THE FASCIST SYMPATHIES OF THE SOFT LEFT

Christopher Hitchens says that intellectuals who

seek to understand the new enemy are no friends of peace, democracy or human life

Washington WHAT is known in American psycho-babble as 'denial' strikes in many insidious forms. It can express itself as the simple refusal to admit that a painful event has occurred, It may manifest itself as a cheery rationalisation of something ghastly. Or it can involve a crude shifting of blame. It's actually a more useful term than it sometimes looks.

The reaction of much of the Left to the human and moral catastrophe at the World Trade Center, and to the aggression that lies behind it, has partaken of all three variants. For me, the best encapsulation came in an angry email I received shortly after I denounced the rationalisers in a column published in New York. It came from Sam Husseini, who runs a dove-ish Washington outfit innocuously called the Institute for Public Accuracy. (I hope it goes without saying that I am not picking on Mr Husseini because of his Arab-American origins: he speaks here for many a brow-furrowed Wasp and conscience-stricken Jew.) The forces of Osama bin Laden, he wrote, 'could not get volunteers to stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem like it was supposed to — and the US stopped the sanctions and the bombing on Iraq'.

That neatly synthesised all three facets of denial. 'Envelope-stuffing' reduces the members of al-Qa'eda to the manageable status of everyday political activists with a programme; the same image obstructs the recognition of the full impact of the attack; the diplomatic measures that supposedly could have warded off the atrocity become, by an obvious transference, the source of responsibility for it. This is something more like self-hatred than appeasement.

The death-squads of New York and Washington have not favoured us with a posthumous manifesto of their grievances, but we are nonetheless able to surmise or deduce or induct a fair amount about the ideological or theological 'root' of their act.

The central plan was to maximise civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown Manhattan. Whatever Mr Husseini may say about Israel, the plan was designed and incubated long before the mutual masturbation of the ClintonArafat-Barak 'process'. The Talebanis have in any case not distinguished themselves by an interest in the Palestinian plight. (It ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian self-determination is, as before, a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as ever.) They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of Sheria law.

The ancillary plan was to hit the Depart ment of Defense and (on the best evidence we have available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all its symbolism, is actually more the civilservice bit of the American War-machine', and is set in a crowded Virginia neighbourhood. You could certainly call it a military target if you were that way inclined, though the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything against a guarded airbase or a nuclear power-station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we would now doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge for globalisation).

The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives — poor things, to be sure, but our own. The White House is where the elected president and his family and staff are to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it down, and the attempt of the Con federacy to take Washington DC, and this has hallowed even its most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a gutted Capitol or a shattered White House. I am quite certain that in such a case the rationalising left-liberals would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to roost. Only those who chose to die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of 11 September to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998.

To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers.

So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the true anti-human and anti-democratic motivation. What about the animating ideas? The teachings and published proclamations of the Wahhabi-indoctrinated sectarians of the al-Qa'ecla cult have initiated us into the idea that the tolerant, the open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches of The Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt. And that's before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and secularists, have even been factored in. As before, the deed announces and exposes its 'root cause'. The grievances and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds.

And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taleban and its surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and they deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and selfconfidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think, not possible. (I say 'fortunately' because I am also convinced that such coexistence is not desirable.)

But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is us, really. Did we not aid the grisly Taleban to achieve and hold power? Yes, indeed 'we' did. But does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove it from power? A sudden sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat. Would that not be 'over-reaction'? All I want to say for now is that the underreaction to the Taleban by three successive US administrations is one of the resounding disgraces of our time. There is good reason to think that a Taleban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy.

The sponsorship of the Taleban could be redeemed by the demolition of its regime and the liberation of its victims. But I detect no stomach for any such project. Better, then — more decent and reticent — not to affect such concern for 'our' past offences.

Ultimately, this is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby former clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taleban cease to be our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. The figure of 6,500 murders in New York is almost the exact equivalent of the total uncovered in the death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at Srebrenica, the demented General Ratko Mladic agreed to release all the women, all the children, all the old people and all the males above and below military age before ordering his squads to fall to work.) On that occasion, US satellites flew serenely overhead recording the scene, and Mr Milosevic earned himself an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after appalling false starts and delays, it was found that Mr Milosevic was too much. He wasn't just too nasty. He was also too irrational and dangerous. He didn't even save himself by lyingly claiming, as he several times did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia.

It must be said that by this, and by other lies and numberless other atrocities, Mr Milosevic distinguished himself as an enemy of Islam. His national-socialist regime took the line on the towel-heads that the Bush administration is accused — by fools and knaves — of taking. Yet when a stand was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky, among many others, who described the whole business as a bullying persecution of— the Serbs!

I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I'm thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.