Osama bin Laden and the American left have forged a tacit agreement to secure the defeat of the United States in Iraq. That’s premise number one in Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home. A second major assertion is that the global war against Islamic radicalism is linked to the Red-Blue culture war at home—and that success in the first struggle is linked to aggressive engagement in the second. A third proposition links victory in the global war on Islamic radicalism to a values alliance between American conservatives and traditional Muslims—an alliance that deplores not only acts of terror but also the libertine culture that Blue America is exporting around the world.

D'Souza readily concedes that the American left and Muslim radicals have vastly different strategic objectives. The former seek to make the U.S., and eventually the world, safe for pornography (that is, for secular liberalism’s vision of individual autonomy), while the latter want to establish Sharia throughout the Middle East, then elsewhere. At present, however, a marriage of convenience exists between the atheistic left and Islamic terrorists—since both sides see their power enhanced by hanging a Vietnam-style defeat on President Bush in Iraq.

D'Souza buttresses his strange-bedfellows thesis by noting that Osama bin Laden's pre-election message in 2004 was largely indistinguishable from the rhetoric employed by leftists like Michael Moore--the man who shared Jimmy Carter's box at that year’s Democratic Convention. Moreover, as the author observes, “If you presume that [leftists] want Bush to win and bin Laden to lose the war on terror, their rhetoric and actions are utterly baffling. By contrast, if you presume that they want bin Laden to win and Bush to lose the war, then their statements and actions make perfect sense.”

Put succinctly, the American left wants George Bush, and thus the U.S., to lose the war in Iraq because it “fears Bush more than bin Laden.” For leftists, the enemy at home threatens to tip the balance of judicial power toward traditional jurisprudence. Consequently, a new foreign policy debacle is needed to discredit conservatives, unite liberals, and consolidate power in the hands of justices whose decisions regularly undermine time-honored beliefs. The left’s first priority, in other words, is to defeat the “Christian fascists” in America—those folks who oppose abortion and gay marriage, and who embrace standards of propriety that (except for Europe and Blue America) are recognized around the globe. If Iraqis must suffer and die under an Iran-style regime to secure this domestic objective, so be it.

Osama bin Laden, for his part, is happy to have American allies whose short-term foreign policy objectives coincide with his own—even if the secular left is precisely the group pushing a worldwide cultural agenda that is anathema to both Al Qaeda and traditional Muslims. This antipathy of traditional Muslims to secularism's imperial march is a fact largely ignored by conservatives seeking allies in the misnamed “war on terror.” D’Souza observes that Islamic radicals from Sayyid Qutb to Osama have fervently denounced the seductive power of American television, movies, music, and mores--and that both radical and not-so-radical Muslims view this cultural invasion as a mortal threat to Islam. Moreover, due to the quantity and prominence of its cultural exports, the U.S. is seen as the focus of Western decadence—“the head of the snake.” Neither political imperialism nor America’s support for Israel is viewed with similar existential dread.

To emphasize this point, D’Souza provides a stark portrait of American cultural depravity—an undertaking unprecedented among foreign policy analysts. Indeed, D’Souza's detailed examples--from gangsta' rap to Howard Stern to The Vagina Monologues--transform vapid words like “explicit” and “mature” into “when I see it” obscenities that would curl Potter Stewart’s toenails. D'Souza's descent into this cultural abyss is designed to view these "entertainments" through the eyes of traditional cultures. Unlike Western liberals, Muslims in Iraq, Egypt, or Indonesia don’t equate freedom with flagrant violations of traditional morality. Indeed, for them, as for Red America, laws that bolster families with a father, a mother, and children seem natural and sensible—whereas a society that legalizes pornography, sexualizes children, makes abortion-on-demand a fundamental right, and puts a stamp of approval on homosexual unions seems deranged. Yet the latter is the society that leftists, via their Hollywood cohorts, are foisting on cultures around the world.

Popular resistance, D’Souza observes, forces leftists to employ U.N. agencies and Soros-sponsored NGOs to do to traditional cultures what they’ve already done to America. In this effort pliable dictators often serve the left’s purposes better than democracies—a fact illustrated by war critics’ nostalgia for Saddam’s “equal rights for women” tyranny. Cultural liberalism and democracy, the author notes, are distinct concepts, and leftists have always been willing to ditch democracy to achieve their ideological goals.

The head-spinning irony of D’Souza’s presumed compact between leftists and Islamic radicals is that Westerners who despise Islam as much as they hate traditional Christians, find themselves on the side of “redeployment”—a policy whose likely result will be the victory of radicals in Iraq. Conversely, Islamic radicals are content to empower abroad a group that sponsors aggressive global secularization. The upside of this deal for team-Osama, however, goes beyond the plum of Iraq, since its consummation highlights American weakness. Moreover, as secular liberals again assume power in America, it becomes easier to convince traditional Muslims that the U.S., like the Soviet Union, is a drunken giant ready to collapse. After all, D’Souza argues, leftist foreign policy prior to 9/11 conveyed just this impression to Muslim radicals.

The foremost example of American weakness was President Carter’s disastrous decision to withdraw support from the Shah of Iran—a move that paved the way for the first Islamic state. Likewise, Clinton's abrupt withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, after eighteen troops were killed in Mogadishu, inspired bin Laden to depict Americans as cut-and-run cowards. In 1998, the same President’s ineffective, Monica-timed cruise missile response to devastating attacks against U.S. embassies in Africa was greeted with derision among Islamic radicals—as was Clinton's purely verbal response to an Al Qaeda orchestrated attack on the U.S.S. Cole that blasted "a forty-foot hole in the ship's hull and [killed] seventeen sailors.” Such fecklessness, D'Souza says, confirmed the radicals’ belief that America, despite its wealth and military assets, had lost the will to fight. And that conviction paved the way for 9/11.

Despite these withering critiques, D’Souza repeatedly defends the left against charges of anti-Americanism. Leftists, the author observes, promote their beliefs, just as conservatives do. Indeed, they are even willing to use military force, if necessary, to install a soul mate in Haiti. In the end, however, this defense is Pyrrhic—and may be offered to deflect criticism of his own audacious thesis. The left’s “America,” as D’Souza observes, is a country where patriotism and religion are suspect and where loyalty rests with international organizations. Indeed, its America is a nation that repudiates the traditional values cherished by most Americans up to, but not beyond, “the greatest generation.” (Janeane Garofalo, for example, gets “choked up with pride” when she sees “Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag.”) To argue in its defense that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill,” is no defense at all. Even more to the point, leftists who want America to lose the war in Iraq and become like Europe are cosmopolitans, not patriots. They “love America” the same way Howard Zinn does—with reckless contempt.

D’Souza’s proposals for defeating the Al Qaeda-Michael Moore axis include persevering in the attempt to establish a democratic Iraq and highlighting the treacherous alliance that exists between Islamic radicals and the cultural left.. Also needed, but at present woefully lacking, is serious political focus on the values that Red America shares with Muslims around the world. Rather than demonizing Islam, defending the newly-minted right to blaspheme, and pushing dubious Western mores on reluctant Muslims, conservatives should denounce the corrupt culture promoted by the secular left and embrace the right of Muslims to configure democracies that reflect their religious and historical traditions. Instead of lecturing Arab women on the joys of chauffeurless driving, administration officials should join forces with them in conferences designed to showcase the devastation wrought by Western pop-culture. Only by highlighting the ideals cherished by Red America (natural rights and external moral standards) and repudiating the excesses of Blue America can conservatives hope to persuade traditional Muslims that at least half of the U.S. (the half despised by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) isn’t intent on destroying their faith.

That “traditional Muslims are the only people who are capable of stopping radical Islam” is a notion that’s bandied about in discussions of terrorism. D’Souza’s book, however, fleshes out the stark implications of that thought. Moderate or liberal Muslims, the author jokes, are already on our side—all eight of them. The remaining billion-plus, however, won’t be won over by plaintive denunciations of terrorism or by rapturous paeans to freedom—not as long as Muslims equate “freedom” with Western decadence and “terror” with the only practical means of resisting corruption. Nor will Muslims sign up to fight against fellow believers when reckless statements about their religion are made by supporters of a war against “Islamic fascism.” To win these hearts and minds, “democracy” and “freedom” must mean something other than MTV and rigidly enforced public secularism. And for this to happen, American rhetoric and policy, vis-à-vis traditional Islamic culture, must change.

Whether most Americans are capable of appreciating and adopting these intellectual distinctions is doubtful—as is their willingness to denounce, alongside Muslims, the decadent culture in which they have marinated for almost half a century. Certainly, American leftists and their media cohorts will dismiss D'Souza's ideas as the ravings of a McCarthyite theocrat. (The author provides a list of prominent leftists and leftist groups at the end of his book.) Moreover, assuming that the author's analysis of Islam’s traditional-radical split is accurate, it is far from clear that “traditionalists” who are now sitting on the political fence will cast their lot with a divided-against-itself country whose execrable cultural exports show no signs of changing.

Given these obstacles, D’Souza’s concession that his recommendations aren’t easy may qualify as the understatement of the post 9/11 century. Still, if traditional Muslims are, indeed, the key to stopping radical Islam, one wonders what other options are available to win their support.

Review by Richard Kirk

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several Southern California newspapers. His book reviews have appeared in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.