal mainstream of the American body politic. As such, Unholy Alliance sheds a very bright light on the nature of the other war that has been going on since 9/11: the war at home.”
Norman Podhoretz
"David Horowitz knows the secret history of the American Left from the inside. Now he has come forward with an urgent warning: American security is threatened by a dangerous new conjunction between foreign enemies and domestic radicals. A brave and powerful book."
David Frum
"Before Americans vote for their next President they must read David Horowitz’s account of the Left's alliance with Islamic radicals and its influence on the Democrats’ approach to the War on Terror. His message is ominous and chilling, especially because the bad news comes from one who knows the Left from within."
Lt. General Thomas McInerney (Ret.)
Author, Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror
“David Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance is an insightful, brilliant examination of the mental world of the radical left. Horowitz shows how today’s radicals, unwilling to reflect on the internal flaws that destroyed Marxism-Leninism from within, have embraced an all-consuming nihilism in its place. This has led them to a hatred of American institutions and a solidarity with Islamic terrorists that makes the radical left more properly regarded as dangerous than loony.”
John Haynes, co-author, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage
"David Horowitz is one of America's most important and interesting thinkers. In these dangerous times, Unholy Alliance is not just a good read, it's a must read.
Bernard Goldberg, author, Bias and Arrogance.
“David Horowitz is one of America’s deepest thinkers about the Left. Unholy Alliance is a convincing review of key developments since the collapse of the Soviet Union with a focus on the growing cooperation of the American left with Islamists bent on America's destruction. This alignment might appear strange because the two have such different programs. But Horowitz establishes their many commonalities, starting with a similar totalitarian mindset and ending with their joint hatred of the United States.”
Daniel Pipes
“An original look at those who want us to fail in the Middle East, both at home and abroad. The conclusions are as engaging as they are chilling.”
Victor Davis Hanson
"David Horowitz is synonymous with pyrotechnics. A historian and polemicist of the first order, he is paid the ultimate compliment of being feared and loathed by his enemies on the left. Read Unholy Alliance and find out why."
Rich Lowry
Editor, National Review
David Horowitz is always provocative and Unholy Alliance does not disappoint. The world communist movement may be moribund but its habits of mind and ideological fantasies have not disappeared. This is a fascinating- and depressing- account of how some American radicals consumed with hatred for America and its values defended religious fanatics and neo-fascists after 9/11.
Harvey Klehr, co-author, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
To purchase David Horowitz's newest book, Unholy Alliance, for only $18, go to the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore. Click HERE to see a flyer with more information on David's new book. |
