Over the eight years and four months since out of the wide blue yonder the members of the Axis of Weasels (including Kristol, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Rumsfeld, Old Uncle Dick Cheney and All) were granted their heartfelt wish for new Pearl Harbor and Christopher had his Van Morrison-style rapture of exhilaration, the self-styled champions of messy freedom, blind, deaf and dumb justice, trick or treat, shock and awe, us and them, preparing to loose a town a week, and fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here have comprehensively wrecked all chance of making the present century any more bearable for the vast mass of humanity (not to mention our furry and feathered friends) than the last one was. All these wars and and settling of scores, all this fear, terror and deliberate error, all this destruction of precious human life, limb and potential, and all this wastage of irreplaceable and non-renewable resources is pathologically criminal. Regardless of whether they actively made 9/11 happen on purpose, let it happen on purpose, let it happen through incompetence, or just got lucky, they've certainly been having a ball at the world's collective expense ever since.
The individuals collectively in charge of US military/imperial policy have done more damage to more people and to society and civilization than anybody since the unholy trinity of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. That's right; they've out-polled and potted Pol Pot and they've left Saddam's and Suharto's records so far back in their wake that you can't see 'em for dust. They've managed to do this because they've got their grubby little hands on the levers of power and they've have had plenty of help, from Tony Blair for one, but also including from most of the rest of us who while we've noticed plenty of signs that we're living under creeping tyranny, have given the bastards carte blanche to go on lying, cheating, wrecking, looting and killing with gay abandon, mostly because we've worked out that trying to stop their steamroller by standing in front of it is a strategy likely to fall very flat indeed.
Christopher Hitchens's part in the ongoing orgy of creative destruction has been to tell us why the steamrolling is necessary. I wouldn't describe him as an apologist — can you imagine him apologizing for anything? — but as an explaner to the masses of why we fight. His position cries out for caricature, and it is easy to picture him as a cheerleader combining the swaggering revolutionary furvor of Chauvin with sound, solid sensible white man's burdenism of Kipling. Today I invite you to see him as medicine man for the war party. You have my full permission to imagine him dancing with Wolfowitz half naked around a campfire clad in eagle feathers and a loincloth, waving a tomahawk in one hand and a bottle of fire water in the other and crying "war—! war-war! wa-wa-wa-war!" at the top of his voice. Alternatively, you may prefer the image painted by George Galloway of "a jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes." Certainly, he's had us rolling in the aisles these past few years.
While Christopher has long been arguing for the virtues and necessity of Bush's and now Obama's wars and basing this "analysis" on the existential threat of Islamic terrorism, he has been rather bashful about discussing the meat and potatoes of what makes Islamic terrorism kick. In particular, he's been as eager to delve into the details of 9/11 as a vampire is to eat garlic, leaving that minefield claims and counterclaims to others. All in all this has been a sensible strategy, as it is doubtful whether his views on that event could stand upto serious scrutiny any better than his stand on yellowcake has.
But in Vanity Fair this month, Hitchens has broken 9/11 silence in order to aim some ill-advised blows at his former master (well, let's say mentor) and intellectual, cultural and moral superior, the octogenarian Gore Vidal. Like Daarth Vader telling Obiwan Kenobi, "Your powers are weak, old man!", he's pulled out his light saber, stuck out his chest, and decided he's finally brave enough to go mano a mano with the aged and infirm patrician. And for good measure, he's aimed a few blaster shots in the direction of a sort of Luke Skywalker of the rebel movement, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, whose 2002 critique The War on Freedom was described in glowing terms by Gore as "Far and away the best and most balanced analysis of September 11", an endorsement which must surely have offended many in the rebel movement as well as the crew of the Fox News deathstar.
Likewise, Hitch's latest outburst has generated no small amount of offense among his devoted readership of fools (including us at HW), mainly because many people feel it just isn't decent with a small "d" to attack the old and weak regardless of whether or not one has right on one's side. Our own Mark G., a budding Jedi himself, has taken up the matter in a recent post, but there are a lot of threads in this bundle of yarn, and so I'm sure we will be trying to untangle some of them at greater length in future. The other day, a perspective on the subject arrived here in the comments from Anthony Thorne, and I like it so much that, with his permission, I'm putting it up as a post immediately following this one.
Being under strict orders not to indulge in "conspiracy theories" from Comrade Rakhmetov — he's like a doctor advising his patient to cut out smoking and eat more roughage! — I'm biting my tongue on 9/11 and concentrating instead on how the global warming/climate change bandwagon will fare now that the jaws, claws and paws of proper winter have returned this year like a can of Heineken to reach parts of the Northern Hemisphere that other winters cannot reach. But if you youngsters want to get stuck in, my advice is go for it with as much gusto as the "68ers" put into loathing Nixon. At the very least, it should prove very cathartic.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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