Ross Douthat And The Last Crusade.

Ross Douthat is heartened by Pope Benedict's outreach to Anglicans because, well, there's a war against Islam to fight and Jesus needs foot soldiers:

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

Douthat is considered a "reasonable conservative" in liberal circles, but this column is downright nutty. It's frightening enough that someone who attended school in a city as international as Boston could endorse the idea of viewing Muslims worldwide as a "foe" of Christianity.  But consider the fact that there are probably a number of people in charge of making foreign policy decisions in the last administration, who saw Christianity and Islam as "foes" and acted or advised accordingly. In fact, the march to war in Iraq despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and even the argument that the use of torture is justified against Muslims are easily explained by the worldview of a person who sees Christianity and Islam as being "foes," particularly if one sees America as a "Christian Nation."

Glenn Greenwald rightfully notes the irony of "someone who is virtually calling for a worldwide religious conflagration is simultaneously condemning his targets for lacking "Western reason." As Greenwald points out, one of the latest examples of the conservative ideal of "Western reason" was Republican members of Congress portraying the presence of Muslim interns on Capitol Hill as part of some fifth columnist threat.

I've already made this point implicitly before, but the kind of anti-Muslim bigotry demonstrated by reasonable conservative Ross Douthat and his ideological cohorts in Congress directly undermines national security. Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan drew attention earlier this year for his opposition to torture, but this diminishes his role in the fight against Al Qaeda. Aside from interrogating Abu Zubayda, Soufan was the lead investigator on the bombing of the U.S.S Cole. It was Soufan's recognition of Osama bin Laden's writing style in the note sent out after the bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that allowed the FBI to identify bin Laden as the mastermind behind them. When 9/11 hit, he was one of eight Arabic speakers in the Bureau -- and it was he who established the evidentiary link between Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks by identifying one of the individuals involved as someone who had been part of the Cole bombing.

For Douthat and like-minded conservatives of course, Soufan, a Lebanese-American, is by definition a "foe." In the fight against Al Qaeda, American cultural and religious pluralism is among its greatest strengths, but one that is consistently undermined by these kinds of noxious prejudices. A country that succumbs to the kinds of views expressed by Douthat in his column today is the kind of country that doesn't produce men like Ali Soufan.

UPDATE: I just want to add that there's a great deal of common ground between Douthat's perception of a grand conflict between Islam and Christianity and the tribalism of Pat Buchanan. Each is grounded in a hostility to cultural pluralism and fear of an encroaching, menacing other. The major difference being that while outright prejudice against black people is largely culturally taboo, prejudice against Muslims is so acceptable as to be found expressed openly in the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

-- A. Serwer