The summer issue of The American Conservative consists of a symposium on the meaning of “right” and “left” in our current context and what value, if any, these distinctions retain. You can now read the entire thing online. I venture to say that this may be the only time the writing of left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale has appeared in the same forum as that of conservative matriarch Phyllis Shclafly.

The pieces that resonate the most with me are those by Andrew Bacevich and Scott McConnell who focus on the way the war on terrorism, and particularly the war in Iraq are redefining the political landscape.

Here’s McConnell:

The defining issue of our day is the Iraq War and American foreign policy. It has been so since the shocking attack of 9/11, an event that showed that the survival of the United States as a free society was unexpectedly at risk. Foreign policy, when the stakes are war, peace, and national survival, inevitably becomes the deciding issue when it moves to center stage. The division in this case was whether the United States would seek to isolate al-Qaeda from the Arab world in order to marginalize and destroy it. Or would it pursue policies that inevitably pushed more and more of the world’s one billion Muslims towards al-Qaeda’s view of America and the world? Astonishingly and recklessly, George W. Bush, influenced by neoconservative advisers who believe the only thing Arabs understand is force, chose the latter course. Under false pretenses, he invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, while abandoning America’s long-time effort to serve as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. These policies and their consequences now dominate our age, pushing all the elements of the Left/Right division into the background.

I might put it a bit less polemically than that, but otherwise that sounds about right. Early on after 9/11 it wasn’t clear what path the U.S. was going to follow: a narrow focus on al-Qaeda and its supporters and enablers (such as the Taliban), along with an effort at reducing the American footprint in the Middle East, or a wider war against all terrorist groups, even those that didn’t directly threaten the U.S., along with various “rogue states” accused of pursuing weapons of mass destruction?

Charles Peña’s recent book Winning the Un-War goes into some detail about how the Bush administration elided the distinction between al-Qaeda and states like Iraq during the months after the invasion of Afghanistan and finally leading up to the war in Iraq. In his view, the conflation of these distinct issues has distracted us from what the U.S. government’s primary focus should’ve been, namely pursuing the people who actually attacked us. An alternative strategy to the one the Bush administration has been pursuing would be focused on distinguishing those groups or states which pose an actual threat to us, like al-Qaeda, from those that don’t. Rather than widening the war, he argues, we should be narrowing it.

Other pieces from the symposium I found interesting or worthwhile are Jeremy Beer’s piece on how local preservationist and conservation groups represent a more “conservative” spirit than anything coming out of Washington, Michael Lind on the ethno-religious character of the two parties, Sale’s proposal for an alliance between left-wing populists and right-wing libertarians under an umbrella of local self-determination, and Phillip Weiss with a left-wing perspective on cooperation between antiwar liberals and conservatives.