Terror and Gliberalism

Decades ago when Osama bin Laden was a gawky teenager considering a career in civil engineering, Ishmael Reed attacked what he called "gliberalism." Gliberalism is the curdling of the most vital political tradition in American life into a crude, apologetic vanity, one that contends, Reed wrote, that "violence is healthy for the 'oppressed' even if it kills them."

Gliberalism captivated upper-class liberals paralyzed by their material and social privilege on the one hand and their sympathies for the dispossessed on the other. It proved a dangerous overreaction to the uncomfortable premodern concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that, adapted for the modern era, privilege confers a responsibility to provide for social justice. Instead, gliberalism contended, privilege rendered untenable any critique of socially iniquitous impulses among the underclass. As Morrissey once sang, "you just haven't earned it yet, baby."

After 9/11, gliberalism retreated to the shadows, but it now appears set to take a very public curtain call. For example, it's not every day that you see a member in good standing of America's foreign policy elite descend into a total caricature of himself, stripping away his reputation as a Serious Man and exposing his inner gliberal-a frail skeleton of immense wealth and massive egotism. That's what George Soros did last week at a posh Washington conference on terrorism.

While Soros is best known these days for having spent something like $25 million of his personal fortune last year in an unfortunately fruitless quest to unseat George Bush, the financier did more to promote and secure democratic advances in the former Soviet Empire than practically any other American. Given this latter credential, no one could seriously argue that he's merely a liberal version of Richard Mellon Scaife-a charlatan given to the bankrolling of dubious journalism and scholarship in the service of raw and reactionary political advantage.

At least not before Soros' star turn at last week's "Terrorism, Security & America's Purpose" conference, a meeting of the great and the good presented by such establishment pillars as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Soros' own Open Society Institute. Soros received a spot on a sprawling panel discussing a "road map" against terrorism convened in the Capital Hilton's grand ballroom. Quickly departing from the scheduled topic, the sharply-dressed financier proceeded to "challenge the very concept of the 'war on terror.'"

Now, by all means challenge the very concept. Conceiving of the reaction to the network and global ideological movement known as al-Qaeda (what Mark Danner in this week's New York Times Magazine incisively calls "al-Qaedaism") as a war lends itself to counterproductive overreliance on military force as a panacea for a vastly more complex threat.

But Soros didn't make that case-or, rather, he did, but conflated it with an altogether different argument. "Terrorism is abhorrent because it kills innocent civilians for political goals," he instructed. "War, by its very nature, kills innocent victims. By using military force, we run the risk of doing the same thing as the terrorists." In other words, Soros knows Osama bin Laden is an evil man; he just sees too much bin Laden in us when we respond to him.

What accounts for Soros' emerging gliberalism? The central preoccupation of American foreign policy-which, disastrously, is not al-Qaedaism. "The invasion of Iraq has spawned more insurgents and suicide bombers than there were before," Soros noted, making an indisputable point. Then he went further: "Most people have come to realize that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder, but they still accept the war on terror as the obvious response to 9/11." In other words, for Soros-as for many others in attendance-the disastrous and counterproductive Iraq War is the direct consequence of answering al-Qaeda's call to arms.

Now, you might notice that this contention is the exact opposite of the vastly more compelling argument that invading Iraq was a strategically disastrous misapplication of anti-al-Qaedism, that it was a distraction from the real and manifested enemy-a case made by the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, expert al-Qaeda journalists like Peter Bergen and Jim Fallows, and, at least by the October presidential debates, John Kerry. Instead, Soros and Bush apparently agree that a straight line connects Ground Zero to Baghdad, which makes both of them idiots.

As bin Laden wouldn't say: oy. Four years After, it apparently needs to be said that for all our sins there is no parallel between the murder of innocents as deliberate strategy and the decidedly unintentional deaths of innocents in response. Now, American moral responsibility doesn't stop there. Without a doubt, 9/11 isn't a moral blank check, indiscriminate violence in the name of counterterrorism can't be tolerated, and al-Qaeda seeks to draw America into military overreaction.

But American moral and strategic responsibility most certainly does start there. Without that recognition, crucial to mounting a just war, we're left with tenuous root-cause theories like poverty and the absence of democracy to explain terrorism. But psychiatrist and former CIA terrorism analyst Marc Sageman's group analysis of all known al-Qaeda members demonstrates that most al-Qaedist recruits-not just the vanguard-are middle-class. And jihadism is born not only in brutal regimes but also in such safe democratic harbors as Hamburg and the British midlands.

And to make the crass political point, advocating the divorce of counterterrorism from American hard power is the greatest gift imaginable to those who would use the U.S. military indiscriminately. When I told a late-arriving neoconservative journalist friend of mine what Soros had said, he whooped in delight.

The conferees, though, greeted Soros with either applause, or, more frequently, polite neglect, as though a man who bankrolls a significant fraction of contemporary political liberalism can be as easily ignored as the LaRouchies who occasionally litter Washington sidewalks. And while many worthy and sensible critiques were on display, the statement of principles that emerged from the breakout meetings, wine receptions and rubber chicken lunches opted to make a different mistake: producing a meaningless counterterrorism strategy intended mostly to get bipartisan heads numbly nodding along. For example: "No nation can successfully address the terrorist threat alone" ? "intelligence is a crucial tool in preventing terrorist attacks" ? "terrorism is a political act requiring a political response."

Happy fourth anniversary America. We've come a long way.

THERE ARE TWO problems with such thin and uncritical elite support for the struggle against al-Qaedaism. The first is substantive. No sentient human being can disagree with the catechistic offerings of the statement of principles, and as such, it doesn't offer any alternative to Bush-which was the implicit purpose of the entire conference.

Indeed, when Juan Zarate, Bush's latest counterterrorism adviser, delivered his brief remarks, he basically rephrased the statement of principles ("?use all elements of national power to destroy and disrupt al-Qaeda?"), showing its consonance with Bush's strategy.

The conference might have drawn a sharp distinction by referring to al-Qaeda's stated objectives, such as forcing the U.S. to overreact as a way to make Muslims identify with bin Laden, and say something like, "Military responses to al-Qaeda in targeted and discrete missions is necessary, but occupying Muslim countries is counterproductive. Since al-Qaedaism is not a tool of any state or regime, our military strategy has to proceed accordingly." By not drawing these distinctions, the bipartisan porridge of the conference risks making Soros' gliberal critique all the more resonant.

The other problem with the race to bipartisan comity is its inability to muster a vigorous defense of the premises of anti-al-Qaedaism when challenged. The centrist connubial cuddle-which reached its apogee when the statement was read aloud by those pillars of establishmentarianism, Warren Rudman, the former New Hampshire Republican senator, and Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana Democratic congressman-was interrupted by a somewhat agitated Indian-American Muslim and government contractor named Mustafa Malik, who wanted to know why the statement had a beef with "Islamic ideology," a contention he said was without "empirical basis." The problem, he said, was simply occupation: "Aren't you deluding yourselves as to the real grievance?"

With a look in his eyes that said, "Shit! Offended Muslim!" the moderator babbled about how the statement called for "the establishment of a better mechanism for terrorist grievances." He punted downfield the question of whether "Islamic ideology" was what was fueling bin Laden and his supporters, despite the sensible-centrist statement's call for "a far more vigorous campaign of ideas in the Islamic world and elsewhere." Clearly, a war of ideas is too important to be left to the Washington intellectuals.

A real response to Malik would have been to say, "Look, bin Laden's brand of Islamic ideology is without a doubt the real grievance. If you want evidence, read every single statement bin Laden has ever issued. It's true that occupation has a provocative effect on jihadist recruitment. But it's provocative precisely because occupation seems to confirm bin Laden's ideological contentions about the West's rapacious attitude toward Islam. We have to defeat those contentions and those spurred to violence because of them, and we'll argue our case at mosques in Finsbury Park, madrassas in the Northwest Frontier Province and, because we have to, the battlefields of Kandahar. You're here because you know there's a problem, and we want you to help us defeat it."

When Malik left the ballroom, I asked him if he was upset at the non-reply. "Even if I didn't get an answer, I hope my friends here think about it," he said. "I don't have the answer." It says a lot about the seriousness of the panel that its eminences didn't have the balls to engage Malik forthrightly.

GLIBERALISM IS OFTEN misdiagnosed as relativistic. But it can easily distinguish between right and wrong: oppression, to stay with Reed's example, is wrong; and so is the self-destructive violence it often breeds. The trouble is that after the initial judgment, gliberalism turns inward, and reminds itself of its own numerous flaws, and asks itself if its condemnation is really tenable given its Beacon Hill townhouse. That's why it ends up either offering platitudes or simply countenancing injustice as it waits for the liberating moment when its own house will finally be in order.

What needs to be realized is that, to judge by Soros' remarks, elite support for the war on al-Qaedaism is at risk of eroding, largely because of justifiable fury over the Iraq War. It's quite possible that early support for both wars was merely initial acquiescence to what was then the politically safest course of action, as opposed to true recognition of what the real threats were (and weren't). After 9/11, support for retaliating against al-Qaeda, which is still robust after four years, was something like 90 percent; and during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush claimed the support of about 70 percent of the public. If those numbers drove the initial establishment embrace of Bush, it's hardly surprising that such support would erode with the latest polls.

Soros and I both want out of Iraq ASAP. Where we part company is over my feeling that after we're out, there's still something worth fighting and vanquishing. I believe, where he does not, that al-Qaedaism can be fought without descending into a mirror image of its moral depravity. (For the record, he does support the war in Afghanistan, though given his "innocent victims" criterion, that hardly seems to make sense.) If you think Soros' view will remain his alone, give it another year. It's certainly possible that the Iraq War will consume public support, or at least elite backing, for the necessary war against al-Qaedaism-a war which the Iraq debacle only inflames-as much as it consumes America's military, financial and other resources.

The conference's statement of purposes will be as quickly forgotten as any other D.C. convention agenda, and chances are its drafters don't really think they've come up with a new counterterrorism doctrine. Soros, in the end, is one man, albeit a very powerful and influential one. But the temptations of gliberalism lurk in the self-critical heart of every liberal. Gliberalism may not be dominant now, but-especially if we're still in Iraq-wait until we commemorate the fifth year After, or the sixth, or the seventh.

FEAR OF SELF-SUBVERSION

In the conservative moment's consciousness, the idea that occupies pride of place is that elite (read: liberal) opinion acts as a mechanism of subversion during moments of national crisis.

Repeating an argument he's made for decades, Norman Podhoretz recapitulated the standard conservative perspective on Vietnam as a cautionary tale in his recent Commentary essay on the war on terror. "[B]y the time Nixon had replaced Johnson..." Podhoretz wrote, "[l]arge numbers of Americans, including even many of the people who had led the intervention in the Kennedy years, were now joining the tiny minority on the Left who at the time had denounced them for stupidity and immorality, and were now saying that going into Vietnam had progressed from a folly into a crime."

The clear implication of this argument is that if you were for a particular mistake it's virtuous to remain committed even after you realize you've made one. That's why the Wall Street Journal recently took on conservative queasiness on the Iraq War, blasting right-wing "self-doubt, self-flagellation, excessive fine-tuning, and political cravenness."

However much ideological discipline this argument enforces, the majority of its invective is reserved for the left, which the right, despite firmly controlling all three branches of government, believes is still the repository of elite wisdom. Writing about Iraq in National Review last year, Victor Davis Hanson inveighed, "Whether this influential, snarling minority-so prominent in the media, on campuses, in government [!], and in the arts-succeeds in turning victory into defeat is open to question."

There's a tremendous amount to ridicule here. It wasn't Dan Rather or Sean Penn that rent the Iraqi political process into a zero-sum contest along sectarian lines, nor did they send the Marines into Tal Afar last week on exactly the same futile mission that the leathernecks carried out last year.

What's more, it's absurd to suggest that the era of conservative dominance faces an existential threat from, say, Swarthmore. ("To the ramparts, men of valor! The English professors are amassed!")

Finally, and most important, it's insane to suggest that architects, contractors, or advocates of the Titantic have to go down with the ship after they see it's going to hit the iceberg-especially if they have the opportunity to jump off and save the passengers. For my part, we need to withdraw from Iraq more or less immediately and then mitigate the very real damage that will result from a souped-up al-Qaedaism. (Yes, getting out will be bad and bloody, but it gets worse, and will continue to get worse, for every minute we stay.)

But there was evidence at last week's terror conference that the Wise Men acutely fear the conservatives' stab-in-the-back charge. Harvard's Stephen Walt was the only speaker I saw who openly endorsed withdrawal from Iraq, though I suspect that a large chunk of the conference's speakers and attendees believe it necessary. (I may not be able to back this up with quotes, but to cite the eminent logician Donald Rumsfeld, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)

More visible were the intellectual weaknesses of those liberals who crafted a needle-threading rejection of withdrawal. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state, told the conference that while she opposed the war, "getting it right is a necessity, not a choice." And that was as far as her analysis went: not a word about whether our occupation is counterproductively provocative for al-Qaedaism and sectarian division or what can be done about these matters, which is the minimum responsibility of those who tell us we need to stay.

Wesley Clark, the general turned once and perhaps future Democratic presidential hope, at least proposed bringing "a regional dialogue together" to preside over stabilization and the finessing of sectarian divides (or as he enthusiastically put it, "I'm talkin' 'bout the formation of a contact group!") lest the time come when "the American people say, 'come on home, boys, you can't win.'" That's sensible as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

At a press mob after Clark's speech, Eli Lake of the New York Sun asked Clark why he had any confidence in his contact group if, as Clark noted in his speech, Iran and other regional players have been stoking instability. His answer: "You don't have to approve of people to talk with them."

Matt Yglesias of the American Prospect pushed the general on when he would know it was time to bring the boys home. "When we're doing more harm than good, then we'll know when the window has closed," Clark replied. "But we're far from that point." General, we're skewered by it.