Just got a review copy of In The Red Zone: A Journey Into The Soul of Iraq by Steven Vincent today from Spence Publishing. (Thank you.)

Vincent sounds like quite an interesting guy. He was quoted recently in Front Page as saying:

Suppression of the feminine—whether it be feminine sexuality, freedom or laughter—is the foundation upon which the death-cult of Islamofascism rests. Undermine that foundation, and the entire edifice, from al-Sadr to Zarqawi to bin Laden will collapse.

But for the West to encourage such an event, we must overcome our own fears of liberated women. By that I mean, the Left must discard a multicultural mindset that refuses to use Western standards to criticize other cultures, even when Western values—such as feminism--are clearly more beneficial to those cultures. As I describe in my book, one afternoon in Baghdad I listened to a group of Western anti-war activists complain that the American invasion of Iraq was an imperialistic attempt to crush the country’s native culture. When I suggested that some aspect of this “native culture” should be crushed—like forcing women to wear black sacks in blistering summer weather—one of the activists looked at me with a shocked expression. “But feminism has brought such destruction to the American family, do we want to wish that on Iraq?” And she was no post-feminist youngster, but a woman from the anti-Vietnam War days!

This—along with an unwillingness to support the Bush Administration in anything—explains in large part the silence of the Left as Islamofascists repeatedly violate their core beliefs of secularism, human rights and creative freedom (where are the outcries about the murder of Theo van Gogh? They come mostly from the Right). I remember my Iraqi friend Naseer telling me how impressed his mother was to see American women soldiers. His mom didn’t realize such gender equality was possible, or that women could interact so easily with their male counterparts—and millions of other women across Iraq are learning similar feminist lessons. The Left has got to accept one fact that has stuck in their craw since the Vietnam War: where the American military goes, so goes human freedom.

But the Right has to bite some bullets, too. Let’s face it: many of us prescribe for Iraq the very measures that conservatives detest about the 1960s—particularly when it comes to feminism, sexual freedom and rejection of patriarchal authority. So the Right—especially those on the religious right—have to accept the fact that once you let the feminine genie out of the bottle, the results are unpredictable and not always to a conservative’s liking. That means here in America, as well.

Communists, libertarians, leftists, neo-cons, Christian evangelists, Hollywood celebrities and NASCAR Americans ought to be able to rally at least one point: women must be free in the Islamic Middle East. It’s an issue that combines visionary idealism with hard-nosed, America-first realism. By uniting the progressive energies of the Left and the Right, the U.S.—I’d like to say the West, but Europe is too busy appeasing its Muslim minority--will exert the same sort of slow, steady, unyielding pressure against the misogynistic imams and shari’a-wielding ayatollahs that brought down the apartheid regimes of the antebellum south and South Africa.

Look for some thoughts from me in the (hopefully) not too-distant-future.