Right Way Wrong

You will recall Dinesh D'Souza as the pirssy authoress of the tract, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11. In it, he posits in Reader's-Digest prose that due to America's abundant fags, inadequate subjugation of womenfolk, Planned Parenthood clinics, and unremitting acceptance of the Holocaust as an historical fact, it was not only inevitble but, heck, understandable that Osama bin Laden, the Oral Roberts of Saudi palace-builders, would assign a bunch of clean-living mamma's boys to dispatch 3,000 little Eichmann's for their unquestioning complicity in the secret, international machinery of the Jew-Run Media. Al-Qaeda and suchlike, in this formulation, are only the moral mirrors of the United States, gazing hither and yon across the globe for those societies eager for remaking, realignment, and regime change. They, unlike us, are on the right side of history, however, and when the mushroom clouds clear and the magnetic dust of the last archived reels of Schindler's List and Seinfeld blow away like baby spiders on a breeze, there will remain gaunt men and women swaddled entirely in black, with chicken wire over their faces, ululating and firing off Kalisnikovs, neither drinking nor aborting nor buggering nor producing anything with a laugh track.

I was on my way to the wine store yesterday, and while scanning the radio dial, I heard the vaguely familiar, feminine whine of D'Souza's voice, commenting that "Iraq is Iraq; Vietnam is Vietnam." (Groucho: "And if you stew apples like cranberries, they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now tell me what you know.") D'Souza lolled his way through the usual "Iraq and Vietnam, hell, they're not even spelled the same" sorts of dissuasive yabber, then mentioned that "military tacticians" from Sun Tzu to Karl von C. have all observed that "strength in war can be measured as resources times will." Strength in marriage can be measured in height times love. Likelihood of weight loss can be measured in body mass divided by chocolate. Gas mileage is best expressed as drag coefficient minus hood ornament. D'Souza warns that in Iraq we are "in danger of losing a war [Pinter pause] that we can win."

But why, Dinesh? Because as I listened, I wondered: aren't our sectarian enemies, those brutal revanchists striving to turn Iraq into a theocratic appendage to the global caliphate, such as we're always warned, in fact our friends? Do they not seek, through regrettable but necessarily violent means, to eject the culturally leftist Americans from their holy territory, to restore women to their rightful domestic roles, to eliminate the corrupting influence of the decadent West from the lands of the Prophet and his people? Ought D'Souza not ally himself with these warriors in the broader culture war, and cheer them, their means, and their ends? If Islamism is not the enemy of justice but its friend, then isn't D'Souza just the second string sub who grabs up a fumble only to run it into his own end zone?