New Republican?

The week's most interesting reading comes from the generally liberal New Republic, in which editor Peter Beinart argues that the left needs to embrace the fight against Islamic totalitarianism in the same way it embraced the fight against Communism during the early Cold War. He eschews attacking Bush from the right, as Kerry did during the debates, but doesn't necessarily strike a centrist pose either -- he's mostly arguing that the "soft" left, as he calls them (i.e. Michael Moore, MoveOn.org) have placed the fight against Republicans ahead of the fight against Islamic anti-Westernism, and have lost sight of traditionally liberal values in the process.

It rather reminds me of Hitchens' immediate post-9/11 reaction: "[T]he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state."

The crux of Beinart's argument is that the American Left has simply been slow to catch onto this concept. He doesn't defend the Iraq war. Yesterday on C-SPAN, he said he thought people like Moore do more harm than good, rather than being a "useful ally," for refusing to get real about Osama, al Qaeda, etc. Beinart's stat regarding Democratic isolationism is sadly telling too.

Can it be that the Left's deepest and most important fracture isn't all about the Iraq war, but rather between those who believe that we are engaged in a war with fascist Islamic totalitarianists and those who don't? (Or, those who believe the war is being conducted to satisfy the greed of profiteers, or is some kind of propaganda, or something like that?) And is this fracture occurring at the same moment that American Republicans are starting to believe that the Iraq war is a mistake? What's the next step, if Iraq was the wrong one?

Robert S. McNamara says, memorably, in The Fog of War: "The human race really has to look at this whole business of killing people."

UPDATE: Beinart follows himself here.