What We're Not Fighting For: The list includes short skirts, dancing, and secularism.(war against terrorism)

In the nation at large, the September massacres have revealed a persistent unity under the surface of our political and cultural divisions. Among liberals, however, they have uncovered a deep divide lying under surface agreement. Many liberal intellectuals have rallied to the defense of the country. The Washington Post and The New Republic have been models of intellectual and moral clarity, supporting the president vigorously-more vigorously, indeed, than he may intend to act.

But the left wing of the liberal coalition has reacted to the attacks with instinctive opposition to military action coupled with not a little anti-Americanism. The Saids, the Sontags, the Chomskys, the other contributors to The Nation-Christopher Hitchens being a noteworthy exception-have been more interested in flaying America for its supposed sins than in defeating its enemies (or "enemies," as they would no doubt put it).

This is a deep disagreement about America's moral status. It is not, to be sure, a new disagreement. But since it manifests itself in debates about foreign policy, it has not been politically consequential since the Cold War. Differences on Kosovo were not important enough to prevent liberals and the Left from living together in the Democratic party. Now foreign policy matters again. The last few years saw an attempt to reunite campus leftists and labor-who had parted ways during the Vietnam War-in opposition to globalization. Owing to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, that alliance is breaking up again.

For left-of-center supporters of the war, bringing around their allies is thus not only a patriotic service but a political imperative. Yet there is a danger that in the course of arguing for the war, liberals will settle on an interpretation of it that is both wrong and dangerous. According to this interpretation, what we are fighting against is "fundamentalism." What we are fighting for is "tolerance," "pluralism," "modernity," and "the open society"-and these terms are, with varying degrees of explicitness, to be understood as liberals understand them. What we are fighting for is, essentially, moral liberalism.

This, I take it, is what Salman Rushdie is getting at when he writes, in a generally quite admirable op-ed rebuking anti-American leftists, that we must be willing to die for "short skirts and dancing." Michael Lind, who is hard to categorize politically but is certainly a liberal on moral issues, makes the point more clearly: "It's a war of reason and tolerance against medieval superstition." Such superstition is not confined to radical Islam. "The anti-American Muslims believe that the United States is a godless, secular humanist regime. So does the religious right," writes Lind. "The radical Muslims want to roll back feminism and stamp out abortion and homosexuality. So does the religious right." Aryeh Neier, the head of the Open Society Institute, has drawn the same parallel. The Rev. Jerry Falwell's notorious remarks, he writes, "make clear that American fundamentalists are as hostile to modernity as their counterparts elsewhere."

Andrew Sullivan-who is not himself a liberal in the contemporary sense but is a scourge of religious conservatives-has been a strong and eloquent supporter of the war on Islamist terrorism. He goes so far as to call it "a religious war." In the New York Times Magazine, he writes that it is "a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far gentler echoes in America's own religious conflicts-between newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism." He concludes, "What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion."

As I've said, not all the above-quoted people are orthodox liberals, but it's easy to see the appeal their view of the war will have for liberals. Many of them tend to regard what Alan Wolfe calls "moral freedom" as the essence of freedom and the highest achievement of our civilization. As the Supreme Court put it in an abortion case, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and ...