With DADT Gone: Can We Unite to Beat the Taliban?
The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell offers the patriotic political center to chance to move the debate on the War on Terror beyond the usual Left-Right rhetoric.
America is engaged in a defining civilizational fight against the medieval forces of religious and political extremism. We will win this fight, and become a better country by fighting to win. The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell offers the opportunity for a patriotic political center to emerge in American politics, one that moves the discourse on our engagement in the War on Terror beyond the usual Left-Right labels.
The repeal of DADT has already exposed leftist "America is always wrong" sentiment in the guise of pacifism that compares the US military to the anti-Semitic, misogynist and homophobic Taliban. Similarly, the extreme right is displaying apoplectic fits of homophobia that leads them to mock the US military in ways that might seem recognizable by the Taliban. The extremes on the left and on the right may share and even admire some Taliban values such as a hatred for Israel (on the left) and virulent anti-homosexual bigotry (on the right).
War has always been a catalyst for social, economic and political change in America. In war we are defined against our enemies, making it clear who we are and what we are not, which often leads us to becoming a better country as a result. When America wins, it is not merely a military victory overseas, it is also the triumph of our best values over those domestic forces that most resemble the enemy.
In World War II, for example, we faced brutal racist enemies in the Nazis and we learned that we are not like them; WWII discredited political anti-Semitism in America and marginalized its leading proponents such as Charles Lindbergh. In the aftermath of the war it became more difficult to excuse racism at home after fighting it abroad. African-American GIs who had fought to liberate Dachau could no longer be expected to sit at the back of the bus because they were presumed to be “racially inferior.” The structural logic of segregation simply couldn't survive the reality of the enemy, because we were never like the Nazis, but it took a war to show us.
The enemy defines dialectically, not because we are anything like the Taliban, but precisely because we are nothing like them. Social conservatives will have a hard time defending the war against jihad if so many of them sound like jihadis when it comes to gays. Reading some of the anti-homosexual screeds coming from the right, we might as well be reading texts translated from Persian or Pashto.
Similarly, reading some of the anti-American screeds from the left, we might as well be reading Islamist propaganda calling for the defeat of America. It will be impossible for leftists to argue against our now inclusive military recruiting of the best and the brightest to fight against the forces that seek to totally subjugate women and engage in murderous homophobia.
We are nothing like the enemy, we are opposite, and our victory will also include a victory against the extreme left and the extreme right at home as well as abroad. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their collaborators stand for anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia and anti-Americanism; they are barbarians, and in fighting them we become improved, because we are not like them.
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