Two Wrongs Don't Make a Leftist

The presence of anti-U.S. leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has put both the campus and the country up in arms. Pro-Israel groups spread flyers with menacing quotes by Ahmadinejad, demanding his invitation to campus be rescinded. Many insisted he be allowed to speak in the interests of free speech (including myself). In some of the debates concerning Ahmadinejad's visit, hard-core liberals even championed him and his ilk as righteous rivals of Bush. But most Americans have a difficult time seeing how leaders like him find an audience anywhere-such as at the Non-Aligned Nations conference in Havana, where he received rave reviews.

It's assumed that anyone who plugs into their message must also hate America, baseball, freedom, etc. These leaders may be reprehensible, but they understand something that most fail to appreciate: opposing a uni-polar world order is an appealing idea. "By causing war and conflict, some are fast expanding their domination, accumulating greater wealth, while others endure poverty," Ahmadinejad pontificated to the U.N.

In his letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad addressed the U.S. with solid arguments: the faulty setup and reckless carnage of our Iraq invasion; our shady interventions in Latin America; our apathetic, if not abetting, posture toward Africa's stagnation; Guantanamo Bay, and other extra-legal detention (torture) centers. Up to this point, he has accurately listed incidents of America's global sins.

Why should such a country-and its cohorts-run the U.N. with no one able to challenge their prerogatives?

The irony, of course, is that Ahmadinejad himself proves why such a corrupt and cruel system will remain in place. After all, for all his populist rhetoric, he is neither Robin Hood nor Karl Marx.

"Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems," he went on to say in his letter. "We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point that is the Almighty God. Undoubtedly through faith in God and the teaching of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question to you is: 'Do you want to join them?"

In 1989, Ahmadinejad's mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, sent a similar letter to Mikhail Gorbachev declaring that communism had failed and recommending he study Islam as a fitting replacement for the USSR.

Ultra-leftist sympathizers of Ahmadinejad and proponents of violent Islamic expansion miss the above idea entirely. The left's secular bent makes them incapable of giving proper respect or fear to the religious zeal of those unlike themselves. In their dated Cold War ideology, anyone who opposes American capitalism must be an underdog, a liberal revolutionary. The fundamentalist Islamic cause is revolutionary, but it is neither liberal nor anti-colonial.

The extreme Islamic ideologies of Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and their materialization in a political state-Iran-are antithetical to the pluralist, secular-humanist world envisioned by liberals. Iran perpetrates murderous homophobia. It oppresses its Jewish and Arab minorities, promotes Holocaust denial, and puts on fascist military parades for missiles designed to carry nuclear weapons-perhaps to the "Zionist entity" that must be wiped off the map. Dissident students and women have been jailed and reformist parties and their press organs outlawed. But one of the most illiberal elements of the Iranian vision is its expansionism, which is spreading east to Afghanistan and west through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

The war Iran ordered up in Lebanon used that country as a battleground to deflect attention from its nuclear ambitions and the role of its ally, Syria, in continuing to oppose Lebanese independence. Before the war, Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, tried to freeze the government's call for a tribunal to investigate the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hezbollah had been a minority party in opposition to the ruling March 14 Movement-named for the rallies against Syrian occupation that followed Hariri's murder. Hezbollah's war has increased its popularity enough to seize power. Not coincidentally, posters of Ahmadinejad now hang in many Shi'a villages.

Walid Jumblat, a leader of the Druze ethnic minority and the March 14 Movement, told The New York Times, "There is an Iranian empire slowly but surely being erected."

Before the war, with Syria and Israel gone, Hezbollah remained the only military force preventing the Lebanese Army from finally taking sovereignty over its own territory. By crossing the border into Israel with kidnappings and rockets and dragging that country back into the Lebanese quagmire, Hezbollah is now able to claim that it is the only one capable of defending Lebanon from "Zionist aggression."

In a similarly clever ploy, Iran did exactly what Ahmadinejad castigates America for: invested big bucks on arms. Once those weapons landed in northern Israel and the response salvo hit southern Lebanon, Iran could emerge again as the rescuer, offering millions of dollars through Hezbollah, and on its own, for reconstruction efforts-reconstruction for a devastation they initiated.

Yet somehow, uber-leftists think that because these forces oppose Western superpowers, they share a progressive view of liberation. Actually, Iran's policy is a different version of the same Islamic extremism offered by al-Qaeda and Hamas, with its visions of a reinstalled caliphate empire.

Condemning these groups is not an endorsement of Bush's flawed strategy. But critics of Western policy should be equally skeptical of Ahmadinejad's alternative.