Osama bin Laden may be winning the war against the United States. This is not because the Bush administration is facing difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq (though the two cases reflect the limitations of hard, military power, even one as predominant as America) but because America is doing unto itself what bin Laden wanted it to do — i.e., lose its real strength, which is its pluralism, its democracy.

A recent example of this destructive process is the passage at the House of Representatives of HR 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, which will force “university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding”.

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The American rightwing is using its current political domination to also put in the last word on the ‘culture wars’ in US universities. Conservative think tanks and neocon scholars in the academy, it seems, are not likely to stop at anything short of straitjacketing American schools in the neoconservative ideology and putting down alternative thinking and formulations. If this process were allowed to take root, it would spell the death of freethinking in America.

But what does it mean in the context of the war on terrorism? Bin Laden has put America in a paradox. He used America’s soft power to attack the US. He knew the US response would be to immediately rely on its hard power. Insecurity often does that and it requires a great degree of sophistication to take a deep breath and understand the adversary’s strategy. It is one of the great ironies of history, of course, that he should have found, lodged in the White House, a kindred spirit in George W Bush, one who believes as much in invoking God to fight the infidels as bin Laden himself. So the bin Laden script began to unfold. The mixture of fear and anger has since led the US to flex its military muscle outside and resort to paranoid legislation at home. By far the worst of the two phenomena is what America has done to itself internally even as it gropes in the dark outside “to bring democracy to the Middle East” and “security for itself” at home.

Here lies another paradox. The neocons want to bring democracy to Iraq and, by extension, to the Middle East. But while they want to go out in the world and foist democracy on the Middle East, they and others in their camp are peeling off democracy’s many layers within the United States. The question is: Should less democracy within be the price for more of it without? Indeed, can it be? [more]

I trust I'm not the only American here who finds it repugnant that we need lecturing from a Pakistani newspaper on the merits of an open society. No offense to Pakistanis, of course, but this is a testimonial to how far the United States has sunk in recent years.

Further background on HR 3077 can be found here, which I previously posted on American Samizdat.