From First Things:

The West finds itself divided between two strong impulses that correspond, in the main, to the political right and left or to what in the United States we have come to refer to as red and blue, after the election maps. At every turn, our collective resolve to confront those who provoke us encounters fierce internal opposition, which cannot always be distinguished from the spiteful and, in effect, suicidal wish that the enemy of my enemy prevail so as to show up the neocons, the Republicans, the religious right, and the bogeyman, with whom the bien-pensants might go down in flames as well, but then self-sacrifice in the pursuit of world peace is no vice.

And so the right feels itself to be fighting a war on two fronts. These days, it’s against the Jihadist from without and the antiwar militant from within, as during the Cold War it was against the communist in Moscow and Beijing and the anti-anticommunist in New York and Paris. Insofar as the antiwar left emerges from the constellation of political sympathies that include abortion rights and, more broadly, the right to die (go to an antiwar rally and poll the demonstrators there on which side they took in the Terri Schiavo case), a disturbingly reciprocal relationship between fundamentalist Jihadism and liberal antiwar sentiment begins to come into focus.

I’m not sure who this “antiwar militant” is. If we’re referring to folks like the ANSWER coalition, I’m right there too: I don’t like those guys either. But if the author, Nicholas Frankovich, honestly believes that the all of the various Catholics who opposed the war are “militant” and are pro-choice and right-to-die types, then I think this is amazingly simplistic. Of course, if you go to an anti-war rally, you’re more likely to find people who support a “right-to-die.” But what about the growing number of Americans (many of them Catholic) who wish we had never gotten in the war in the first place? Or the people around the world (Latin America, Africa, etc.) who oppose abortion and opposed the war (many of them Catholic)? Are they all enemies too?