However, it was not so long ago that both the Left and the Right had common cause. More on the flip.On September 12th, 2001, the vast majority of the world and the entire United States stood together in condemnation of a senseless act of violence by religious nutjobs against the United States. We all loathed al'Qaeda. We all were horrified that the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan had provided the terrorist organization safe harbor within their borders. Most of the world was ready, willing and able to deal with al'Qaeda and their hosts, by any means necessary up to and including war.
It was George W. Bush and a small cabal of Neo-"Conservatives" within his cabinet who blew this goodwill by slacking off on the fight against al'Qaeda and instead committing our military and our national treasure against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Tora Bora should have been Osama Bin'Laden's Waterloo. Instead, it became the beginning of a new chapter in Islamo-fascism, with Bin'Laden escaping to the lawless frontier of Waziristan in northern Pakistan and a new breed of Sunni Islamic terrorist pouring into Iraq to be blooded by conflict with The Great Satan, the United States of America, joining the Iran-influenced Shia Islamic radicals in the struggle they had begun in the late '70s.
In the right wing Daily News today there was an interesting article about how leftist motion picture director Oliver Stone is getting support for his new 9/11-related movie World Trade Center from unlikely allies: the lobbyists who devised the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, the Media Research Center, ultra-Right columnist Cal Thomas, and the National Review, who had been arch-critics of Stone's oevre in the past.
Why is there such surprise that rightists are rallying around World Trade Center, a movie directed by a guy who has made most of his career doing movies geared against everyone the right in the US has been supportive of? The guy who did a documentary about Fidel Castro? The guy who attacked free-wheeling Capitalism in Wall Street, the Vietnam War in Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July, and Nixon in the film of the same name?
The fact is, we all had common cause after 9/11. The bombing of the twin towers was an attack on everything our country stood for by a force so alien to it that it might as well have been the work of an extraterrestrial invasion. Radical Islam is almost a Hegelian antithesis of everything the United States was founded on. It mandates the absolute rule of a blood descendant of Mohammad instead of a representative government serving by the consent of the governed. It mandates Sharia law as the standard of jurisprudence, not the inalienable rights of Humanity to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It demands total religious orthodoxy and second-class citizenship and tribute from those who do not share their religious worldview, and makes atheism and polytheism capital crimes.
We should have utterly destroyed al'Qaeda. Instead, we went on our fool's errand in Iraq and let al'Qaeda get away. As a result, radical Shia and radical Sunni Islamists are fighting each other in Iraq, and radical Shia Islamists are (with rare support from radical Sunnis) threatening the radical Jewish theocrats in Israel. We have zero prestige in the region and cannot even get our allies to agree that both the radical Shia Hesb-i-Allah and the radical Kadima-ists of Israel need to back away from the brink of another few innings of the Lebanese War.
We stood shoulder to shoulder on 9/12/2001. One wonders if things would have been radically different had we had Al Gore in the White House on 9/11. One thing would have probably been different: we probably wouldn't be talking about al'Qaeda in anything other than historical terms by now.
