Hitchens Watch

Anatomy of a Hitch Hen

2012-01-17T05:15:00.000-08:00

From: "Lubna Qureshi"

Christopher Hitchens is dead, but his annoying friends survive him. Since his death on December 15, I have read countless tributes from these friends.

Sally Quinn, the wife of retired Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, also contributes articles to the newspaper. Her piece, “Sleep in heavenly piece, dearest Christopher,” nauseated me the most. Indeed, the title alone would have induced the late Hitchens to vomit himself.

“Christopher was one of the most beguiling people I have ever known,” Quinn wrote. “I thought so from the first moment I met him at a party about 30 years ago in my home.” Rather than honoring his memory, she seemed more interested in advertising her social connection to him, as well as her Washington Post blog, “On Faith.” As she reminded her readers, “He wrote for ‘On Faith’ from the start and sat for two video interviews, one after he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.”

“He was one of the most learned religion scholars I knew, which is why he was such a formidable debater,” Quinn continued. “He really knew the Bible. He really knew the Koran. He really had read all the theologians, thinkers and philosophers.” In the first place, any Hitch hen who misspells the Qur’an has probably read nothing about Islam besides God is Not Great. More importantly, respected theologians have little respect for Hitchens.

God and Mr. Hitchens

The Most Misunderstood Book: christopher hitchens on the Bible

Christopher Hitchens Is Absurd

Beyond a superficial grasp of religion, Quinn shares Hitchens’s commitment to sloppy reporting, which characterized the final stage of his career. In the December 19, 1979 issue of The Washington Post, Quinn profiled Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. She concluded her article this way:

“A reporter for a national magazine recently went to the White House to interview Brzezinski. The interview was very jolly. A great success. Not surprisingly Brzezinski was pleased with himself, exuberant. So exuberant, that as the reporter was leaving he began to joke around and flirt with her. Suddenly he unzipped his fly. The photographer who was with them took a picture of this unusual expression of playfulness. Shortly afterward the reporter received a photograph of the private moment they had shared, captured for eternity. It was inscribed, by Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

On December 20, 1979, The Washington Post published the following correction:

“In yesterday’s story about Zbigniew Brzezinski, it was stated that at the end of an interview with a reporter from a national magazine – as a joke – Brzezinski committed an offensive act, and that a photographer took a picture ‘of this unusual expression of playfulness.’ Brzezinski did not commit such an act, and there is no picture of him doing so. A photograph of Brzezinski and the reporter was made, and Brzezinski autographed it at the reporter’s request. The poses, shadows and background of this picture create an accidental ‘double entendre,’ which Brzezinski refers to in his caption. The magazine reporter states that nothing in the interview or the autographed picture offended her. The Washington Post sincerely regrets the error.”

Careful interviewing of the magazine reporter and the photographer would have prevented such an egregious error.

In addition to her journalism, Quinn is also an ambitious Washington hostess. Her 1998 book, The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining, almost surpassed Hitchens’s memoir Hitch 22 in its namedropping. Does it really benefit her readers to know that General Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a guest in her home?

“Aside from the people you invite, the most important aspect of entertaining with confidence is never to entertain beyond your means,” Quinn counseled her readers with apparent helpfulness, but her supporting example revealed her true purpose:

“Tom and Meredith Brokaw have an apartment in New York where they entertain elegantly. They also have a ranch in Montana with a couple of tiny log cabins and two modest cottages. When they entertain there, everyone wears jeans and it’s strictly homestyle, with simple, delicious food, buffalo steaks, bowls of vegetables, and potatoes passed around the table.”

A husband and wife who own an apartment in New York and a ranch in Montana are not economizing; they are luxuriating in their own wealth. Furthermore, I would recommend that social drinkers skip her chapter on cocktail parties:

“Speaking of the cocktail hour, it should be forty-five minutes long…No matter how scintillating your guests are, the very nature of the cocktail hour precludes any really serious conversation, and you can’t sustain polite, superficial chitchat for much longer than an hour…I’ve actually been to a private dinner in Washington where the President was over an hour late, and the cocktail party was interminable. Everyone was hungry, tired, bored, cross, and slightly boozed by the time he got there, and it was not a great start to the evening.”

You may agree that the cocktail hour should only last forty-five minutes, but I doubt that you will ever require the following advice:

“What if it’s the President and he’s late [for the cocktail hour]? The Secret Service will be there and will advise the host or hostess how much longer it will be. If the guests have been there since eight and it’s nearing ten, my advice would be to say to the Secret Service, ‘I’m sure the President would like us to go ahead and sit down.’”

Given her attacks on President Bill Clinton at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it is unlikely that Quinn served many cocktails to him.

For the November 2, 1998 issue of The Washington Post, Quinn interviewed well-connected members of the Washington establishment. “He came in here and he trashed the place,” said David Broder, her colleague at the newspaper, “and it’s not his place.”

David Gergen, the political advisor and commentator, went further:

“We have our own set of village rules. Sex did not violate those rules. The deep and searing violation took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them. That is one on which people choke. We all live together, we have a sense of community, there’s a small town quality here. We all understand we do certain things, we make certain compromises. But when you have gone over the line, you won’t bring others into it. That is a cardinal rule of the village. You don’t foul the nest.”

In Washington, That Letdown Feeling

Appearing on C-Span several days later, Quinn made it clear to a caller that she considered herself a member of this elite club:

“Well, I mean, certainly I live here and I’m part of the community. So, you’re right in that respect that I couldn’t have known that these people felt that way unless I were their friends and I saw them professionally and socially….I think that there’s a sense in Washington that something that people here cared about has been damaged or has been diminished in some way and that people take it personally and seriously because this is their community.” (43:00)

Quinn did not include the black residents of Southeast Washington in her envisioned community, but they must have differed with her on the issue. In fact, Quinn went so far as to support Hitchens in his betrayal of his friend, Sidney Blumenthal. Hitchens signed an affidavit claiming that the Clinton advisor had described Lewinsky as a stalker. “I like Christopher, I think he’s brilliant,” Quinn stated at the time. “Christopher did what he had to do, and I don’t have a problem with that.”

The Boy Can't Help It

It is widely assumed that a social snub motivated Quinn’s animosity. According to Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, 'The Clintons did not make her their guide.'

Something About Sally

Quinn, of course, denied this to a C-Span viewer: “Being rebuffed by Mrs. Clinton just never happened. We’ve actually had quite a cordial relationship, and I’ve never been rebuffed by the Clintons, or Mrs. Clinton, so I think you have some false information there.” (37:00)

Relying only on my intuition, I cannot believe that Quinn would have turned against the Clintons had they regularly visited her home.

Like most of Hitchens’s self-promoting friends, Quinn is oblivious to the realities faced by ordinary people. When another caller, fearful of Clinton’s interventions abroad, contended that his son would have to fight in the event of war, but not hers, she explained that medical reasons would preclude her child from doing so. At the same time, however, she also exposed her own political and historical ignorance: “I don’t think that wealth keeps children out of the military.” (23:00)

Fortunately, subscribers to The Washington Post will no longer see her byline in print. Last year, Quinn used her social column, fittingly entitled “The Party”, to publicize her estrangement from her stepson’s family. In her response to complaints about her unprofessional behavior, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli terminated her column. Her blog, “On Faith”, can only be read in the on-line edition of the newspaper.

No 'dueling' Bradlee weddings, just scheduling mistake
Brauchli Confirms Print Death of “The Party”

Christopher Hitchens: Bigger Than Jesus?

2012-01-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

While reading Hitch's bio on Wikipedia, I was struck by the current size of it and thought that I'd compare the number of references with that of other notables. While John Lennon (252) got in trouble for claiming that The Beatles (343) were more popular than Jesus (538), it turns out that the only one who can give Him a run for His money (as far as I could figure out) is the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith! (474). Hitchens (197) is, however, bigger than Shakespeare (192). And Marx (172). And Darwin (181). And Freud (173). Read 'em and weep.


Jesus   538
Joseph Smith  474
George W. Bush  387
Hillary Rodham Clinton 367
Ronald Reagan  361
Adolf Hitler  341
L. Ron Hubbard  322
Stalin   308
Abraham Lincoln  294
Nikita Khrushchev 270
Muhammad  266
John Lennon  252
Richard Nixon  250
Paul McCartney  249
Margaret Thatcher 248
John Fitzgerald Kennedy 246
Rudy Giuliani  239
Alexander the Great 235
Winston Churchill 229
Martin Luther King, Jr. 222
Al Gore   221
Franklin Roosevelt 218
Napoleon Bonaparte 217
Bill Clinton  211
Thomas Jefferson 210
George Washington 200
Christopher Hitchens 197
Tony Blair  194
William Shakespeare 192
Ernest Hemingway 190
Ayn Rand  190
Vincent van Gogh 189
David Bowie  179
Aleister Crowley 178
Elizabeth II  177
Jimi Hendrix  176
Ulysses S. Grant 176
Geert Wilders  175
Richard Dawkins  175
Karl Marx  172
Jimmy Carter  148
Lenin   139
Noam Chomsky  137
John Maynard Keynes 136
Condoleezza Rice 127
Saint Augustine  124
Joseph McCarthy  124
Julius Caesar  123
Ayaan Hirsi Ali  119
Dwight David Eisenhower 118
Robert E. Lee  113
William F. Buckley, Jr. 113
George H. W. Bush 112
Theodore Roosevelt 112
John Cage  111
Frederick Nietzsche 110
Lyndon Baines Johnson 108
Mark Twain  107
Leonardo da Vinci 105
Alger Hiss  101
John Milton  101
George Bernard Shaw 96
Andy Warhol  94
Thomas Aquinas  93
Ludwig van Beethoven 91
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 90
Tom Cruise  89
Orson Welles  85
Aristotle  83
Stephen King  82
Salvador Dali  82
Babe Ruth  79
John Marshall  78
Pat Condell  78
Milton Friedman  76
Muhammad Ali  76
Gore Vidal  74
Bobby Kennedy  74
Sam Harris  72
Hunter S. Thompson 71
Hirohito  70
Henry VIII  69
Pamela Geller  68
Pablo Picasso  68
Andrew Jackson  67
Cleopatra VII  64
Mikhail Gorbachev 64
Genghis Khan  61
Buddha   60
Johann Sebastian Bach 57
Andrew Breitbart 57
Paul Newman  56
Martin Amis  54
Mary Baker Eddy  52
Leonard Bernstein 47
Truman Capote  40
Michelangelo  34
H. L. Mencken  32
Norman Mailer  32
Tom Wolfe  31

The Most Touching Tribute of All.

2012-01-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

How did I miss this? An inspired tribute to The Great Man, from one of the most impressive and wonderful thinkers of our time. And a man who in many ways paved the way for the Hitch himself. Like Hitchypoo, David Horowitz began as a radical leftist before he saw the light and realised that ~~he could make more money as a rightist~~ Communism would only ever lead to ~~constraints on America's ability to bomb brown and yellow peopl~~e the Gulag. A discovery Hitchens made for himself only a few short decades later! In what was not at all a cliched move indicative of a tired, decaying mind, goodness no.

Anyway take it away David!

'I did my mourning for Christopher when he was given his death sentence last July and appeared in public as a punished shell of his former self. For those of us who knew him, it was hard to watch and painful to think about. Christopher was a great entertainer and everyone will miss him for that. He was also an outspoken if inconsistent moralist, and a fearless champion of the right to think and speak one’s mind, and he will be remembered gratefully for that....his wit and verbal bravura were irresistible and helped many to forgive him his transgressions. When he was struck with cancer, thousands of his targets directed prayers for him to heaven in the face of his ridicule....In his last decade he had held his comrades to account for their malicious support for the tyrant in Iraq and their equally disgraceful attacks on their country for its support for freedom......I have missed Christopher since the day he was given his death sentence. I have reflected more than once on the times I saw him early in the day with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and the look of a man who had been freshly mugged, and thought my friend is killing himself, knowing that there was nothing I could say or do to stop him. After his diagnosis, Christopher defended his reckless self-destruction saying it helped to make his life give off “a more lovely light.” I think it did for him, and am glad for that, though those of us who enjoyed its pleasures will wish he had found some other way to shine.'

Gets you right there doesn't it? Incidentally the drawing above is a tribute from Jerry Coyne's increasingly unhinged website Why Whatever I Believe at Any Given Moment is True. Whatever one thinks about Hitchens, it's a pretty remarkable drawing, I think you'll agree.

The Antihitch — Chris Hedges tells it like it is

2012-01-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

And about 20 minutes in, Chris does Christopher up like a kipper, noting that the New Atheists and the Christian Fundies are about as far apart in their modus operandi as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Oncologist: Final Report

2011-12-27T06:07:00.000-08:00

From: "Lubna Qureshi"

Since the death of Christopher Hitchens, I have spent some time watching his final interviews. His appearance on Charlie Rose in August of 2010 particularly interested me. In the course of the interview, Rose asked Hitchens if he regretted his excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco.

Hitchens answered:

“No, I think all the time I’ve felt that life is a wager, and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn’t…writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that, or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation is worth it to me. “

www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11168 (17:45)

His response annoyed me intensely. There is nothing “bohemian” about alcohol and tobacco; they are the drugs of the establishment. Additionally, I can only imagine how much better the writings of an abstemious Hitchens would have been.

Hitchens killed himself with alcohol and tobacco. Because some questions about the end result of those addictions still lingered in my own mind, I had another conversation with my oncologist friend about esophageal cancer.

The journalist received his diagnosis in June of 2010, so I was curious when his cancer had begun to develop. “It is not possible to estimate,” the oncologist replied. “Generally, the cancer grows over a year before it spreads somewhere.” In some cases, it can begin to spread after six months.

Despite the fact that esophageal cancer remains an incurable disease, I asked the oncologist how long Hitchens would have lived without treatment. “It’s so variable,” he said. “Generally, if you don’t have any treatment, you don’t survive more than six months.”

According to The New York Times, Hitchens died of pneumonia. My friend explained that “any cancer patient will be susceptible to pneumonia,” but that sufferers of esophageal cancer are particularly so. “Their swallowing mechanism is disrupted, and they can sometimes aspirate their food during their sleep,” the oncologist said. Furthermore, a hole can form between the esophagus and the trachea if the cancer is in an advanced stage.

www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/arts/christopher-hitchens-is-dead-at-62-obituary.html

In his very last article for Vanity Fair magazine, Hitchens reported that “a vivid red radiation rash” extended from his chest to his abdomen. “This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus,” the journalist wrote.

www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201

Did the proton treatment really eliminate his cancer? “No,” the oncologist answered. Even though proton treatment is more effective than either electron treatment or the more conventional radiation therapy, it can only eliminate cancer that has not spread from local areas. Unfortunately for Hitchens, his cancer was in Stage 4, which meant that it had already metastasized. “Stage 4 is not curable,” my friend said. If the proton treatment eliminates the cancer in one area, “it will show up somewhere else.” The oncologist went on to say that the proton therapy was only meant for “local control” to alleviate symptoms. “It was not curative treatment,” the oncologist stated.

When I had first interviewed the oncologist in March of 2011, he predicted that Hitchens had less than six months to live. As it turns out, he almost lasted nine. Of course, the oncologist had never met Hitchens, and had only engaged in speculation. Still, I sought the oncologist’s retrospective reaction. Why did Hitchens last longer than expected? “It was his mental strength,” my friend reflected. “That’s all. He fought to stay alive.”

At the same time, the oncologist was not entirely uncritical.

“He was too optimistic about his own outcome and survival,” my friend concluded. “I am sure that his oncologist did not counsel him from the way he described things.”

Merry Hitchmas!

2011-12-24T13:18:00.001-08:00

Murdoch's rag dug a unused Xmas rant of Hitch's out of the crypt where he quoted Tom Lehrer's A Christmas Carol. In the Hitchwatch spirit, here are a couple of alternative ditties if you want something stronger to go with your scotch!

I got ninety-nine problems but the Hitch ain't one.

2011-12-24T03:30:00.000-08:00

The tributes continue to pour in, from sentimental poetry, to tears, to badly drawn effigies of the ex-Popinjay (who has ceased to be). But unlike in Hitchens' career they saved the best till last. So I give you....Hitchhop! Watch with awe.I guarantee you will never have seen anything like it. (Hat-tip FGFM for the title and the idea of Hitch-hop).

Merry Atheistmas!

Atheists can be religious too!

2011-12-23T02:09:00.000-08:00

Yes! It's true! Apparently! And all you need to be is an official enemy of the United States to qualify. Jerry Coyne explains it, none too coherently.

'The notion that dictatorships like that of North Korea are not atheist regimes but theocracies—complete with godheads, miracles, slavish worship, and sacred books—was best expressed in a talk on the “Axis of Evil” that Christopher Hitchens gave in California. I have never seen him give a better talk, and it appears to have been done entirely without notes.

The man was amazing, and the talk is mesmerizing. It shows that you don’t need Powerpoint slides to keep an audience entranced. When you see the passion with which he speaks, perhaps you can better understand why he persisted in his misguided position on the invasion of Iraq. It was not an idle opinion, but one based on his compassion for the oppressed and deep-seated hatred of tyranny.' (my emphasis).

Indeed, and how awful it would be to live in a place like North Korea, where 'slavish worship' is the rule. I mean there you might read awful, terrible propaganda, perhaps a bit like this:

'Kim Jong-il was amazing, and his speeches were mesmerizing. They show that you don’t need Powerpoint slides to keep an audience entranced. When you saw the passion with which he spoke, perhaps you can better understand why he persisted in his misguided position vis-à-vis the United States. It was not an idle opinion, but one based on his compassion for the oppressed and deep-seated hatred of tyranny. '

But enough of this gay banter! Courtesy of Norman Finkelstein here is some video footage of some brave, incorruptible, rational and secular American intellectuals mourning the death of the Popinjay (Praise be Upon Him!). If you look closely I think you can see Jerry Coyne to the left.

The Obits Just Keep Coming

2011-12-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

— By Stabler

If you haven't recently consumed a large or spicy meal, you may want to brave brave Tammy Haddad's "Hitchens: The TV Gladiator", which reminds us of Hitch's early steps on the road to becoming a public intellectual for the age of the Kardashians. Hitch's own hero worship for Bill Buckley is not insignificant, it may be were he learned that really rancid ideas soaked in thesaurus chin ups could be commercial dynamite.

Link

Greenwald on Hitchens

2011-12-18T04:56:00.000-08:00

'Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.

Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:

As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”'

Greenwald is of course correct here, and it does bring sharply into focus the issues relating to Iraq, and the broader issues relating to the role of intellectuals and journalists when the political class espouse criminality and avarice: is the role of the intellectual to question 'official' lies and challenge received opinion? Or to remain silent? Or (Hitchens' choice) to parrot the lies and savagely attack (as 'unpatriotic', 'traitors' etc.) those whose conscience brings them into conflict with the State?

Whatever choice the intellectual makes, ultimately it's up to him or her. But, before Hitchens' self-evaluation as some kind of 'rebel' or 'contrarian' is taken seriously: a few questions.

1 : Above we see the grisly spectacle of Tony 'the Butcher' Blair, the extraordinarily rich and powerful terrorist and mass murderer standing next to the ex-Popinjay (who has ceased to be). Tony Blair is of course a key member of the Establishment. He is, in other words, someone who would despise and fear a genuine rebel or 'contrarian'. But Blair loved Hitchens and had nothing but good words to say about him on hearing of his death. What does this tell us about Hitchens' anti-establishment credentials?

2: The 'liberal' media, which Hitchens affected to despise, has been overwhelming in its praise for the Popinjay now that 'Last Orders' has finally been called. The air has been heavy with rich white males telling us how brilliant and wonderful he was. Would a genuinely controversial and divisive figure receive such treatment? Is the Popinjay indeed now to become the People's Popinjay of Hearts? ('Loved by millions' as so many commentators have pointed out. And so wealthy!).

3: The one thing that unites almost all of Hitchens' fans is the colour of their skin. Hitchens (said Hitchens) was desperately keen to liberate the Arab and Muslim masses from tyranny and oppression, a feat that would be accomplished by cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorus and torture. And yet a quick glance through the Arabic media shows a pronounced absence of the sickly encomia we have seen so much of in the White Man's Media. It's almost as if the Arabic world knows little and cares less about this 'great intellectual'. How do we explain this profound mystery?

4: And finally, isn't it interesting that the praise for Hitchens focuses almost entirely on his personality, his history and his legendary capacity for drinking? Rather than, say, on any of his individual works, the earliest one's of which are already well on their way to being forgotten? (Ten out of ten to any of his little fanboys who have actually heard of, let alone read, 'Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger' or 'The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification'.)

Morley's Ghost

2011-12-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

— By Stabler

The left defense of Hitchens gets off an early salvo in Jefferson Morley's kind but soggy "Hitch The Apostate" over at Salon. After some pedestrian reminiscing about the good old days of their friendship, Morley moves in on Iraq: "He made a stupid mistake. He supported a war that was a disaster for the people it was supposed to help." These may excused as the sentimental words of a former friend; Morley does not approach the venal extent of Hitchens's "honest" support of the war: his pep talk to the Bush White House on invasion eve, his slap on the back to Haliburton, his cheers for the torture and show trail of John Walker Lindh, etc. In a desperate effort to shield Bush and Cheney, Hitchens even wrote a memorably stupid piece equivocating the perfectly understandable term "chicken hawk."

Less forgivable is Morley's swallowing whole the passage of "Hitch-22" where Hitchens hid behind the fallen American soldier who had sited him as an influence. "Some might say that Christopher was a warmonger who had helped send this person to a meaningless death. But if the young man's parents did not think so, how could anyone else?"

As I pointed out at Hitchens Watch when "Hitch-22" came out, this rancid passage more than any other signaled Hitchens's moral bankruptcy. Taking a passage the soldier had quoted, Hitch explained how intellectuals could never understand the need for the invasion of Iraq the way the man in the street could, and that was his bond with the dead young man.

Yet Hitchens had no word for the men and women of the street when shock and awe rained down. All he could do was brag that he knew more about the invasion's incompetence of execution then we did. If he even looked at the suffering that incompetence produced, or how that suffering will continue well into our still new century, all he could say was "Yea Haliburton!"

In memorial

2011-12-15T22:26:00.000-08:00

The Preening Popinjay has passed on....

The Wrath of Khan

2011-12-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

Via our Scandinavian correspondent, Lubna Qureshi:

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Stephen Fry’s tribute to Christopher Hitchens. When I came across George Eaton’s own review afterward, I realized that he had caught an important moment missed by me:

“’More Bosnia, less Iraq,’ he [Hitchens] wrote in a text message to Fry. It felt as if he was trying to edit his own obituary. As he told the New Statesman, though he is unrepentant about his support for the invasion of Iraq and believes that history will vindicate him, he does not want to be ‘defined by it’. His reference to Bosnia was an attempt to place his support for the war in the context of a wider commitment to anti-totalitarianism. It was also a war that saved Muslim lives, rather than ended them.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/11/hitchens-remembered-polemicist

If Hitchens feels guilty about his endorsement of the Iraq War, then he should extend that guilt to his support for our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Recently, I read an intriguing article that suggested President George W. Bush might have incited genocide against Muslims in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The author is Professor Liaquat Ali Khan, a scholar of international law and human rights at the Washburn University School of Law. Khan is also a native of Pakistan. I decided to interview him for Hitchens Watch.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/09/19/presidential-incitements-to-war-crimes/

Hitchens Watch: Two months ago, Hitchens wrote the following: “On September 12, 2001, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1368, condemning the attacks on American soil and asserting the universal right of defense. The terms of the resolution explicitly state that those found to be ‘supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable’.” Does the universal claim of self-defense justify the American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/09/pakistan_is_the_enemy.html

Khan: The classical concept of self-defense, which is enacted in the UN Charter, which gives the right of self-defense to a nation-state. Now, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the right of self-defense has several constraints. For example, it says that the right of self-defense can be exercised only if an armed attack occurs. So, there is the question of sequence. The second is that the temporal proximity between the attack and the exercise of self-defense should be very close. For example, if somebody attacks me, I cannot go home and think about it and then three hours later, come back to exercise the right of self-defense. So, there is a temporal proximity. There is spatial proximity. And then, the duration of the right of self-defense, is also under Article 51, is limited. That you should inform the Security Council that the armed attack has occurred, and then the Security Council takes over from the nation-state that is trying to defend itself. Now, this is the classical notion of the right of self-defense. What I have argued in my book, called The Extinction of Nation-States, that this classical right of self-defense is undergoing a tremendous transformation. And we are in the midst of making a new rule of the right of self-defense. And I think the US is trying to construct that rule. I don’t know if the US would allow this construction to every nation-state, but definitely it is using a new concept, and it is exercising on that new concept. And under the new concept that the US is using, I think the temporal proximity and spatial proximity both have been dispensed with. So, that is a big change that the United States says: “We can exercise our right of self-defense without any temporal constraint.” For example, the 9/11 attack occurred, and we can still exercise the right of self-defense because these are the same so-called terrorists who are planning another attack. And of course, the spatial proximity is that the right of exercise can be done anywhere in the world, that we are not confined to the United States if somebody comes over here, attacks, and then, we exercise this right of self-defense. We can exercise the right of self-defense in any country on this planet, and maybe even in space, if the technology allows. So, this is the fundamental change in the classical concept of self-defense, no temporal constraint, no special constraint, and number three, no reporting to the Security Council, that to continue to exercise this right of self-defense without seeking approval from the Security Council. Now, I don’t know if the US would allow this right of self-defense to other states. I doubt it.

Hitchens Watch: Was Osama bin Laden just sheltered by fundamentalists within Pakistani intelligence? Were Presidents Pervez Musharraf and Asif Zardari also aware of his presence in Pakistan?

Khan: In my opinion, I am not sure if Zardari knew that Osama bin Laden was in Abbottabad. This is my opinion. I mean I don’t have any facts to support it or to contradict it. I think my best intuition is that probably some people in the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], knew and protected Osama bin Laden. But I am not sure if the high command actually was aware of it. And even if they were aware of it, I think maybe there was some sort of plausible deniability. You know plausible deniability. I mean that’s the doctrine that the CIA has used while giving information to the president, where the president can deny that they had information, but nevertheless, they do. So, I think that plausible deniability has become probably universal spy doctrine, that the spy agencies, they tell their superiors, but in a convoluted way, so that the high command can say “we don’t know” or can express surprise. So, I think unless that was being practiced, and I won’t rule it out, I think somebody has to know.

Hitchens Watch: In the July 2011 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Hitchens denied that the raid of bin Laden’s home violated Pakistani sovereignty: “Well what f-ing sovereignty? What f-ing sovereignty were these people ‘protecting’? It’s bad enough that the Pakistani army lacks sovereignty over the tribal area and can’t control it when the country’s own life depends upon it. But that bin Laden was living in the Pakistani equivalent of Annapolis, MD.” If the Pakistani government knew of the raid of bin Laden’s home in advance, was Pakistani sovereignty really violated?

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107

Khan: Well, I think logically these are two separate questions because sovereignty means that a nation-state has control over the events within its national territory, therefore territorial sovereignty. I mean I think the word territorial sovereignty is a better descriptive, which means that the nation’s territory is sovereign in a sense that other countries are excluded from entering into the territory, not only entering but attacking the targets within the territory. And so I think the question of sovereignty is a more abstract legal question. It’s a doctrine of exclusion, that every other nation-state is excluded from entering the territory of Pakistan, for example, including its air space, without the permission of the government. Now, whether you can effectively control your territory is a separate question because I think no nation-state, we have close to 200 nation-states, I think most of them would be vulnerable to US invasion because they don’t have the sufficient resources to stop the United States from entering and attacking the targets within their countries, except maybe twenty countries, even let’s say fifty countries, who can put up some resistance. But I think 150 countries are open to invasion from stronger countries. So, could we say that 150 countries do not have sovereignty? No, we wouldn’t say that. We would say that legally they are sovereign, but they don’t have the resources to protect their territory against stronger states. It’s just like human beings. I have a right to physical security, but can I protect myself against every one in the United States? No. I think there would be millions of people who are much stronger than me, and if they want to attack me, I would really be harmed. So, I think the concept of sovereignty, and the resources to protect it, are two different questions, and I think Hitchens is confusing the concept with the resources needed to protect sovereignty. I think the international legal system works because the concept is strong, not because nation-states can actually protect themselves. And social structure is maintainable not because every person can protect herself or himself, but because all people agree that we should not attack each other.

Hitchens Watch: In the same article, Hitchens went on to write: “If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of ‘sovereignty’ might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces.” Does the Pakistan government really have any interest in opposing the Taliban?

Khan: Well, I think if Pakistan is sovereign, which it is, that also means positional sovereignty, and that means that the nation-state can make its decisions without foreign influence. Now, of course, the United States wants Pakistan to eliminate the Taliban, particularly those who are fighting the US. Now, the question is: does Pakistan have a similar national interest in eliminating the enemies of the United States? You cannot presume, as Hitchens does, that any person who’s the enemy of the United States is also the enemy of Pakistan. That doesn’t fit logically because there will be a lot of groups who will oppose the United States, and Pakistan will either be neutral or even more friendly to that group. Take Iran. Iran and the United States don’t get along. The United States wants to harm Iran, but that doesn’t mean that Pakistan should also try to harm Iran. In fact, Pakistan could be very friendly to Iran, just like the United States is very friendly to Israel, even though a lot of Muslim countries are not friends with Israel. I think the United States should allow Pakistan to make its own decisions, and determine that whether Pakistan wants to engage in a civil war with its people. Remember the Taliban is only one name of a very large group called Pashtuns. Even though the Taliban do not represent all Pashtuns, nevertheless, Pashtuns have a lot of sympathy for the people who are fighting against the US occupation in Afghanistan. So, to say that the Pakistanis don’t fight the Taliban and they are playing a double game, I think all these arguments are rooted in false logic. I don’t think it is in the interests of Pakistan to engage in a fight with the Taliban in Pakistan. I think Pakistan has chosen to negotiate with them, and that is the right course.

Hitchens Watch: Why did Pakistan support the Taliban in the very beginning? I have read that the Pakistanis thought that winning influence in Afghanistan would give them “strategic depth”, but I not understand what that concept means.

Khan: Strategic depth is a doctrine used to explain the India/Pakistan conflict, and strategic depth could either mean geographical depth or the depth of bringing one more country into the equation. Now, we all now that 40 million Pashtuns across the border both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they are one people. And they have been divided into two countries. The border is fluid. The border is artificial. The border is a construct, which physically cannot be controlled, is not controlled. And people flow back and forth because family lives across borders. So, then we say strategic depth simply means that the 40 million Pashtuns living in both Pakistan and Afghanistan are one people, and even though we have divided them into two countries, actually they should be recognized as one people in two countries. That’s one. The second is that Afghanistan’s majority is Pashtuns. You cannot make a government without the majority of the people. That’s not going to be a democratic government. So, it’s natural that the Pashtuns rule Afghanistan, and when Pashtuns rule Afghanistan, they have a natural alliance with Pashtuns in Pakistan. In some sense, the union between Pakistan and Afghanistan is natural, and that unity, despite the border, is irrefutable. And India wants to create a very rigid border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and maybe move Afghanistan to its own alliance. That’s not going to happen.

Hitchens Watch: In the September 7, 2009 issue of Slate, Hitchens wrote: “American drone strokes have pinpointed and killed at least one especially ghastly Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who, among other crimes, was the probable organizer of the murder of Benazir Bhutto.” Was Mehsud really a terrorist? If so, what would have been the best way to apprehend him?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/09/dont_forget_why_were_in_afghanistan_and_iraq.html

Khan: Well, again, Mehsud was a part of the resistance movement, and he was a Pakistani Taliban, trying to help the Pashtuns across the border. Now, this whole business of terrorism, I think that’s another linguistic game that Hitchens and people like him, and even the West generally..I mean I’ve written about it repeatedly, that we use the word “nigger” in order to delegitimize the grievances of the black people. We have reinvented the word “savage” to delegitimize the aspirations of the Native Americans. So, I think we do the same linguistic game, that you give a very bad name to your enemy, and you create so many connotations, and so many implications for that word, that anybody who listens to that word is naturally inclined to hate that group. So, I think the United States and the West have successfully launched the word “terrorist” to describe all the people who are fighting the US imperialism. That’s my view of the word “terrorism.” Now, what on the earth could it be that the people who are fighting an occupation will be called terrorists? I mean if we apply this logic to the US, then all the people who were fighting the British were terrorists, but we remember them very fondly, and Hitchens being a Britisher, isn’t he a Britisher?

Hitchens Watch: Yeah, he just became an American citizen recently.

Khan: I think I would ask him if the people who fought the British imperialism, were they terrorists or were they freedom fighters? So, I think in one sense, the people who are fighting the US occupation in Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, I think you can call them terrorists because you want to delegitimize them, but there could be other labels as well. So, I think Mehsud, yes, he is a terrorist from a US viewpoint because he was trying to help the people in Afghanistan who wanted to resist occupation…I think it depends what perspective you have on a given war…I think this whole notion makes me not take it very seriously, that labels can describe reality. I think labels are tools of propaganda. Labels are part of the warfare, and you just cannot invent labels and then make them arguments. So to say Mehsud, or for that matter, Mullah Omar, they are terrorists, I can understand that you are engaging in warfare, but if you’re saying you are engaging in analysis, I refuse to accept that.

Hitchens Watch: Do you think Mehsud had anything to do with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto?

Khan: He denied it, and I think these people, when they deny it, they mostly mean it. So, I take him on his word.

Hitchens Watch: If you were an advisor to Washington, would you recommend cutting off all military aid to Islamabad?

Khan: If I’m advising Pakistan, I would say get rid of the aid, and try to become self-sufficient. If I’m advising the United States, I would do the opposite, and I would say do not cut the assistance to Pakistan, because you will lose Pakistan 100%, completely. Already, the United States has lost the people of Pakistan. The United States is losing Pakistan to China. I think there is a new regional alliance that is going to emerge, and that will be China, Pakistan, Iran, and the Central Asian states, and Russia maybe. But definitely, it seems like the United States, foolishly in my view, and against its own interests, and partly driven by people like Hitchens and company… the United States fails to understand that it simply does not have the resources to make so many countries mad. I mean look at what it’s doing. It has made Iran mad. It is making Pakistan mad. It is not getting along with Russia, with all its defense missiles over there. The Congress doesn’t understand that it cannot bully China, but it regularly does. So, it seems like this US leadership is still in a mode of denial. They still think they are the only superpower in the world, and it can dictate its terms to every country in the world. I don’t think that is the case, anymore. The US is still powerful, but it’s losing its power. It is still a rich country; it is losing its richness. It’s in the process of going down, whereas India and China and many other countries are on the upswing. Pakistan would have been the same way had it not been dragged down in the last ten years. Pakistan was doing very well economically until it was dragged down to be in the War on Terror. So, I think, if I am advising Washington, I would say do not lose Pakistan, because if you lose Pakistan, you are losing a key country that would have helped you in that part of the world. But if you lose Pakistan, then you are creating a continuity of “enemyship,” if I can make that word, continuity from China to Pakistan to Iran to Afghanistan to the Central Asian states. This is a very contiguous region that is going to turn against you.

Hitchens Watch: Just after the US intervention in Afghanistan began in the fall of 2001, Hitchens rejoiced “we are rid of one of the foulest regimes on earth, while one of the most vicious crime families has been crippled and scattered.” He insisted that the US military force “remains to help the Afghan exiles to return, to save the starving and to consolidate the tentative emancipation of Afghan women.” What do you think of Hitchens’s view?

http://www.thenation.com/article/ends-war

Khan: I think the United States does have things to teach to the world. I think it has many good values that it can teach to the world. For example, personally I’m a great admirer of American pragmatism. I think American culture is very pragmatic. American people are very pragmatic, and pragmatism means that you focus on the price rather than the ideology. I think a lot of countries become so ideological that they lose sight of the price, or they lose sight of the end. They become so means-focused that they forget the end. Number two, I think Americans are very practical people, which fits with the pragmatism. They are problem-solvers. They take a problem, and then they ask themselves: “How can we solve this problem?” And then they actually end up solving the problem. And I think they also believe that economic prosperity is essential for all other human values. That if you don’t have economic prosperity, the greatest human values cannot be achieved. And I think I would love Muslim countries and Pakistan and Afghanistan to borrow these ideas. They become more pragmatic. They become more practical, and they focus on economic prosperity. Now, having said that, I don’t think Muslims anywhere want American social values, unfortunately or fortunately. Nudity, not taking care of your parents, child care, problems in the United States, overindulgence in individualism, these are not social values that Muslim countries are going to accept. And I think that’s where the US people and the US policymakers fail. That American social values will not be accepted in the Muslim world. And Afghanistani women are not going to walk around with miniskirts, and throw away their families, and throw away their children, and throw away their parents, and just pursue self-development. That is not going to happen. If it happens, then I think the Muslim culture will come to an end, and it would have been completely replaced by Western culture, or American culture. And I think Hitchens should understand that Muslim countries will not import the dysfunctional American values that have actually destroyed the whole concept of family.

Hitchens Watch: The term “emancipation” can be interpreted in many ways. I do not expect to see the typical Afghani woman dancing in discos with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Emancipation can also mean essential human rights: the right to an education, the right to work, the right to choose one’s husband, the right to birth control.

Khan: Yes, I agree with you that Afghan woman have the right to education, the right to work, and the right to choose a husband, and many other rights, including the right to physical security, and equal respect. The recognition of rights comes slowly and rights have cultural variants.

Hitchens Watch: In the fall of 2001, Hitchens wrote that the Americans “had just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age.” He also claimed “that the feat was accomplished with no serious loss of civilian life, and with an almost pedantic policy of avoiding ‘collateral damage’.” Has there been serious loss of civilian life in Afghanistan since 2011? Has the United States avoided collateral damage?

Khan: No, I think this whole idea that collateral damage does not occur, nobody believes in that. There is huge collateral damage. Now, I think I would concede that the modern warfare, in some sense, is restrained both in terms of ideas as well as in terms of values. To engage in massive, widespread destruction, I think there’s less of it. We don’t do the bombing of Dresden and we don’t see the bombing of England, as we did in the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean that the collateral damage has been eliminated, or even minimized. I think collateral damage, you can define very narrowly, and say we are talking only about lives lost. That if you can minimize these deaths of civilians, then you have minimized collateral damage. Okay, that’s a very narrow definition of collateral damage. But there’s another definition of collateral damage, and that is: How many houses have been destroyed? How many families have been broken? How many families have been displaced? How many people have become refugees? How many people have lost their income, or the source of their income? How many lands cannot be plowed? How many factories have closed? How many factories have not been built? I think if you define collateral damage in terms its social, economic, and shared cost, then you will find that collateral damage of the Afghanistan War has been huge, just like the collateral damage of the Soviet invasion was huge. Afghanistan has been economically crippled because, for the obvious reasons, that there is resistance. Even Karzai is saying I will not allow you to stay here unless you promise that you won’t raid homes at night. This is one of his conditions. Imagine you are living in a village, and you don’t know when foreign troops are going to barge into your house, and just destroy everything that you have. I mean this terror of foreign troops coming to your village, coming to your house, breaking your door, and coming into your house, not caring about the privacy of your home, this terror is collateral damage. And I hear people like Hitchens, who have not experienced in their own lives this kind of terror…he should know better because the Second World War exposed Great Britain to this kind of terror. So, to say that modern warfare and US warfare and US military, they’re very benign and they’re very careful and they’re very benevolent and humanitarian, yes, in some sense, yes. But, in the deeper sense, no. I think the US invasion of Afghanistan may be less brutal than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the collateral damage in terms of economic loss, in terms of loss of opportunity, in terms of loss of families and villages, is no less.

Hitchens Watch: Do you have any statistics for the civilian casualties from the US drone strikes in Pakistan?

Khan: Well, I think Pakistan has a figure…they say 35,000 people have been killed. I don’t know what the figures are. I have no idea. That’s another thing that the whole drone killings, they’re shrouded in mystery. Nobody knows who’s being killed. Nobody knows how many are being killed. Everything is under the dark. Pakistan does not want to disclose it because disclosure would deepen discontent, and the United States does not want to disclose it because the US wants to give the impression that they are only killing the so-called terrorists, as if no other person is being killed. So, I think both the United States and Pakistan have their own interests in hiding the true damage by drones, and therefore, we don’t know. But, again, the terror. Don’t forget the terror of drones, and the uncertainty that it causes, and the terror in the hearts of the children. You are destroying the psychology of children in Waziristan. Because remember, if you are under this fear that a drone is going to attack your village, and people are going to be killed, this will influence very negatively hundreds of children who live there. And I think Mr. Hitchens should know that this is a very brutal collateral damage of drones. You don’t know when it’s going to happen.

Hitchens Watch: In your 2006 Counterpunch article, you wrote that President George W. Bush might have incited genocide. More recently, you argued that President Barrack Obama had “morally degenerated.” Would you accuse Obama of potential genocide as well?

http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/193802.html

Khan: Well, I think if you go by the definition of genocide, then genocide can occur in time of war. Everything can occur in time of peace. So, war is not an excuse to commit genocide. And I think I would argue that Obama has committed genocide in Waziristan, because this is one policy that he actually started, and took credit for it. Even under the Bush regime, some drone attacks were happening, but Obama made it an explicit policy within three days of taking the White House. He met with the generals, and because he came in with this platform that the real enemy is Pakistan, or in Pakistan, and therefore, I would argue that if you strictly go by the definition of genocide, that is the killing of a protected group, or an attempt to kill a protected group, either in part or as a whole, then you are committing genocide. Now, what is the group? The group is an ethnic group called Pashtun, or a religious group called Taliban. And you don’t have to wipe out the whole group in order to commit genocide, only a part of the group. It’s not one person, but I think if you begin to kill 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 of a protected group, and you have the intention to kill them, it’s not an accident or it’s not through negligence, I think Obama has not only continued the Bush genocide policy in Afghanistan, but he has also started a new genocide in Waziristan, if you go by the definition. But unfortunately, I think very few people would conclude that because people still think that war is an excuse, and war is exempt from genocide.

Hitchens Watch: When the war in Afghanistan was nearly one year old, Hitchens had this to say: “I was highly impressed by the evolution of military strategy and tactics since the bombs-away inglorious days of the Vietnam era. Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.” What is your reaction?

http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/090802_hitchens_entire.htm

Khan: Well, I think this paragraph that you just read to me, it’s written from a certain perspective. I think there is dehumanization in this paragraph. There is celebration of destruction in this paragraph, and there is moral triumphalism in this paragraph. And I think the argument is making it very simple. That when you kill your enemy, you have a moral right to be pleased. And I don’t know if this principle is also available to the groups that are fighting the US. If they kill US soldiers, or the US enemy, would Hitchens give them the same moral excuse, moral basis to celebrate, and to be happy? And for where precision bombs are concerned, I think precision is good. I mean as a logistical matter. I think if you can make precision bombs, obviously they are better than crude bombs, on the theory that crude bombs will be inefficient in killing the enemy, number one, and number two, crude bombs will kill more, and will kill people that you don’t want to kill. So, I think to that extent, precision weapons are definitely an improvement over crude weapons, but the use of those precision weapons, and the effect of those precision weapons, and who is the victim of those precision weapons, that’s very difficult to gauge. You could have precision bombs when you are taking the land from the Native Americans, and you could kill only the people that you wanted to kill in order to grab their land, but the question really was grabbing the land rather than whether you could have the precision bombs or crude bombs. So, what I think Hitchens misses in his analysis, and does not show, at least to people who are neutral, that what legitimacy does the US have to occupy Afghanistan for almost ten years now, a little more, and wage a war on a very extensive level that has directly affected millions of people in that country, and now in Pakistan. Only in retaliation to an attack on the US, where 3,000 people were killed, yes, that was not right, but where is the proportionality, and what error and what was the fault of the people of Afghanistan that they had to be punished so heavily for so many years? I think Hitchens and his company, I don’t think they have answered that question adequately.

Qureshi on Fry

2011-11-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

When I was sixteen years old, my favorite film was A Fish Called Wanda. I watched the movie every day after school like a lunatic. Although I cannot bear to view it now, I can still recite the key bits of dialogue from memory. I particularly enjoyed Stephen Fry’s brief encounter with the Kevin Kline character, who is trying to flee from England. Posing as a British security officer at Heathrow Airport, Kline approaches the stereotypical English twit:

Kline: “May I see your boarding pass, please?”

Fry: “Oh, yes, certainly, certainly.”

Kline: “Very good. Now, would you mind stepping over here, please?”

Fry: “Yes, of course.”

Kline: “Oh, look, the Queen!”

Fry: “Where?”

When Fry turns his head, Kline whacks him from behind and steals his boarding pass.

Stephen Fry was the only attraction that his scheduled appointment with Christopher Hitchens had for me. As Hitchens Watch readers all know, a case of pneumonia forced Hitchens to cancel. In his place, Sean Penn, James Fenton, Christopher Buckley, Lewis Lapham, Salman Rushdie, and Martin Amis all participated virtually from the United States. Richard Dawkins sat down with Fry in London.

Of course, I will only focus on the aspects of Fry’s program that interested me. If you are disappointed, dear readers, you can watch the entire program for yourselves, as long as you willing to pay for the privilege.

fora.tv

As much as I despise the fanboys and Hitch hens, I can make the occasional exception. Sean Penn admires The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which is my favorite Hitchens book from the old days. Penn explained:

“Yes, it was his book, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, that really focused my attention on his work… the magnificence of his language is, I think, particular inspiration to those of us in America who have undervalued it. And then the clarity of his thought, I think, made him a particularly sharp knife in the cutting of Kissinger… I think the original title of the book in Chris’s mind was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but that was not appreciated by a publisher. But I think what Kissinger was confronted with, with Christopher Hitchens, was somebody who was not distracted by the intelligence of Kissinger or his articulation…Chris could more than match it, and had a clarity of a kind of pure and unencumbered morality that saw what Kissinger’s motivations were, in a way that was unequivocal.”

Now, Hitchens rejects the nickname “Chris” as déclassé, but I am sure that the journalist will forgive Penn because he is a movie star.

Fry introduced the writer Christopher Buckley, a humorist who has never made me laugh. In his snobbish, prep-school voice, Buckley complimented Hitchens for his ideological betrayals:

“But he has such a supple, and with a bow to Professor Dawkins if I may use the term, evolutionary, mind, that he made a rather interesting trajectory through the years, so that he became, in the early part of the last decade of the last century, one of the great proponents of U.S. military invention [intervention] in Iraq.”

Buckley, by the way, has rejected his son from an adulterous relationship. There is no need to respect the words of such an insubstantial man. If I am wrong to criticize Buckley for his private life, then his buddy Hitchens was wrong to criticize President Bill Clinton for his.

www.washingtonpost.com

www.nypost.com

Naturally, the poet James Fenton read his poem, “The Skip.” Apparently, Hitchens likes it. I refuse to strike an intellectual pose by pretending to understand the poem. I will welcome any explanations.

For Fry’s own part, he venerated Hitchens with genuine humility:

“I made the mistake once of attempting, not to argue against the war in Iraq exactly, but even mildly to suggest that it wasn’t going very well, and I emerged a battered and bruised soul, realizing that I would have been better not to take up arms against so brilliant a mind.”

The host of the evening would have been better to consult Hitchens Watch beforehand. [Indeed.]

Reservoir Decents

2011-11-07T09:31:00.000-08:00

Would you like Fry with that?

http://hitchfry.intelligencesquared.com/

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that Christopher has pneumonia. The good news is he is on the mend, but he will be unable to join Stephen Fry in conversation. His voice isn't strong enough, although it should be in the next week or so.

Stephen will now be joined on both sides of the Atlantic by close friends and colleagues of the Hitch including Martin Amis and Christopher Buckley in New York and Richard Dawkins live on stage in London. They will be examining their and his ideas of what constitutes the good life and the good death – seen against the backdrop of Christopher's career, the causes dear to his heart, the controversies that he has so enjoyed provoking and the things that make life worth defending.

Great Minds Think Alike

2011-10-31T06:00:00.001-07:00

Oncologist Alert!

2011-10-19T05:17:00.000-07:00

Via our Swedish correspondent, Lubna Qureshi:

When Hitchens Watch posted my interview with my oncologist friend nearly seven months ago, I realized there were questions that I had forgotten to ask him.

In his written pieces and television interviews, Christopher Hitchens described symptoms that I found baffling, given my ignorance of esophageal cancer.

For instance, Hitchens reported afterward the sensations he felt shortly before his diagnosis:

“I couldn’t really move, and my whole chest cavity seemed to be filled overnight with some kind of cement. And I wasn’t sure that I was breathing or that my heart was beating, very frightening…And I discovered that my pericardial sac, the bit around my heart, the liquid that protects your heart, was swollen up to the point that my heart couldn’t move very well, if at all, which may or may not have been related to my malady.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009

Was the swelling of his pericardial sac related to his malady? Once again, I turned to my friend, who said that esophageal cancer could cause such a problem. “Cancer cells enter the pericardium,” the oncologist explained. “More fluid would collect around the heart, and compress the heart.” Can only esophageal cancer affect the pericardium? “Any kind of cancer can do it,” my friend replied.

Several months later, Hitchens experienced other unpleasant symptoms. Appearing on C-SPAN in January of this year, the journalist told his host, Brian Lamb:

“I had a very bad episode a couple of weeks ago. I crashed…I had a meltdown in my bone marrow, that can happen with chemotherapy. I had a crisis with white and [red] blood cells, at the same time as my gall bladder went rancid and I was in terrible pain. I thought I had a burst appendix, so I was really flat-out, but I’ve now lost the gall bladder, and I’ve gained some blood transfusion, so I’m back, hanging on.”

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/Hitchen

What happened to his gall bladder? Was the loss of that organ related to his cancer as well? The oncologist said that chemotherapy can lower immunity, causing inflammation of the gall bladder, even without the presence of stones. Inflammation of the gallbladder is known as cholecystitis.

The continued media coverage of Hitchens’s health has created even more questions in my mind. This spring, Hitchens mourned the loss of his elegant speaking voice. Yet, he was able to speak in faint tones at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America last week. Why did he lose his voice and then regain it? Patients can lose their voices for different reasons, including infection, my friend answered. Most commonly, however, esophageal cancer can entrap or damage the recurrent laryngeal nerve, “which provides nerve supply to the voice box.” For sufferers of esophageal cancer, “it is often irreversible, but sometimes it is not.” The oncologist said that the recovery of their voices is a good sign: “That generally means their cancer is responding to treatment.” That meant it could a good sign for Hitchens in particular: “It looks like he is fighting it well, and he may continue to live.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106

Readers of Hitchens Watch are familiar with the journalist’s legendary consumption of whiskey. Therefore, I was surprised to read that the placement of a feeding tube in his stomach had eliminated his thirst for the stuff. “That’s the most depressing aspect,” Hitchens said at the convention. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can get used to.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/books/christopher-hitchens-on-writing-mortality-and-cancer.html

Why does he need a feeding tube now? “You need a feeding tube for a variety of reasons,” answered my friend. Since patients undergoing chemotherapy often lose their sense of taste, they do not eat or drink enough. Providing them with adequate nourishment enables them to “more easily tolerate chemotherapy.” If feeding tubes do not directly improve survival rates, they can “indirectly improve the ability to survive.”

One subject I neglected in my original piece was gene therapy. As Hitchens said to Brian Lamb:

“I have some wonderful oncologists working with me, and we’re on the verge of a whole number of new treatments, some of which may apply to me… I’ve had my genome sequenced, for example…Thanks to a wonderful American, Dr. Francis Collins, who’s the head of the National Institutes of Health, which includes the National Cancer Institute, who did the Human Genome Project…He’s taking a very kindly interest in my case, has helped me have my genome sequenced to try and look for a more perfect identifiable match for any mutation they can find that’s peculiar to me, that can be targeted by a special drug…I hope to try that, if I’m strong enough, if my bone marrow’s recovered enough, and that involves six million…no, excuse me, six billion DNA matches of my tumor set against six billion DNA matches of my blood to look for something that was individually mutated, that wasn’t in my genes.”

“I don’t know why some will have the whole genome mapped,” the oncologist said. “It has to be absolutely experimental…I’m just guessing. I don’t see anything even in the horizon that gene mapping is able to do.” Although my friend was impressed by the involvement of Dr. Collins, “there are 5,000 people under him who are doing the work.”

What is key is finding the causative gene, the oncologist told me. Thanks to an article provided by Dizzy, a Hitchens Watch reader, it seems that such a specific mutation has been found in Hitchens’s case. My friend referred to a study of one gene therapy that extended the average survival rate from nine months to thirty-four months. Again, the oncologist stressed that this particular gene therapy was only experimental, and he was speaking in terms of averages.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370145/Atheist-Christopher-Hitchens-turns-evangelical-Christian-doctor-fight-cancer.html

In my original article, which ran in March, my friend had predicted that Hitchens would survive less than six months. The oncologist made it clear that he does not know Hitchens, and was merely engaging in speculation. Hitchens’s possible response to experimental treatments made my friend somewhat more optimistic, though.

Esophageal cancer remains an incurable disease, but some of my friend’s patients have survived for three years. “Some will live longer than three years,” the oncologist stated. “If they live that long, newer treatment will be available and they may live even longer. Five years ago, these patients did not survive much at all.”

The oncologist’s work has made him philosophical. “I always say we are all terminally ill,” he reflected. “We are all going to die.”

Hitch's last laugh

2011-10-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

—By Stabler
"And if you say "Military Industrial Complex" I'll Laugh In Your Face."
-Christopher Hitchens, defending Halliburton in the early days of the Iraqi Invasion.

As bad as the basic facts are, we should not forget the broader ambitions of the fiasco, as Obama
quietly sweeps up as best he can. The Plan was to set up shop and keep going, because the Iraqis
either would adore being part of the Democracy Team or would be too shocked and awed to do much
about it.

As Hitchens has bragged, he had access to inside information the public did not. We know what
he choose to tell and from what side he chose to argue. The proper response is anger, but also
revulsion.

From the Huff Post

Arguably: Book of the Week

2011-10-11T02:45:00.000-07:00

This week BBC Radio 4 is featuring the Hitch's newly published book 'Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens' as it's Book of the Week. A collection of Hitch's more recent essays, the series is abridged by Pete Nichols and read by the talented and funny Roger Allam, who even looks like Hitch. I'm enjoying it very much. Catch up on iPlayer, here.

Someone once seemed to think that my liking anything Christopher Hitchens was all about Peter - a nu-nu-nu-nu-nuh attempt to spitefully compare the two brothers and wave Christopher's alleged superiority in Peter's face. It couldn't be that I simply like Christopher's writing for it's own sake. It had to be evidence in itself of a thwarted egg-white adoration Peter's fingers could find if he chose to explore the pathetic misery of one of his fans, now rejected. That's how we seem to be regarded here - spurned lovers of all things Hitchens. Our fealty turned to resentment and anarchy. If I've ever bashed Peter over the head with anything Christopher in a fit of temper, and there have been a few, then that was then and this is now. Let me take this opportunity to state that I think both brothers are skilled with words and are worth reading. However, this Book of the Week is not universally applauded. On the Amazon site there are mixed reviews, one stating that the book is "Too much together":

"Much as I love Hitchens this is a poor representation of his talent.

The problem of is one of editing not writing although when read in sequence like this the reviews become (to use a much overused word) quotidian plus it seems every piece of literature can only be appraised by comparison to something written by George Orwell"

The man who accused me demonstrates a common reaction: that of guessing why anyone says something is good? Recently I suggested a fan of Christopher Hitchens also read Peter's views on a topic the brothers had both commented on. The Hitchens' viewpoints were unsurprisingly opposite and I thought it interesting to read both sides of the argument. But the reaction I got was a scathing denunciation of Peter. It seems to me that a lot of people like a writer if that writer writes the readers own views, better than they can. If they write opposing views they are generally bad.

I do not agree with many of Christopher's viewpoints and arguments. But man can he launch a good one (as can Peter). Please do read all reviews before investing in 'Arguably' - I haven't read the book. But if you can find time to listen to 'Book of the Week' then I strongly recommend it to you. As to why I'm doing that, you'll just have to guess...

Hat Trick?

2011-10-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

Well, the last two Slate columns have been two of Our Boy's worst with the endorsement of eternal war and of extending it to Pakistan. But as we all know, Hitchens always tops himself. In honor of this inevitability, let's consult with one of Hollywood's most noted political scientists in a recent video I took on my last visit to Hollywood.

9-11, and Hitch's Tortured Self Appraisal

2011-09-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

— By Stabler

As Hitchens is telling his Slate readers that it's his role to help them "not ignore the obvious," we should take the solemn anniversary of 9-11 to remind him of a few things which the rest of the media, in self charity, are sure not to mention.

In the summer of 2001 a small skirmish on ethics was taking place in the Press over the coverage of the murder of Chandra Levy. The mild mannered, tit-for-tat Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen had rightfully dubbed the coverage "pornographic." Levy was a young woman who had worked in the office of and perhaps had intimate relations with Congressman Gary Condit. No connection to her killing (later proved a random act of violence by a chronic sex offender) and the Congressman ever existed or was presented. He later went back and won judgements of defamation from major news outlets, settled quietly out of court.

The Press had good reason to be leaning this way. After holding their thumb down on the scale for Bush in the 2000 election and it's shameful aftermath, they were stuck with an unelected President with unpopular polices. They had all the reason in the world to obsess on a non scandal with Monicagate overtones. Many progressives, stupidly, played along.

Which brings us to Hitchens. He reveled in Levygate, and used it as shamelessly as any right wing radio hate jock to continue his endless assault on Bill Clinton's filthy penis. This cause was his life, his love, his obsession in those days, and his last two Nation pieces before 9-11 were on what he called "Clindut", perhaps the ultimate example of Hitch's titanically overrated "wit." Hitch's has often told readers back in those days one could afford to be more footloose and fancy free (meaning, I guess, he could go on chat shows and endlessly present "truths" about the political scene that were true because he believed them) because I guess, 9-11 hadn't happened yet.

Consider: what would have happened in that summer before 9-11 had Hitch and the footloose press devoted half of the ink they spilled on the Levy case to matters of potential terrorism? Clinton certainly had tried to raise these issues, and was met jeering about his sex life, based on matters real and imagined, for his trouble. It should also not be ignored that these were the days that made Hitchens a very wealthy man.

So, when you read Hitchens in his new Slate piece defending poor George Bush (the tactic here, as it's always been, is to build straw men of the worst conspiracy stuff to distract us from W's actual performance) remember that Hitchens and HIS side, had no problem sticking Bill Clinton, eight months out of office, with the blame for the catastrophe. They did this for years, until emerging facts made it a non-starter. Remember also that Hitch's Man for most of campaign 2008 was Rudy Giuliani, whose political exploitation of 9-11 went so far over the top it finally wrecked his ambition.

Finally, as Hitch desperately tries to salvage his reputation on the matter of torture, recall that he crudely endorsed the torture of John Walker Lindh, and dismisses any call for accountability for the Bush Crowd as "politics."

A few punches pulled, for old times' sake

2011-08-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

—By Stabler

First we should note that Christopher Hitchens's New York Times Review of David Mamet's The Secret History ("David Mamet's Right Wing Conversion" New York Times, 6/17/11) will do in a pinch, and he adequately conveys that we are dealing with, first and foremost, a rotten book. Hitchens's has the integrity to cite the book at its embarrassing worst; a comparison of the leaks in the BP disaster and the matter of Julian Assange.

One could quibble that Hitchens does not mention that the book is fairly ugly, racist swill (Mamet, in the now familiar tradition of the right, craps on the philosophy and accomplishments of MLK and then hypocritically praises him at book's end), though this might have been tricky, since the book draws a blurb from Shellby Steel, who is also Hitchens's go-to guy for reverse discrimination blather. Since Mamet and Hitchens are both, more or less, amazing grace babies of Bush II, the seasoned Htich watcher might take a moment to examine Hitch's equivocations.

After the now obligatory spanking of Chomsky, Hitchens writes approvingly, "Once or twice, when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton's sleazy sex life." Well, sleazy being a relative term, I am rather thankful for the feminists of the 90s being basically a lone, mostly ignored voice on the issues of human rights in Afghanistan, while the likes of Hitchens ignored them. Yet let's examine what Mamet actually puts down on page 140: "And where was the Left, and where were the Feminists, during President Clinton's savaging of Janita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky?"

Well, I could take this apart at length, but to be generous to Mamet, he has probably mixed up Susan McDougal with Kathleen Willey, who's name I had forgotten myself. If Mamet has an editor, he or she has yet to discover the magic of Google. One wonders if Hitch took note, however, of what a considerable blunder it was to insert McDougal's name here. The woman in question was put in jail by Ken Starr for refusing to manufacture evidence against Clinton, whom she claims she never met. Though she had essentially won her case through Jury nullification, Clinton later savagely awarded her a Presidential Pardon. Her story is ignored in Hitchens's stupid book on the subject, No One Left To Lie To.

A modestly imaginative biographer is likely to conclude that the impetus for Htichens big swing to the right was hardly 9-11, but rather the Bluementhal affair. After all, he had tired to get a personal friend arrested (one who had, by all accounts, had been generous and supportive to him) on false grounds in a political case. Once the nature of Monica Lewinsky became apparent (or the fact that she would be of no use in getting Clinton), Hitchens threw her under the bus himself. In terms that harked back to his his social climbing schooldays, he told Dennis Miller, "he diddles the help."

Yet after lying and bulling his way though all this (See Cockburn, the only one who called him out) the left took him back, and all was forgiven. Knowing in his heart what he had done, how could he ever again respect the left? Liberals, always possessing a healthy dose of battered wife syndrome, made Hitchens the man of the house for a few years before he left for the younger, sexier woman that was 9-11. That fun couple would of course go on to debauchery that made Hitchens's 90s shenanigans look pretty small time in comparison.

Qureshi on Neoconservativism and Bosnia

2011-08-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

When I wrote my first essay on Christopher Hitchens and the former Yugoslavia, I wondered if I would ever find any neoconservatives who had committed themselves to the Bosnian cause. Then, I discovered a 2004 article by British journalist Johann Hari. In his interview with Hari, Hitchens indicated that the neoconservative position on the Bosnian War had impressed him:

“I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That war in the early 1990’s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy…That’s when I first began to find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favor of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there’s Richard Perle. There’s Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act.”

At the time of the interview, Paul Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense, and Richard Perle was an important member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. Hitchens, who was friendly with the deputy defense secretary, had particularly kind words for him: “The thing that would surprise most people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he’s a real bleeding heart.”
http://johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens/

Was the moral stature of Perle and Wolfowitz profound enough to have inspired Hitchens’s conversion to neoconservatism?

Richard Perle had served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. By the time of the Bosnian War, Richard Perle had left government service to work as a lobbyist and consultant for the defense industry. A frequent lecturer on foreign policy, he had strong views on the Bosnian War:

“We have become a party, in a very real sense, to attacks on civilians that approach genocidal proportions because we are enforcing an embargo that prevents Bosnians from defending themselves…We simply do not want to be a party to limiting the ability of people to defend themselves against these vicious attacks on civilians, and if things are worse, they will be worse in a different way, then if we can be said to have contributed to that genocide.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo

In spite of this bold opinion, Perle spoke with far more enthusiasm about the necessity of weapons development and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Whenever he spoke about Bosnia, he used the conflict to promote a neoconservative agenda, which rests on unilateralism. In 1996, he had nothing good to say about cooperation with Europe:

“The West got into a great deal of trouble in Bosnia after the Bush administration, wrongly in my view, decided that this was an issue for the Europeans. And without appearing in any way condescending, the fact is that the Europeans, perhaps because they became accustomed to it during nearly half a century of Cold War, find it very difficult to act in concert and sensibly without American leadership.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol

He also made plain his disdain for the United Nations:

“As I indicated, I am afraid that Bosnia is one example of what we can expect from international peacekeeping operations. If the administration has its way, it will begin to institutionalize peacekeeping within the United Nations, building it up in the name of efficiency, reducing American influence over peacekeeping operations, and we will see more in future of what we are seeing, sad as it is, in Bosnia today.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo

Above all, Perle feared that unchecked Serbian aggression against a weakly armed Bosnia would draw the United States more deeply into the conflict:

“Our interest, it seems to me, lies in achieving an outcome that can be defended the Bosnians themselves, and that is not dependent on an American presence, an American peacekeeping presence, to try to hold together what is bound to be an indefensible situation…the U.S. will go in as peacekeepers, and we will find ourselves involved in a chain of mini Lebanons, there without a clear purpose or a clear mission, without any realistic prospect of defending territory against warring factions on all sides.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo

At the same time, something beyond neoconservative principles seemed to propel Perle. Several months after the signing of the Dayton Accords, he indicated some anxiety about the Bosnians:

“They were promised that in exchange for the conclusion of an agreement at Dayton, they would be equipped and trained by the United States, so that the remaining half of their territory could be defended by the Bosnians themselves, so that they could end the situation of dependency in which they found themselves during the war. I’ve been very much involved in trying to help in a variety of ways to see that this promise is kept, but as a private individual it’s not very easy to do that. The responsibility lies with the government, which made the promise in the first place.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol

Time magazine reported that Perle was closely involved with the Dayton negotiations: “The Bosnians have even hired Richard Perle, a top Reagan administration official, to be in Dayton as a consultant.” As a consultant to the Bosnians, Perle arranged for Military Professional Resources, Inc. to train the Bosnians. Employees at MPRI tend to be former U.S. military officers. According to Alan Weisman’s biography of Perle, which was ironically but fittingly titled Prince of Darkness, MPRI directly benefited from Washington’s financial largesse to the Bosnians.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983728,00.html

I have not come across any evidence that Perle personally profited from the policies that he advocated for the Bosnians, but it is certain that they benefited the defense industry to which he belonged. If Perle’s interest in the Bosnians was solely humanitarian, it is difficult to explain his inconsistent defense of continued military aid to the Turks, despite their atrocities against the Kurds. At a panel, an audience member brought up the destruction of 1500 villages, which left two million Kurds without homes. He also called attention to the Turkish aerial bombardment of the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq. In response, Perle had this to say:

“I wonder if I might just add that it seems to me there’s a very important distinction to be drawn between the Kurds of Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq because I believe that the Turkish democracy, the Turkish parliamentary democracy, is robust enough to solve whatever Kurdish problem exists in Turkey if there is no terrorist component to it. And the unhappy spiral of violence in which terrorism elicits military action could be dealt with easily if the terrorism didn’t exist and the democratic process could work in Turkey.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb
(1:20:20)

Thanks to Perle, I now understand that women and children who were left homeless deserved their plight because they were terrorists.

At the panel, Perle neglected to mention that he was a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government through his own company, International Advisors, Inc. Weisman found that International Advisors collected approximately $600,000 to $800,000 from the Turkish government on an annual basis between 1989 and 1994. Perle’s own take was a yearly consultancy fee of about $48,000.

Moreover, Perle probably played a role in discouraging Congress from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which took place during the First World War. To Weisman, he denied lobbying Congress directly on Turkish interests. I find this denial incredible, given his past experience as a Senate staffer. Evidently, his connection to Turkey has affected his judgment. When speaking to his biographer, Perle committed his own version of Holocaust denial: “As for the Armenian issue, I don’t believe that what happened is akin to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. It was not a final solution and to the best of my knowledge there was never an occasion in which the Turkish government sat down and said, ‘Here’s a plan for the destruction of the Armenians’.” While Perle willingly classified the murder of 200,000 Bosnians as genocide, he could not do the same for one and one-half million Armenian victims.
http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030327Koop.html

Even when Perle has held a government position, he seems to have mistaken public service for the opportunity to make a buck. Shortly before the Iraq War began, Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, where he endorsed the supposed advantages of regime change. At the same time, Perle was a managing partner at Trireme Partners, a venture-capital company with key investments in companies that supported homeland security and defense. In February of 2003, Perle met with Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. In the March 17, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Trireme had enticed the Saudi industrialist with a letter advertising Perle’s political influence. Hersh quoted directly from the letter: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of the Board.”

Perle and his colleagues hoped that Zuhair and the notorious arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a fellow Saudi who had set up the meeting, would invest in their enterprise. The approaching war with Iraq created an ideal investment climate. “If there is no war,” Khashoggi rhetorically questioned Hersh, “why is there need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent. You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.”

Additionally, Perle and his cronies anticipated that Zuhair and Khashoggi would persuade the Saudi government to grant homeland-security contracts to companies in which Trireme had investments. Perle’s business agenda directly contradicted his public criticism of former colleagues who had relationships with Saudi-financed foundations and think tanks: “I think it’s a disgrace. They’re the people who appear on television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people if it weren’t for this community of former diplomats effectively working for this foreign government.”

Out of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11, fifteen came from Saudi Arabia. Of course, so did Osama bin Laden. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi ambassador in Washington at the time, analyzed Perle’s motives for Hersh: “There is a split personality to Perle. Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail – ‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’ – as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”

Perle’s dealings with Global Crossings, a communications company, further compromised his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. The Defense Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarded the potential sale of Global Crossings to Chinese investors as a security risk. Perle promised Global Crossings that he would try to persuade the federal government to drop its opposition to the sale. If he got results, Global Crossings would supplement his $125,000 fee with an extra $600,000. The exposure of Perle’s arrangements with Global Crossings and the Chinese ultimately led to his resignation from the chairmanship. He left the board completely in 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/business/technology-after-disclosures-pentagon-adviser-quits-a-post.html

Wolfowitz was not as deviously interesting as Perle, but he also had extensive government experience. During his tenure as ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980’s, the neoconservative displayed little concern about the human rights violations there. Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, an Indonesian human rights activist, noted Wolfowitz’s warm relationship with the dictator Suharto, “but he never showed interest in issues regarding democratization or respect for human rights. Wolfowitz never once visited our offices.” At the time, Indonesia was continuing its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Bunny Buchori, the director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development, recalled: “He went to East Timor and saw the abuses going on, but then kept quiet.”
http://www.asiademocracy.org/content_view.php?section_id=1&content_id=430

I was curious to see if Wolfowitz had experienced a change of heart after his departure from Indonesia. Did the Bosinian War awaken his conscience? I have watched Wolfowitz’s appearances on two panels in 1994 that reviewed Clinton’s foreign policy, where one would have expected him to discuss matters of pressing importance to him. Although he addressed Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and trade issues, he never brought up Bosnia.http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/PolicyMi

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AmericanFo

Later that year, Wolfowitz finally commented on Bosnia while serving on a panel on foreign aid:

“In fact, as I look at the world today, and I look at Bosnia, it seems to me that there is a case where, in fact, we ought to be making much use of military assistance. But I think the Bosnian case is not only important in its own right, it’s important as a kind of generalization that in facing a number of the potentially messy conflicts that the world is likely to be beset with at the end of the Cold War, I think it’s a far better instrument of policy to help people defend themselves that to think about sending in foreign peacekeepers to fight both sides and to preserve some futile attempt to impose peace”

Although his comments were perfectly sensible, they came rather late in the war. Furthermore, contradictions in his arguments made his humanitarianism extremely suspect. In his advocacy of military aid to Turkey, for example, he expressed the same indifference to the Turkish Kurds as Perle did:

“I didn’t say necessarily that aid to Turkey should increase, but I think that aid to Turkey remains important, and I think when the United States is involved, we have some ability to influence how that military assistance is used, and how the military performs.”

Blah, blah, blah. Of course, the Turkish military used U.S. military assistance directly in its persecution of the Kurds, and Wolfowitz surely comprehended that. As readers of Hitchens Watch already know, Hitchens exploited the suffering of the Kurds to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Yet, Perle and Wolfowitz have suddenly become his personal heroes.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb
(01:16:45)

I truly question the depth of Wolfowitz’s commitment to the Bosnian cause. When he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1995, he was just an academic dean, but endorsed Washington policy as eagerly as any public official. He differed with his government only on the issue of the arms embargo:

“I have been opposed to the arms embargo since its inception, not simply because I believe that it is wrong for the United States to deny the victims of aggression the means to defend themselves. Equally important, I believe that if we refuse to allow the Bosnians the means to defend themselves, the international community would assume the responsibility for their protection, and increasingly that protection would depend on American participation.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin
(26:03)

In short, Wolfowitz favored arming the Bosnians so that Washington could dispense with them as quickly as possible. He dreaded the prospect of American intervention on the ground in Bosnia, which contrasts sharply with his eagerness to invade Iraq a few years later. These contradictory positions indicate that international rescue work was not his primarily objective. An additional comment about Bosnia further exposes the cynicism behind the idealistic pose:

“I think the reason that we’re concerned about this conflict in a way, let’s say, that we’re not concerned about Rwanda is because the moral dimension when it is in a place like Europe, where there are huge armies engaged, where there are nuclear weapons potentially involved, has a strategic dimension as well…If the plague of ethnic cleansing and ethnic warfare spreads in Europe, what we’ve seen in the Balkans could be really very, very small compared to the kinds of major problems we would have elsewhere.”

To Wolfowitz, it was irrelevant that nearly one millions Rwandans had perished in an African holocaust. The deaths of 200,000 Bosnians only mattered for reasons of strategy. He did not even bother to raise objections to the Dayton Accords, which left Bosnia extremely vulnerable to Serbia in terms of arms and territory:

“First of all, the goal is not parity, certainly not with the Serbs…it would be impossible to establish parity between Bosnia and Serbia. In fact, under this agreement, there are provisions, that if you work out the ratios, amount to a ratio of five for Serbia, and I believe that is one and a third for the Bosnian Federation combined. The goal is to get, I think, enough balance within Bosnia, that at least Milosevic is the man in charge, and that we don’t have the spectacle that we’ve had for the last two and a half years of the Bosnian Serbs shelling Sarajevo with impunity and pushing forward and taking large chunks of the country that aren’t theirs.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin
(41:20)

In other words, Wolfowitz did not seek justice for Bosnia, but containment of a problem that had proved embarrassing for Washington. He fervently hoped that the U.S. troop presence authorized by the peace agreement would end soon and “would allow us depart with our credibility and our reputation intact.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin
(1:10)

The fanboys and Hitch hens who are inclined to defend Perle and Wolfowitz should ask themselves why neither man was as eager to wage war against Serbia as they were against Iraq. Certainly, the leftist Hitchens never expressed any admiration for either man in his Nation columns or on television. As far as I can determine, the only member of the right wing on whom Hitchens lavished compliments was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

“Well, I always think it’s a shame that Thatcher and Reagan get mentioned in the same breath because though I was a political opponent of both, and still am, I mean I think in point of character and bearing she is worth ten of him at any time…I was sort of an admirer of the old battle-ax, a grudging admirer, I must say, but in point of fortitude there’s something to admire…And yes, I think it’s good that she’s held up the West, for want of a better word, to the humiliation that it’s inflicting on itself in its complicity in the mass murder in Bosnia.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153
(26:05)

The journalist was fearless in his praise for Thatcher’s stand on Bosnia, so it was unlikely that he harbored a clandestine reverence for Perle and Wolfowitz. Back then, Hitchens was an astute observer of the Washington scene, and he must have known them for what they were. It is utterly illogical now for Hitchens to claim moral inspiration from these two loathsome practitioners of realpolitik. He is merely trying to justify the betrayal of his own conscience.

In truth, Hitchens really had no need to travel right of the political center to find inspiration. Without a doubt, the late Representative Frank McCloskey of Indiana had little use for the militaristic principles of neoconservatism. As a liberal Democrat, McCloskey had opposed the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Yet, the torment of Bosnia touched his heart, instilling in him the determination to act.

McCloskey did not speak in slick sound bites, which I found refreshing after spending hours listening to Hitchens, Wolfowitz, and Perle. One needs only to watch footage of him to note his passion and concern. To McCloskey, the Bosnian people were not a means to a strategic end, but an infinitely valuable end in themselves. In the face of Serb aggression, the very concept of neutrality disgusted him. “You cannot say that heavy artillery besieging a civilian population is warfare,” McCloskey said with earnest fury in his face. “That’s obvious to the world that this is a slaughter going on.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86
(4:00)

Like Hitchens, McCloskey strongly favored lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians:

“We have a military role in this already in that the U.S. was the initiating power to impose the arms embargo on Bosnia. Bosnia almost had no arms. Still, they primarily have small arms while the former Yugoslavia, if you will, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro they have large arms ten times over the Bosnians from the previous Tito and Russian connections, if you will.”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86
(7:20)

As early as 1992, McCloskey had advocated air strikes against the Serbs, far earlier than I would have supported them myself. Hitchens, for his part, initially only wanted to lift the arms embargo to give the Bosnians a chance to defend themselves. Based on my own research, it seems that Hitchens did not even endorse aerial engagement before his appearance on C-Span in 1994. Of course, the UN never lifted the embargo and the situation only worsened.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYu
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153
(3:08)

Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that McCloskey never recommended the bombing of Serbian cities or other heavily populated areas. The Indiana representative favored airstrikes against artillery sites, supply lines, tanks, ammunition depots, and the bridges across the Drina River that connected Serbia to Bosnia.

McCloskey did not relish the idea of an American troop presence in Bosnia, nor did he think it likely. He believed that U.S. airstrikes, in combination with adequate arms for the Bosnians, would suffice. Unlike Perle and Wolfowitz, however, McCloskey would not have hesitated to support the introduction of ground forces, as a last resort, to stop the genocide.

At a time of fierce partisanship, McCloskey did not hesitate to criticize President Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat. Even though the representative was prepared to back unilateral American air strikes, he publicly revealed his doubt in 1994 that Clinton would take the initiative. “For one thing,” McCloskey said with a laugh, “the president has said several times a week for quite a long time now.” Empty threats did not impress the congressman. The few NATO air strikes that would take place would come too late.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86
(4:48)

Still, McCloskey stressed the importance of international cooperation with the Europeans. He would have vastly preferred multilateral action: “If all the NATO and European powers, including the U.S. together, can’t stem genocide within several hundred miles of Rome and Vienna, why do we have a need for NATO, or why should be purport to be leaders?”
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86
(11:10)

McCloskey shared Wolfowitz’s strategic concern that the violence in the Balkans could spread and involve other European powers, but it is clear that compassion for the Bosnian people just drove the congressman.

Would it have been an essentially neoconservative position to support unilateral action to save Bosnia? Neoconservatives are notorious for their contempt for international law. To be sure, when the UN Security Council imposed the arms embargo against the former Yugoslavia, it became international law. Congressional legislation to unilaterally lift the embargo would broken that law. All the same, Clinton could have made a more substantial effort to persuade the UN to lift the embargo. Even if lobbying the UN would have proven ineffective, Washington could have adhered to a higher principle of international law by taking unilateral action. One could have made the case that the arms embargo violated the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

Obviously, President George W. Bush and his neoconservative handlers exercised the most flagrant disregard for international law by invading Iraq without the consent of the UN Security Council. The difference is that no higher principles of international law guided Bush’s plan of attack.

According to Samantha Power’s ‘A Problem from Hell’: American and the Age of Genocide, McCloskey was prepared to sacrifice his political career for the sake of the Bosnian cause. “I would rather actively try to stop the slaughter than run and continue to win, knowing that I didn’t face this,” McCloskey said. In 1994, he lost his congressional seat.

The cardinal tenet of the neoconservative philosophy is power. It is unthinkable that Perle and Wolfowitz would ever have sacrificed their positions of power for reasons of conscience.

Qureshi on Hitchens and Bosnia

2011-07-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

This month is the sixteen anniversary of the Srebernica massacre in Bosnia. As a collaborator with FGFM on his Glorious Hitch Hunt, I searched the Hitchens Watch archives for any commentary on the Bosnian War. I knew that Christopher Hitchens had reported extensively on the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavian republic.

To my dismay, I only found an August 2007 link to an appalling article by Brendan O’Neill in The American Conservative. O’Neill argued that Hitchens’s future embrace of neoconservatism stemmed from his principled defense of the Bosnian people, who were predominantly Muslim:

“Many of today’s liberal hawks, who call for war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, were on the [indent]side of the militants during the Bosnian conflict. Indeed, back then the pro-interventionist Left and al-Qaeda were allies. [indent]Both groups backed the Bosnian Muslim Army and demonized the Bosnian Serbs as savages. Liberal hawks, including [indent]Hitchens, did it with propaganda, al-Qaeda did it by deed. But both the black-and-white worldviews of the Left neocons and the bin Ladenites were forged in the fires of the Bosnian war.”

http://amconmag.com/article/2007/jul/16/00013/

This is a distortion of the truth, of history, and of Hitchens’s record. O’Neill may leave the reader with the erroneous impression of Bosnia as an artificial spawn of religious fanatics. In fact, Bosnia was an independent state as early as the twelfth century. The Bosnian people, who were European Slavs, slowly embraced Islam once their country fell under the control of Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. As historian Noel Malcolm observed in Bosnia: A Short History, this gradual pace of conversion indicated the unforced nature of the conversions. Moreover, the Turkish governors were remarkably tolerant of the Orthodox Christian and Jewish minorities there. The Orthodox Christian Serbs, who lived in Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia, belonged to the same ethnic group as the Bosnians, and spoke the same language. Religion was the only essential difference between the Bosnians and the Serbs.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire acquired Bosnia. After the fall of that empire in World War I, Bosnia-Herzegovina joined Serbia, Catholic Croatia and Slovenia form the newly independent nation of Yugoslavia. Following a brutal Nazi occupation, the Bosnians managed to maintain their own territorial integrity within Yugoslavia until the nation collapsed upon the end of the Cold War.

Contrary to claims that Bosnian nationalism created the conflict, Bosnia might have remained an autonomous republic in union with Serbia and Croatia had it not felt profoundly threatened. “There is no return to a united Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs said. “The time has come for the Serbian people to organize itself as a totality, without regard to the administrative borders.” According to military theorist Norman Cigar’s Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”, this meant that Karadzic and his sponsor, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, were conspiring to carve up Bosnia for the sake of a Greater Serbia.

Defeating O’Neill’s point of view, Cigar effectively made the case that Bosnia was far more secular than the putative nation of Bosnian Serbs. The military theorist contrasted the referendum proposal that officially brought Bosnia into independent nationhood, with the one that created Republika Srpsk, or the Bosnian Serb “Republic.” Bosnian Serbs voted to “remain in Yugoslavia together with the Serbs of Serbia, Montenegro, Krajina, Vojvodina, and Kosovo.” In other words, the Serbs sought to create an empire exclusively for Orthodox Christians. Members of the Bosnian community, on the other hand, elected “a sovereign and independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state of equal citizens, constituted by the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina: the Muslims, Serbs, Croatians, and members of the other peoples who live there.”

In 1992, the war began. The Serbs began a campaign euphemistically known as “ethnic cleansing.” They sought to terrorize Bosnian civilians out of territory they desired for themselves. Ethnic cleansing led to the deaths of 200,000 people, including 12,000 children; the rape of 50,000 women; and the displacement of 2.2 million people from their homes.

http://www.un.org/en/ga/63/generaldebate/pdf/bosniaherzegovina_en.pdf

At exceptional points in world history, evil literally battles with good. The war between Serbia and Bosnia was not a fair fight. In “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power noted that the Central Intelligence Agency’s conclusion that Serbs were “responsible for the vast majority of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.” Apart from isolated incidents, the Serbian government and its clients in Bosnia bore responsibility for “90 percent” of the war crimes.

Reporting on the ground in Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Hitchens eloquently and bravely confirmed the destruction of a cosmopolitan, secular society. “During respites from the fighting, I was able to speak with detachments of Bosnian volunteers,” Hitchens wrote for the September 14, 1992 issue of The Nation magazine. “At every stop they would point with pride and cheerfulness to their own chests and to those of others, saying, ‘I am Muslim, he is Serb, he is Croat’.”

Hitchens celebrated Sarajevo’s cultural diversity: “In the Old City itself, you can find a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic and an Orthodox church within yards of one another.” As much as Hitchens admired Sarajevo, he could gaze upon that beautiful city with clear eyes: “There is no need to romanticize the Muslim majority in Bosnia. But they have evolved a culture that expressed the plural and tolerant side of the Ottoman tradition…and they have no designs on the territory or identity of others.”

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic personalized this cosmopolitanism. Izetbegovic was Islamically pious, but when Hitchens asked for his opinion of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, “he gave the defining reply of the ‘moderate’ Muslim, saying that he did not like the book but could not agree to violence against the author.”

For Hitchens, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. I was struck by the journalist’s empathy and respect for Muslim people, sentiments that he has since lost. For the journalist, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. In the December 6, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens reported on the fatalities at a Sarajevo school that had been hit by mortar fire: “I noted the children laid out in slabs and vaguely registered the fact that the small boy in jeans with eyes still open was about the age and weight of my own son.” Does Hitchens prefer to forget that young men the age of his own son have fallen victim to American bombs dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan?

Back in 1993, Hitchens could still write respectfully of Muslim civilization. He lamented the Serbian demolition of Stari Most, or the Old Bridge, in the Bosnian city of Mostar, “a span of perfectly suspended marble, gorgeously engineered in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent.”

Hitchens’s articles were an elegy for a culture as well as a people: “The minarets are gone, the mosques have been profaned and dynamited, and now all the bridges are down. Some of these treasures ranked with those of Venice and Istabnul as cultural heritage. Many of them were even more beautiful than the World Trade Center.” The World Trade Center had been attacked for the first time that year, and would be attacked again in 2001. Certainly, Bosnians were victims of terrorism, too. I do not understand why O’Neill denied this fact.

Besides the brilliance of Hitchens’s reportage, his personal humility also impressed me. Appearing on C-Span in 1994, Hitchens responded to a jeer that he should fight the Serbs himself. “It will sound absurd coming from a pudgy person in his mid-forties such as myself, but I very much admire those who have gone to volunteer their services in Bosnia, of whom there are some thousands now, and I wish there were more of them,” he said. “And I wish I had the nerve to do it myself.”

(24:20)

Since then, his personality had undergone a significant deterioration. When opponents to the wars of George W. Bush recommended Hitchens’s personal enlistment, the journalist could only sneer: “The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians…It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.” It would be risible to claim that the average American faced greater danger from al-Qaeda than the average Bosnian faced from Serbian aggression only a few years before.

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=6

O’Neill accused Hitchens of demonizing the Serbian people. Actually, Hitchens took pains to acknowledge that individual Serbs had also fallen victim to the evils of Serbian imperialism. In September of 1992, the journalist pointed out that “none of the Bosnian Serbs I met complained of cruelty or discrimination, and where they heard of isolated cases they reminded me that it was the Serbian forces who had stormed across the River Drina,” which served as the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia. As the artillery bombardment of a helpless Sarajevo continued, Hitchens informed his Nation readers on June 15, 1995 that “an unusually large number of Serb civilians in Sarajevo had fallen victim to the renewed assault. The response of the Karadzic regime in (or perhaps beyond the) Pale was to take these pictures, edit them for its own TV station and proclaim that these Serbs were the victims of rape and butchery by Muslim fundamentalists.” If only Hitchens would extend that same humanity to our “enemies” today.

Hitchens did not call for the occupation of Serbia, nor advocate the bombing of its capital city, which President Bill Clinton would later authorize during the Kosovo War. Obviously, Hitchens now has less scruple about targeting areas heavily populated by civilians. During the bombardment of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, Hitchens only complained “the death toll was not nearly high enough…too many [jihadists] have escaped.”

Back then, he did not even insist on Washington’s right to regime change in Belgrade, as deplorable as the Milosevic government may have been. Hitchens only called for lifting of the 1991 arms embargo that the United Nations had imposed against all the former Yugoslavian republics. A local political scientist told Hitchens in September of 1992: “The arms embargo to ‘both sides’ is pure hypocrisy. The Bosnians need arms to defend themselves…” Hitchens concurred: “This, by the way, echoed the street opinion in Sarajevo, which roundly opposed the idea of foreign troops fighting their battles but bitterly recalled that the lavishly accoutered People’s Army had been paid out of the historic tax levies of Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians, and witheringly criticized the moral equivalence that the great powers are using as a hand-washing alibi.” Since Belgrade had been the capital of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs had simply helped themselves to the weapons of the old Communist regime.

Remarkably, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic requested the withdrawal of all U.N. personnel in the spring of 1993. In the June 7, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens praised this request:

“A nation that is fighting for survival actually demands to be left alone to fight its own battles. Though certainly [indent]prompted by the hypocrisy of the NATO powers, which in another historic ‘first’ have announced that the defense of Bosnia is unthinkable because there are foreign troops already there, it sharply distinguishes the Bosnians from, say, the Kuwaiti monarchy or the South Vietnamese junta, and many other clients who were not too proud to clamor for dependent status.”

Unlike Kuwait, of course, Bosnia lacked oil. While the Clinton administration inherited the fear of a Bosnian quagmire from Bush the First, it is important to understand why the United States encountered the Vietnamese version. Americans were the unwanted aggressors in the final phase of Vietnam’s war for independence. The Vietnam War was not a tragedy that happened for Americans; the Americans inflicted the tragedy on Vietnam as well as on themselves. In the case of Bosnia, the Serbs were the aggressors whom the international community should have driven out. “These days, the worst anyone can find to say about the racist devastation and murder and rape of Vietnam is that poor old ‘we’ somehow got ‘bogged down’ in it,” Hitchens pointed out. “Nobody cares to remember that the Milosevic role was played by LBJ.” Obviously, we should not forget the roles of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

Rightly, Hitchens condemned the weakness to the U.N. response to the Serbian onslaught. Readers of the June 15, 1995 issue of The Nation learned that “control over Sarajevo airport had been ceded to the Serbs by its U.N. guards, who allowed the Serbs to determine how many flights landed and when, and which civilians might board or not board the planes.” Not only did the U.N. deprive Bosnian forces of the means of self-defense, the international organization tried to prevent them from fighting at all. Sarajevo remained trapped by the Serbian siege because “the NATO-proclaimed ‘exclusion zone’ around the city, which forbade even the stationing of heavy artillery, had become used as a platform for bombardment of civilians, the city itself being held hostage for the good behavior of Bosnian forces elsewhere.”
[indent]The indifference of the Western world made the massacre at Srebernica inevitable in July of 1995. Although the UN had made Srebernica a safe haven for Bosnian refugees, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic seized the city. The Bosnian Serbs divided the relatively young men from the others, who then were bussed to the “safe haven” of Tuzla. In her chapter on Srebernica, Samantha Power provided a terrifying account of what happened next:

“On the two-and-a-half hour drive, many pressed their faces up to the glass of the bus windows in the hopes of spotting their men. Bodies were strewn along the roadside, some mutilated, many with their throats slit. Trembling young Muslim men were coerced into giving the three-finger Serb salute. Large clusters of men, hands tied behind their backs, heads between their knees, sat awaiting instructions. The buses were frequently stopped along the way so that Serbian gunmen could select the young, attractive women for a roadside rape.”

Meanwhile, Mladic’s forces butchered nearly 8,000 men. One Bosnian man who miraculously survived recounted his experience:

“They took us off a truck in twos and led us out into some kind of meadow. People started taking off blindfolds and yelling in fear because the meadow was littered with corpses. I was put in the front row, but I fell over to the left before the first shots were fired so that bodies fell on top of me. They were shooting at us…from all different directions. About an hour later I looked up and saw bodies everywhere. There were bringing in more trucks with more people to be executed. After a bulldozer driver walked away, I crawled over the dead bodies and into the forest.”

More than ten years later, the International Court of Justice classified the Srebernica massacre as an act of genocide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/world/europe/27hague.html

The Serbs may not have planned to kill every Bosnian in sight, but the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined the crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group.”

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

Reflecting in the November 20, 1995 issue of The Nation, Hitchens accused the Clinton administration of possessing foreknowledge of the genocide at Srebernica:

“In the past few days, it has been said that there was no warning of the massacre and that the CIA spy-in-the-sky satellites (which only disgorged their information after the inhabitants had been killed and buried) were therefore not asked the [indent]right questions until it was too late…Everybody knew what was intended, and everybody knew on past form what would happen at least to the males of military age.”

Under international law, the Genocide Convention had obligated the United States prevent the genocide. Yet, the signatory nation did nothing. Why? In addition to the supremely logical explanation that Bosnia possessed no valuable natural resources, Hitchens offered another insight into the apathy of the United States and its western allies:

“Now, what were the roots of this incredible cultural, intellectual, moral philistinism? ...One motive is obviously anti-Muslim prejudice…If Christian churches, whether Orthodox or Catholic, were being burned, and if Christian civilians were being burned by Muslim irregulars with…definite support from a neighboring Muslim power in Europe, who is there here who thinks that Western Europe would have regarded it as a matter of indifference, or it as proof that the Balkan people are incorrigible, or as another proof that the warring factions of the Balkans are at it again? I don’t think so.”

The Dayton Accords substantiate that the Clinton administration did not regard justice for a Muslim people as a priority. The Bosnian Serbs, who only comprised one-third of the population of Bosnia, won half of its territory. In effect, the Dayton accords rewarded Serbian aggression.

Since then, Hitchens has distorted the history of the Bosnian War as badly as Brendan O’Neill. Writing on the tenth anniversary of the Srebernica genocide, Hitchens claimed that “the neoconservatives, to their great honor, mostly supported an effort to prevent genocide being inflicted on Muslims.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2122395/

Tellingly, Hitchens did not bother to list these neoconservative heroes. I doubt that he refrained from compiling such a list because he feared that it would be too long. The most diabolical neoconservative of all, the future Vice-President Richard Cheney, had little in interest in Bosnia. Samantha Power recorded Cheney’s ignorant dismissal of the slaughter. Late in his tenure as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush the First, Cheney claimed: “It’s tragic, but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict…for centuries.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell was equally craven. As secretary of state more than ten years later, the civilian Powell would deceptively make the case before the United Nations for Hitchens’s beloved Iraq War. The secretary of state functioned as a neoconservative in fact if not in name. With the most profound irony, the still-uniformed Powell had joined Cheney more than a decade before to persuade “the President that the risks of military engagement were far too high – even to use U.S. airpower to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia’s hungry civilians.”

Military intervention against genocide should only be an extremely last resort. Historically, it would have been possible for Washington to prevent acts of genocide in number of ways. In case of the case of Vietnam, Americans simply could have stopped committing genocide by withdrawing. In the case of East Timor, Americans simply could have stopped supporting the occupying power of Indonesia. In case of Bosnia, Americans simply could have given the persecuted nation a chance to fight the Serbian forces. In the case of Iraq in 2003, however, no intervention was necessary. Saddam Hussein, whose military power had been contained by the international community, had lost access to his Kurdish victims. In truth, the Iraqi leader would never have had the opportunity to kill the Kurds without American support in the first place. Now, the American occupation of Iraq has become a genocide in itself.

Nevertheless, Hitchens has insisted on learning the wrong historical lessons:

“I reflect on what was not done at Srebernica, and what ought to have been
[indent]done in Rwanda, and on what was put off long with the Taliban and the Baathists, and I think what an honor it is to [indent]have such enemies. Co-existence with them is not possible, which is good, because it is not desirable or tolerable, either.”

His best writing on the Bosnian tragedy is long behind him.

Anyone For Pie?

2011-07-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Clock is Ticking!

2011-07-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

While we wait to see how late Our Boy will be with his latest Slate essay, let us revisit happier times when The Great Man was beating that ticking clock metaphor like a dead horse. Be prepared to lose a town a week!

Qureshi on Tammy Bruce

2011-06-01T05:37:00.000-07:00

“Hitchens Watch: We Watch the Loonies, So You Don’t Have To” should be the updated title for this website. As part of our current effort to diversify our portfolio, I have monitored Tammy Bruce. Dear readers, you do not know how I have suffered while listening to her on-line radio program.

As a self-described conservative feminist, Bruce provided a unique perspective on May 2 on the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Incorrectly reporting the death of one of the Mesdames bin Laden, she said:

“An older son was killed, the bastard himself, a courier, and a woman, who is believed to have been the freak’s youngest wife and whom someone grabbed to use as a human shield. Yeah, well, it didn’t work out that well. If you’re going to be married to Osama bin Laden, you’ve chosen your level. I give women a lot more agency than others do, and if you’re in that house, I don’t care. There’s a lot of other women who weren’t in that house, and if you’re the woman in that house, now you’re not.”

I agree that feminism gives women agency, but one does not give unarmed women agency by executing them in violation of all their rights as a human being, let alone international law. Unfortunately, Bruce did not stop there:

“We arrest something like twenty-two others. We get them alive, which includes six other of his children, two others wives, and four friends of the beast are arrested, at least…Others were arrested, were in the compound. Can you imagine the intelligence we’ve gathered?....Too bad we can’t waterboard them.”

Can you imagine the intelligence we could have gathered if the Navy SEALs had simply arrested bin Laden instead? In any case, the feminist movement has defended the physical and psychological integrity of all women. The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.” In their phrasing, the framers of the Constitution did not include any exceptions. Philosophically, a true feminist would favor the application of this enlightened principle to all women, whether good or evil. Of course, we know nothing about bin Laden’s wives. Please note that Bruce did not exclude children from her waterboarding fantasy.

Why would a “feminist” offer such vile commentary? An examination of Bruce’s estrangement from the National Organization for Women might provide some answers. As president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, Bruce was a prominent critic of O.J. Simpson, an abusive man who was wrongly acquitted of the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. In her book, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, Bruce bragged about her campaign against Simpson. She coordinated rallies against Simpson throughout the trial period, as well as a march that drew more than 5,000 people after the verdict. She was also a constant media presence, which is how she got into trouble. Eventually, the members of the NOW board censured her for making “inflammatory, racially insensitive statements.”

http://www.now.org/nnt/05-96/tambwoc.html

At the first reading, some of Bruce’s comments may seem innocuous. She called for “a needed break from all that talk of racism. Ours was a clear position and certainly less contentious. We focused on anti-violence and on the victims.”

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-10-18/news/ls-58415_1_domestic-violence

Indeed, I would have agreed with Bruce at the time. I also believed that race was a diversionary issue. If you believe that the Los Angeles Police Department framed Simpson in a racist conspiracy, I would advise you to consult Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder by Vincent Bugliosi, the legendary prosecutor of Charles Manson.

Appearing on the ABC News program Nightline in response to the verdict, Bruce argued that “what we need to teach our children is..not about racism but…about violence against women.”

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-07/local/me-1440_1_tammy-bruce

Of course, Bruce denied that her attitude was racist, later writing: “This country is not at a loss for organizations working for black civil rights, but we are starving for a truly feminist effort that devotes strict, focused attention to women’s rights.”

Whether there are enough African-American organizations in this country, her perspective was too narrow. Attempting to differentiate sexism from racism was an impossible and idiotic task. By ignoring racism, Bruce was ignoring the victims of racism who should have vitally mattered to NOW, black women.

Hypothetically, a feminist organization could do good work by advocating the promotion of women at high-powered law firms and elite universities, but such advocacy would mostly benefit affluent white women. The disadvantaged and poorly educated residents of a predominantly black ghetto would gain nothing, and have no reason to join such an organization. In the end, this hypothetical organization would fail because all progressive movements must form coalitions in order to advance. Certainly, NOW did fail when the NAACP California State Conference boycotted the “Fight the Right” march in San Francisco in 1996. Although the women’s rights group had carefully planned the march, the NAACP withdrew because Bruce had remained at her official post.

I suspect that Bruce possessed a flaw in her character far more significant than ideological narrowness. According to a report from the Associated Press, Bruce refused to appear on a television program about the Simpson case because she did not care “to argue with a bunch of black women.” She claimed the remark had been distorted, but why would the television producers have lied?

In fact, the evidence suggests a pattern of dishonesty on Bruce’s part. She alleged that NOW neglected to invite her to the board meeting that would vote on her possible censure: “We were not given notice that we were on the agenda…It breaks my heart. I can’t even begin to tell you.”

Kim Gandy, the executive vice president of NOW, contradicted Bruce’s assertion:
“I personally told her that it was going to be a topic of discussion. I urged her to come. She said, ‘I may come.’ I said, ‘You need to come.’”

In the July/August 1996 issue of Ms. Magazine, journalist Helen Zia apparently resolved the controversy: “When Bruce is asked if this means one of them is lying, she grows teary and says softly, ‘It’s sad that it’s come down to this.’” It was convenient for Bruce to avoid answering the question.

If Bruce is not prejudiced against African-Americans, it is difficult to explain her hatred for President Barack Obama. On her radio show, she constantly refers to him as “the dumb bastard” and “Urkel.” Steve Urkel was the nerdy character on the old sitcom Family Matters. As far as I can determine, the only trait the president shares with the fictional geek is his blackness. Now, I do not like Obama myself, but Bruce’s attacks even strike me as petty and mean-spirited.

Nevertheless, Bruce reserves most of her venom for First Lady Michelle Obama. Seeking to encourage black teenagers to work hard in school, Mrs. Obama said that she had applied herself despite the teasing of her peers. Bruce exploded while serving as a guest host on The Laura Ingraham Show:

“We’ve got trash in the White House. Trash is a thing that is colorblind. It can cross all eco-ecosocionomic kind of categories. You can work on Wall Street or work at the Wal-Mart. Trash are people who use other people to get things, who patronize others, who consider you bitter and clingy.”

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200903230018

It seems that Bruce does not want black kids to perform well in school. I do not understand precisely what Bruce was trying to say, but I am willing to bet that Mrs. Obama knows the correct word is “socioeconomic.”

I believe that Bruce has now extended her contempt for African-Americans to women in general. The former abortion rights activist is now extremely judgmental about women who have terminated their pregnancies. Although she claims to be pro-choice, “it doesn’t mean…that abortion is something that women should be proud of, or should seek out, and….with everything we have when it comes to birth control, if you’re marching into an abortion clinic, you have failed.”

00:02:03

Even today, no foolproof method of birth control exists. If you do not believe me, read Our Bodies, Ourselves. Sexual gratification is an essential tenet of the feminist philosophy. A woman who cannot control her own reproductive system is an unliberated human being. By determining their own destinies, women who have had an abortion have not failed; they have succeeded.

Bruce does not stop at condemnation, however. “I am pro-choice,” Tammy said on her program on January 20, “and I think, yes, we need to stop using federal funds for abortion…and if you…need to have an abortion, you pay for it, or let the guy pay for it.”

Her attitude clearly indicates her indifference to poor women. Since Bruce believes only women with money should exercise biological self-determination, her pro-choice position is hypocritical. Childbirth is ten times more dangerous to a woman’s life than a safe, legal abortion. A pregnant woman should only risk her life because she wants to be a mother. Surely, a sincere feminist would care about the lives of her fellow women, and willingly express that care with her tax dollars.

http://www.prochoice.org/pregnant/common/myths.html

On other issues, Bruce has made a decided move to the right, and she makes Christopher Hitchens look like a master logician by comparison. The former president of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has recently been charged with rape. On her program on May 16, Bruce provided a very curious analysis:

“This guy’s a socialist, so he’s managing the redistribution of wealth on the global level, and he attempts to rape a maid in a hotel…This is who these people are. This is the left. They feel…their sense of entitlement, their lives are based on the fact that some people deserve more than others, and that there should be some arbitrary, artificial construct of life…when he tries to rape a maid in New York, this is a guy who has gotten away with a lot.”

Admittedly, Strauss-Kahn is a member of the Socialist party in France. On the other hand, Moshe Katsav, the former president of Israel, is a convicted rapist. Will Bruce now smear all Zionists as rapists? Considering her ignorant denial of the Palestinian community as a distinct society and culture, I predict that she will not.

A good option for Hitchens

2011-05-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

Coming off his very worst Slate article of all time, I think it's worth suggesting to Hitchens that he give it a rest. And the best way for him to take a vacation is perhaps to experiment with psychedelic drugs. Aside from easing his pain, writes Alexander Zaitchik, Hitchens would be doing a service to the scientific community interested in treatment for cancer. Psilocybine can be ingested easily enough and would probably be the safest route for Hitchens. Acid is fun, but it may be too much for a cancer patient.

The last time I took LSD was over the summer at a concert in Colorado. MGMT was playing, and it was raining like hell. It was so damn rainy that it was actually dangerous: people were slipping and sliding all over the red rocks. It was absolutely miserable except for the fact that we were on acid - the drug made the whole thing fun. That's one truth you won't hear in civics class: drugs are fun. It doesn't have to be a requiem for a dream for all of us. Here in British Columbia, marijuana is celebrated like an ancient past time.

In short, I think Hitchens should consider Zaitchik's advice to experiment with psychedelics for treatment. It's not bogus medicine. There is real research to suggest that it's a good option for cancer patients.

David Aaronovitch doesn't get enough of it, and I am living proof.

2011-05-26T03:47:00.000-07:00

As an aside allow me a few words on David Aaronovitch's latest column in the Times today. In it he considers adultery; the public attitude towards high profile adulterers in the light of the super injunctions* controversy in the UK, and seductively hints at his own.

DA maps a journey, from reasoning:

"anyone can see that there's no read-across from sexual frugality to professional capacity"

to 'getting it', ie. to understanding the Zeitgeist:

"The unfaithful celebrity, who seems to get it all, rocks our world and mocks our limitations."

Mocks our limitations? Hmm. David doesn't so much 'get it' as gets some of it, some of the time. He certainly doesn't get me. And I am not alone.

It's not about popularity or skill with a ball *cough*. One blogger put it succinctly:

"The simple fact is this. If you become a star then you have to accept that many sad people want to know all about you and are prepared to pay for it. This knowledge is bought and sold at a premium. You knew of this downside before you came to stardom. This thirst for detail is the main reason why sponsors are prepared to pay you lots of money to wear their logos."

When you are a footballer promoting products you are not simply promoting a running shoe or a vest. The world and more particularly the world of advertising doesn't work that way. You are promoting an image. Pay £X for our face cream and you too can look like Kate Moss when actually you never will and a pot of Nivea will do the job just as well. But when the idea of Kate Moss became one of a cocaine snorting debauched druggy her brand was worth less. And that mattered. She traded on her image.

Paddy Pantsdown has demonstrated that adultery need not end a political career but I do think it's naive of Aaronovitch to laugh at the Fred Goodwin case as an illustration. Yes other factors may well have been at work but DA seems to find the idea of cosy corruption between the sheets ridiculous. I wonder what he'd say about the Profumo affair? And the public are right to mistrust a politician given to deceit and debauchery if Lord Boothby is any example. More recently David Laws' deceit about his expenses was fraud.

"If you make a commitment" DA tells us "it should cost you". Oh what rot. David Aaronovitch doesn't 'get it' again. It's not about anything costing you it's about having integrity. If David married in church I'm guessing he would have promised to honour his wife?

"David, will you take [this shorter person] to be your wedded wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and protect her, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?"

Imagine a society in which nothing can be believed. Where there is no trust. Imagine that all the food labels tell us lies and we never know who will be at home when we arrive there, or whether our key will fit the lock. Imagine phoning an ambulance and not knowing if it will arrive. Imagine caring for someone and never knowing where they are or if they are well or in pain or coming back? Imagine giving yourself to someone and in that moment of giving never knowing if this is shared joy or simply a convenient lie? Imagine the stress of not believing.

David Aaronovitch is an atheist and quotes Cromwell, presumably in an effort to mock the idea of sin. But society needs it's heros and gods, it needs its symbols of good and evil. If David would care to look back through history and philosophy he would see that. And we need to trust. I know that. Life is far too scary without it.

Notice that DA wrote "sexual frugality" not sexual fidelity. Why does he assume that faithful husbands have a frugal sex life and unfaithful ones an ample sex life? I don't think we can assume either way. An adulterous husband can be one who desperately searches for a shag and rarely gets laid whereas a happily married husband can enjoy a deeply satisfying sex life with his wife. It's completely subjective and not a matter of frugality or liberation per se. I've seen far too many desperate middle aged men rejected to subscribe to that view.

I think David is correct when he states:

"Those of us who stay within our own struggle will often want some kind of recognition for our own self-discipline"

Society should applaud good behaviour and denounce the bad. Isn't that what it's all about? Religion, philosophy and politics is all about telling us how to live; what is good and what is bad. But I don't think the unfaithful celebrity is mocking our limitations. As I've already stated, we need our heros. We need images to aspire to. But the example of wrongdoing is not about mocking our limitations. None of us are perfect. It is the casual acceptance of wrongdoing that mocks our value system. We cannot and will not put bad behaviour on the same comment free platform as good and nor should we. It is more about the acknowledgement of our frailty and our need for the public reassurance of what is right and what is wrong. The visible establishment of our shared values.

In my opinion this issue has now threatened the establishment. If an MP cannot stand up in parliament and speak honestly and freely, with full regard to his commitment to his constituency, then where is democracy? With secret 'Family Courts' in Britain and Super Injunctions for the rich and famous (they're costly) I can only agree with David Aaronovitch: it's a disgrace.

*Super Injunction: a gagging order so complete that you can't even say there's a gagging order.

Public figures and public morality are discussed on the Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, chaired by David Aaronovitch, here.

'David Aaronovitch: expert on lies' exposed on 'Surely Some Mistake?' blog.

Aaronovitch debates this topic, phone hacking and journalistic ethics with David Allen Green and others at the Frontline Club.

UPDATE :

I've never had sand kicked in my face before but tonight David Aaronovitch did just that by stomping on the opinion about injuctions protecting a brand with: 'well we all know it's shit' or words to that effect. Succinct and devastating. Check out the exact quote by watching the good and interesting debate about superinjuctions, phone hacking and ethics in journalism at the Frontline club here. I don't agree with all Aaronovitch says, especially when he claims to have special insight into the motives of other people (as this post states: I am living proof), but I recommend this enjoyable and informative debate. Was Peter Obourne pissed? Is Aaronovitch going to hug David Allen Green later on Hampstead Heath? Should we care? And is the UK so far behind America and Europe in enforcing a code of conduct in print journalism that change is needed? Watch the debate, here.

More on injunctions on BBC R4 here, Tues 21st June.

When rape really isn't rape.

2011-05-23T02:16:00.000-07:00

Peter Hitchens hates what I do: writing honestly what I think when it annoys him. I'm permanently on the naughty step as far as he's concerned. And this is no exeption - yes he's vomited his vile views about rape again. And yes I'm going to call him an idiot. How anyone so blessed, so clearly intelligent and capable can be so utterly wrong, so astonishingly wrong, so totally bloody stupidly wrong amazes me. It really does.

The naive Mail on Sunday reader may have been seduced into thinking Peter was defending Kenneth Clarke when really it was a convenient vehicle for Peter to peddle his disgusting misogynist views:

"Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly.
One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove.
One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences.
Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape.
But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship."

Often, not always. So being held down and forcibly sexually penetrated by a friend, relative or neighbour isn't rape it's just a 'dispute about consent'? Oh well, nothing to see here then, move along, no biggy?

And he disapproves of "child molestation" but an uncle grabbing a child on thier 16th birthday and ramming his penis into the now legal adult is just a 'dispute about consent' is it? Not rape. Not real rape.

The last time I looked being raped by your spouse had been outlawed. Presumably Peter Hitchens thinks this is a liberal step too far?

If memory serves me well I think Clarissa Dickson Wright was involved in the last case of legal marital rape. The police forcibly returned a wife to her husband to be forcibly buggered to satisfy his sexual tastes and marital rights? Presumably Peter Hitchens doesn't think that amounts to rape. Just a slight marital dispute then? A domestic. A recalcitrant wife and her forgiving husband, silly old bugger eh?

Other journalists have defended Ken Clarke more intelligently and sensitively. But this offering from Peter is more about his views than Clarkes'. And on this issue I think Peter Hitchens can just bugger off.

This Jersey Girl may be the only adult in the room

2011-05-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

— By Stabler

In the cacophony following the killing of Bin Laden this article by Kristen Breitweiser possesses a singular dignity. As Rudy Guiliani watched the towers fall, he turned to his gangland friendly Police Chief, and said, "Thank God George Bush is our President." When Guiliani told the world of his inadvertent response to watching around a thousand people parish in real time it was
treated not a confession of mental illness but as common sense well within the boarders of the prevailing conventional wisdom.

Wild times, those post 9-11 days. Even Alex Cockburn (who has, by the by, gone full birther with "A Volcano Of Lies") praised Bush for his post 9-11 restraint, repeating the dubious progressive mantra that Al Gore would have gone insane and dropped the bomb or some such. The general perception of recent American Political History breaks down down into loosely connected pockets of mercifully self inflicted amnesia.

Breitiweiser and her partners fought a lonely battle to force Congress's hand in holding even a "fair and balanced" 9-11 Review. Hitchens, who now cites the 9-11 Report, was very much part of the gang that would have allowed the Bush White House to escape all accountability, just as he had been Ken Starr's tool during the previous Administration.

By the time Hitch's Impeachment pal Ann Coulter was writing that Breitwiser and the other widows who had forced the commission were glad there husbands were dead so they could bask in the publicity, he had backed away from Ann Not before, however, writing that Cindy Sheehan was "sinister" or celebrating the torture of John Walker Lindh. Htich tells us that he is listening to Leonard Cohen these days, but I would suggest Randy Newman: "God Bless the potholes, down on Memory Lane!"

Qureshi on Hitchens/Chomsky

2011-05-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

As visitors to Hitchens Watch all know, Christopher Hitchens recently published an article bearing the childish title, “Chomsky’s Follies: The professor’s pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.”

The screed contrasted sharply with the opinion expressed by Hitchens on C-Span more than seventeen years ago:

“Professor Noam Chomsky…is one of the most extraordinary moral human beings of our time, and who has produced a shelf of books and critiques and findings and carefully calibrated work that hold up a mirror to American politics and society that it should look in more often.”

C-SPAN: For the Sake of Argument, 1993-09-01

This abrupt change of opinion puzzled me, so I consulted Hitchens’s memoirs, Hitch-22. On page 394, he described Chomsky as a “then-friend.” Because the book left me more bored than enlightened, I had to look elsewhere for an explanation for the failure of this cherished friendship. I wrote to Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I asked the professor what prompted the journalist’s abrupt ideological shift after September 11, 2001. “Good question,” Chomsky responded. “I thought the shift came about 20 years ago, but have no idea why. I don’t know him well enough to judge.”

Perhaps there is no rational explanation for this behavior, I wondered. “I don’t know much about him (or care), but there may be a perfectly rational explanation: the desire to curry favor with the powerful,” Chomsky continued. “That’s often quite a strong motivation.”

Apparently, Hitchens imagined a former intimacy that had never existed. Apart from rampant careerism, I suspect that an unfulfilled desire for greater contact still lingered from the past, prompting Hitchens to lash out at him. Hitchens claimed that Chomsky “doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and society” on 9/11. Since Chomsky said no such thing, the “self-evident premise” is only evident to Hitchens himself.

“As to how to react, we have a choice,” Chomsky had actually written on 9/12. “We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have lead to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators.” He then mentioned the 1996 Israeli assault on the Lebanese village of Qana, which was an American-sponsored atrocity, and the 1982 Lebanese slaughter of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which was an atrocity sponsored by Israel. In support of his point, Chomsky referred to the eyewitness reportage of Robert Fisk. To those who doubt the destructive impact of American and Israeli policy on the Middle East, I would myself recommend Fisk’s profound work, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

http://www.counterpunch.org/chomskybomb.html

Ironically, on 9/13, Hitchens also connected American statecraft to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. After traveling to Washington State to speak at Whitman College, Hitchens had been trapped by the nationwide grounding of all planes. “On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy,” Hitchens reported to the Guardian newspaper. “But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So, the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/13/september11.usa23

It is difficult to determine precisely when Hitchens decided to commit himself to neoconservatism, but within a few weeks, Hitchens began to distort Chomsky’s work, as well as much of his own. The hatchet job in Slate is only the latest example:

“Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he [Chomsky] wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.” The Clinton administration alleged that Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, was a nerve-gas facility funded by Osama bin Laden.

In fact, Chomsky refrained from speculating on the true motives behind the bombing of Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Rather, the professor simply made a factual comparison on the results of the president’s decision:

“The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one know, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it.)”

Chomsky only noted that the cumulative casualties of the 1998 Al-Shifa bombing were greater than the casualties of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He suggested that I consult an article written by Werner Daum, who served as German Ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000. According to his piece in the Summer 2001 issue of the Harvard International Review, the night watchman and his family died in the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant. Compared to the nearly 3,000 people who perished on 9/11, these immediate casualties at the plant may seem negligible, but one must place the Al-Shifa bombing in long-range perspective. As Ambassador Daum pointed out:

“It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan’s market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these profits to be replaced with imports. It was, naturally, the poor and the vulnerable who would suffer from the plant’s destruction, not the rich.”

Chomsky explained to me exact statistics are still unavailable: “The U.S. doesn’t investigate its own crimes.” He added that Ambassador Daum was not alone in his estimation: “The only other expert analyses are similar. But those are just guesses.”

I inquired whether it would be either appropriate or possible to make an ethical comparison between the bombing of Sudan and 9/11. In other words, could he argue that one attack was worse than the other? Or could he only address the matter in statistical terms?

“Of course when you bomb the main pharmaceutical plant in a poor African country you can be sure that many people will die, just as when you walk down the street you can be sure you’ll crush many ants,” Chomsky answered. “How that attitude compares to explicit murder on ethical grounds is a question worth pursuing. I know my opinion, but I haven’t written about it.”

Nevertheless, solid evidence and common sense proved insufficient for the new darling of the right wing. The intentions of the perpetrators mattered more now to Hitchens than the lives of the victims. He had this to say one month after 9/11:

“The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character…The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was…the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/rejoinder-noam-chomsky?comment_sort=ASC

Well, I will accuse Hitchens of misrepresenting his original conclusions about the Al-Shifa bombing. In the November 16, 1998 issue of The Nation magazine, Hitchens had charged Clinton with the infliction of deliberate harm on innocent people:

“Moreover, a very large number of people are going to die, or are dying now, as a direct result of the destruction of a poor nation’s chief producer of medicines and agricultural pesticides. And everyone knows how this works in an underdeveloped country; it is the children and the old people and those who are already sick who die when the vaccines and the antibiotics and even the analgesics fail to show up. I look at Bill Clinton’s face –when I can force myself to do it – and ask: ‘People were put to death to save that?’ This is, as far as I know, the only time in recent history when a President has made war on civilians for a contemptibly obvious and personal motive and escaped without any protest from the traditional stage army of the good.”

Hitchens’s contradictions are intentional untruths designed for the execution of a personal vendetta. I would go beyond the scope of this article if I fully addressed the controversy over the Al-Shifa bombing. In fairness to Hitchens, I still must acknowledge the excellence of his reporting on the issue. In his book, No One Left to Lie To, he made a convincing case that the bombing was unjustified.

Then again, Hitchens’s Slate piece was also unjustified. “The article was quite dishonest,” Chomsky observed to me, “even by his standards.” What set off this latest smear was the professor’s criticism of the extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden: “It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law.”

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

Certainly, I also would have favored arrest and legal prosecution. I am very pleased to find myself in agreement with the professor now. As a supporter of Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign three years ago, I disagreed with Chomsky’s position on strategic voting, but honest people can respectfully differ. I challenge the fanboys and Hitch hens to defend the lies of their lord and master.

A dish that is best not served this tepid

2011-05-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

—By Stabler

"I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end
to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had
been. That would be something. Not much, but something."

Ah, the comforting revenge fantasies of the confirmed atheist. Actually,
wasn't it the case in Hitch's wet dream of Zarqawi's death that he KNEW who had
betrayed him? Maybe one is an agnostic's revenge fantasy, and the Zarqawi bit
is for the true non-believer.

Those who suggested back in W's time that the U.S. should avenge 9-11
by going after those responsible for 9-11 were met with scorn by Hitchens,
and the argument that Pakistan should be pressured into giving him up were
laughed off. Now it's OBAMA's job to do the diplomatic dirty work. We might
have even extended our history of Bin Laden back to Bill Clinton's warnings
back in nines, met only with dumb Monia jokes and far fetched "wag the dog"
scenarios. Yet as Hitch has rather pathetically admitted, one could afford to
be frivolous in those days.

As the U.S. now stands as a torture state, in massive debt to communist
China and locked into an Orwellian nexus of perpetual war, how easy it is to
forget that ten years ago the U.S., with Christopher Hitchens still safely a
British citizen, bore no such horrible burdens. All of this escapes Hitchens's
scorecard, as does the real price of shock and awe. Yet as our boy
inches over to join Bin Laden on the dark side, it is the true legacy that
weighs on his crumbling shoulders.

Chris Hitch-Slaps Chomsky

2011-05-10T02:39:00.000-07:00

Since his treacherous abandonment of the true Left, apostate Chris "Judas" 'Itchens has committed many sins and crimes against the Holy Left, ones which of course have been thoroughly cataloged and chastised by us Watchers and Hitchhunters the world round. But none of his transgressions have been greater nor more heinous than the ultimate offense that he has so unapologetically committed. Namely, his flagrant flouting of the most sacred and holiest of all commandments on the Left: Thou shall not smite thy Chomsky. Yes, attacking Noam Chomsky is the supreme international crime on the Left, encompassing all the evil that follows. One can be sure that as you read these words, somewhere somebody is on the internet scathingly denouncing someone else for denouncing Chomsky.

So naturally, as a card-carrying Leftie, my hackles were up and I bristled at this fatuous, crude, and dishonest drivel published in Slate posing as a vulgar attempt at a hit-piece against Chomsky for his reaction to Bin Laden's death.

The article is off the rails the moment it leaves the station. First there's the revelation that Hitchens doesn't seem to understand what cognitive dissonance is (it's not a contradiction for someone to believe simultaneously that Bin Laden wasn't behind 9/11 yet the attack was justified). Next, more insidiously, he obliquely implies that Chomsky is not just paranoid, wrong and--aghast!--"stupid and ignorant", but that he can be conflated with conspiracy theorists and may even in fact be one of the Truther variety himself at heart. Of course this is not even risible to anyone who knows anything about the Troofers. They tend to hate Chomsky more than Cheney. And the hypocrisy is rather rank for Hitch to stick his nose up at this sort of thing when he's done his own share of batty conspiracy theorizing himself (unlike Chomsky). Such as alleging that the Lusitania sinking was a vast, vast conspiracy conducted by none-other than Winston Churchill in order to draw the US into the war, or that the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 may have actually been a false flag and the handiwork of Vladimir Putin and the FSB.

To parse some of what CH writes:

As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of ahologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open.

Chomsky has left the "central" question of whether 9/11 actually happened open? That's news to me, or any honest person who has actually read the Guernica article, where Chomsky obviously does nothing of the sort. Such a ludicrous accusation is about as delusional and serious as the Truthers' allegations, appropriate though, as Hitchens is becoming about as marginal and credible as them.

We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

No, it's just a simple fact that claims made by Bin Laden about 9/11 are not necessarily true and indisputable. Hitchens knows this, and clearly agrees with this truism given how he discounted Bin Laden's multiple "confessions" in the years after 9/11 that he was not responsible for it.

So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it's still anyone's guess who did it. Since "April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it 'believed' that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan," no evidence has been adduced. "Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since."

Of course CH knows that Chomsky is not agnostic about who was behind 9/11, he's disingenuously refusing to address the point NC raises, i.e. that the evidence that OBL was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks is actually more thin than conventional wisdom suggests, to the degree that it might have factored into Obama's reluctance to capture and try Bin Laden rather than assassinate him. Hitchens goes on to sneer at Michael Moore for daring to reiterate an elementary principle of a society governed by the rule of law: that criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And on top of Hitchens' snide contempt for the very values of the society he claims he is trying to protect from Islamofascism (talk about facile moral equivalence, Bin Laden is no Hitler, 9/11 was not remotely as bad as the Holocaust!), he then strangely suggests that it's somehow a contradiction to plausibly suspect Bin Laden was a culprit behind 9/11 whom should be apprehended and his guilt ascertained by the courts (and that we should rightly be aware of the US role in the creation of jihadi movement). Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean that the police aren't allowed to have suspects in a case. This is pretty basic.

Unlike some, I don't really have a beef with folks attacking Chomsky, but a pathetic, fatuous and desperate attempt like this is pretty reprehensible and low, even for someone as shameless and dishonest as our Hitch. Another clear demonstration of how Hitchens seems to have genuninely lost it, morally and intellectually.

The New Faithiests: Richard Dawkins.

2011-05-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

First, some clarification. Some of our older reader may remember a Richard Dawkins, active in the 1970s, who wrote important works on evolutionary theory, such as The Extended Phenotype. But he seems to have died, or moved to Canada or something, and instead this post will be about another Richard Dawkins. This other Richard Dawkins writes potboilers with big print (small words though!) and lots of brightly coloured pictures like The Greatest Show on Earth.

This other Richard Dawkins also hosts a website on which he expounds his (no longer) particularly interesting views on science, and his even less interesting view on politics.

Like many of the New Atheists, Dawkins leans to the Right. He takes it for granted, for example, that Islamic fundamentalism is caused by Islam (i.e. that there is something about Islam that lends itself to fundamentalism), that so-called Islamic terrorism is caused by Islam, and so on. Like any good saloon bar bore, Dawkins feels no need to actually provide any evidence for these startling propositions 'cos it's like, obvious, innit? Besides, Dawkins has doubtless done much empirical work of his own, perhaps by interrogating the taxi drivers who meet him at the airport to take him to his 5 star hotel where he will be staying for yet another highly paid speaking gig, and asking them for their own scientific opinion on why the Muzzies just can't cut it.

But I digress!

Dawkins Mark 2 is as famous for being a New Atheist as Dawkins Mark 1 was for being a serious scientist. But like preposterous buffoon Sam Harris, Dawkins Jr has now started to waver even in that, the closest thing he had to a principle. Indeed, like Mad Sam Harris, Dawkins would now seem to have become a New Faithiest. All religions are equal of course (equally bad that is!) but now it seems that some are very much more equal than others.

'Given that Islam is such an unmitigated evil, and looking at the map supplied by this Christian site, should we be supporting Christian missions in Africa? My answer is still no, but I thought it was worth raising the question. Given that atheism hasn't any chance in Africa for the foreseeable future, could our enemy's enemy be our friend?

Richard'

CF also here.

(Note: Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, has described Islam as a "wicked and vicious faith").

There are three things to point out here. First like the Wicked Hitch of 'The West', Dawkins Jr. is now keen on the imperial 'we'. Who is this 'we' who 'should' be doing things 'for' (not with, obviously!) Africans?

Secondly, following Mad Sam Harris, it now seems that whereas, in theory, 'we' hate all religions, in practice 'we' should be prepared to countenance a sort of Nazi-Soviet pact with fundamentalist extremist homophobic Christians (and presumably with fascists as well, as Mad Sam has made clear).

And finally, 'atheism hasn't any chance in Africa for the foreseeable future.' Dawkins views atheism as more or less synomymous with rational thought. So: according to this, rational thought has no chance in Africa for the foreseeable future. I know why Nick Griffin would think that. Why does Dawkins?

Hitchens on the Death of Osama bin Laden: No Big Deal

2011-05-02T07:57:00.001-07:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2292687/

There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

But, again, we were aware of all this already. At least we won't have to put up with a smirking video when the 10th anniversary of his best-known atrocity comes around. Come to think of it, though, he hadn't issued any major communiqués on any subject lately (making me wonder, some time ago, if he hadn't actually died or been accidentally killed already), and the really hateful work of his group and his ideology was being carried out by a successor generation like his incomparably more ruthless clone in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something.

Aren’t you proud of President Obama? Are you not proud? Are you not proud that a man born—that a man born into segregation and discrimination is leading really hard professional, tough, generous, brave men and women in uniform for the defense of the United States and all the time has two daughters in Sidwell Friends and seems to think he can manage both?

Question...

2011-05-02T05:35:00.000-07:00

Do you think they'll run a headline like this when Hitchens dies? And the Commander-in-Chief (do not patronize him!) has a message for Hitch's Republican friends:

Frittering while the New Rome barbecues

2011-04-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

Reading through the most recent Fighting Words columns, one can be reasonably sure that the cancer hasn't got to Hitchipooh's brain yet, although the same cannot be vouchsafed for his best friend Martin based on that hideous heap of hagiographic hogwash that the Guardian saw fit to publish last week. And to think this is the same Martin who just ten short years ago published a reasonably lucid, erudite and, dare I say it, articulately worded collection of prose pieces entitled The War on Cliché. Reading Martin's recent drivel one can only ask "What went wrong?"

Meanwhile, Hitch is mighty unimpressed with NATO's latest feat of derring do:

"In effect, this half-baked approach leaves the initiative with Qaddafi. It also means that the mounting death rate, which recently included the lost life of my much-admired Vanity Fair colleague Tim Hetherington along with several others, is not justifiable by any commensurate military or political gains. These are lives that are being frittered away. Hetherington's last tweet described what he saw in Misurata the day before his death: "Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO." How shameful. What is utterly lacking in Libya, still, is an entrance strategy."

Besides putting Hitch squarely in the company of the next president of the United States Donald "we-should-go-in-and-take-the-oil" Trump — and before the trolls chirp in, I freely admit there is a sheet or two of toilet paper's difference in their respective positions - it also prompts the inevitable rejoinder, "Just like yours, Hitchens! Just like yours!" As plump and pampered as any Nero, Christopher has spent the last ten years frittering while the New Rome has been barbecuing itself, not to mention half of Ummah Wahida, to a crisp. What an artist dies in him? Let me give you a clue. It begins with a "P" and ends with soiled underwear.

In other news, could Hitch be implicated in that Arizona "honor killing"? Probably not, but the implications are traceable to anyone who cares to join the dots. Iraqi immigrant to Freedom's Shore Faleh Hassan Almalek apparently ran down his rebellious 20-year-old daughter because he couldn't accept her disgracing of the family by adopting licentious western ways. How shameful. And yet if Hitch hadn't launched the Glorious War in the first place, the Almaleks would in all probability be running their own kebab stand or selling trinkets to the tourists in Saddam City and young Noor would have been obediently espoused to her second cousin twice removed, as indeed she is in a parallel universe where Al Gore got elected and Saddam Hussein received a Nobel Peace Prize for not making war anymore.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.....

Amis salutes Hitch's courage, his rhetorical genius, his indefatigability

2011-04-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

Unless they know something we don't, the hacks at the Guardian appear to have run Martin Amis's obituary of Christopher Hitchens a little ahead of time. It's an interesting read, sort of, pervaded more by praise than burial, and with a delightful final paragraph that mixes one part Arabian Knights with five parts Carl Sagan, and with just a dash of Bladerunner in there for the real cognoscenti.

Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.

Or, as Joni Mitchell, a true artist, once put it:

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

Lubna Qureshi on Blair, Hitch, and Oil

2011-04-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, and Christopher Hitchens, the former man of principle, put Hitchens Watch to sleep with their theological debate several months ago. Despite their philosophical differences, Hitchens has continued to defend Blair for his participation in wars of imperial aggression in the Muslim world. Before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, Hitchens recently wrote, “the wealth and people of Iraq were the abused private property of Saddam Hussein and his crime family.” The contempt that the world has for Blair somehow escapes Hitchens’s comprehension, now that Hussein is gone:

“How can anybody with a sense of history not grant Blair some portion of credit for this? And how can anybody with a tincture of moral sense go into a paroxysm and yell that it is he who is the war criminal? It is as if all the civilians murdered by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be charged to his account. This is the chaotic mentality of Julian Assange and his groupies.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/hitchens-201102

Putting aside the fact that no one at Hitchens Watch has slept with Assange, Blair should also be granted “some portion of credit” for what has gone wrong in Iraq. According to The Lancet, the esteemed British medical journal, more than 600,000 Iraqis died between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006.

http://www.brussellstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf

Compounding these horrifying statistics, British pollsters at Opinion Research Business calculated in 2008 that more than one million Iraqi civilians had died since the war began.

>http://www.zcommunications.org/a-look-back-at-8-years-of-war-in-iraq-by-medea-benjamin

Even if the fanboys and Hitch hens accept these numbers, they may claim that these unfortunate Iraqis would have perished at the hands of Hussein, anyway. Notwithstanding the terror of the former regime, I would advise the fanboys and Hitch hens to consult the article in The Lancet: “From January, 2002, until the invasion in 2003, virtually all deaths in Iraq were from non-violent causes.”

Iraqis who have murdered their compatriots would never have had an opportunity to exploit without the destabilizing effects of the Anglo-American operation on their country. So, why did Blair join President George W. Bush in this destructive enterprise? Did he do so for moral reasons, as Hitchens claims?

I would like to thank Mark for sharing an April 19 article from the British newspaper The Independent. In the article, reporter Paul Bignell contrasted the public statements of the British government with the documentary record. Shortly before the war began, Blair officially commented:

“Let me just deal with this oil thing because…the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons…”

British Petroleum, wildlife’s best friend, also denied a strong interest in Iraqi oil. Months before this official denial, however, the British Foreign Office met with BP at least five times. In the minutes of one meeting, the Foreign office noted:

“Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP are desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity to compete. The long-term potential is enormous…”

The memorandum from a similar meeting acknowledged that the Foreign Office “was determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/secret-memos-expose-link-between-oil-firms-and-invasion-of-iraq-2269610.html

Actually, it is not news that Blair participated in an unwarranted intervention under false pretenses. As an issue, weapons of mass destruction did not weigh on Blair’s mind at all. I would urge all visitors to Hitchens Watch to read Barry M. Lando’s Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, From Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush. Pages 220-221 covered the Washington visit of Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, in 2002. In his memorandum to Blair, Dearlove observed:

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy….It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capacity was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.”

Since Blair realized that Iraq presented no military threat to the international community, oil had to be his chief motivation. Hitchens must know this.

Happy Hitchday!

2011-04-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

From Lubna Qureshi:

If anyone cares, Christopher Hitchens turned 62 on Wednesday, April 13. Once again, he has appeared on television to share his endless fascination with himself, this time with a British audience.

Despite the denials of the fanboys and Hitch hens, Hitchens Watch recently proved that Hitchens is a self-confessed neoconservative. Now, Hitchens Watch has proved it once again! In the British interview, Hitchens accepted the label neoconservative:

“If the majority of the left in the world, and actually the majority of liberals too, decides that they think Bush is a greater enemy than Saddam Hussein, well, that’s what the left now thinks. They can leave me out of that, completely. I won’t quarrel on that point. I’d rather be called a neoconservative at that stage.” (5:09)

We have all heard Hitchens’s political views before, but the final third of the interview was more interesting because he talked about his brother, Peter, who is a fascinating figure in his own right: “I am sure I can remember telling him he was adopted…with a reasonable chance that he might believe it.” I suspect that Peter wanted to believe it, for who would desire a blood connection to such a detestable figure?

He is Risen!

2011-03-28T10:26:00.001-07:00

Decent declares victory.

The Iraq Effect

If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened.

The most heartening single image of the past month—eclipsing even the bravery and dignity of the civilian fighters against despotism in Syria and Libya—was the sight of Hoshyar Zebari arriving in Paris to call for strong action against the depraved regime of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. Here was the foreign minister of Iraq, and the new head of the Arab League, helping to tilt the whole axis of local diplomacy against one-man rule. In May, Iraq will act as host to the Arab League summit, and it will be distinctly amusing and highly instructive to see which Arab leaders have the courage, or even the ability, to leave their own capitals and attend. The whole scene is especially gratifying for those of us who remember Zebari as the dedicated exile militant that he was 10 years ago, striving to defend his dispossessed people from the effects of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons.

Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family? As it is, to have had Iraq on the other scale from the outset has been an unnoticed and unacknowledged benefit whose extent is impossible to compute. And the influence of Iraq on the Libyan equation has also been uniformly positive in ways that are likewise often overlooked.

After Hitch?

2011-03-28T07:21:00.001-07:00

Don't worry; we'll always be able to mock Dave Weigel!

Lubna Qureshi Visits the Oncologist

2011-03-25T07:16:00.001-07:00

Recently, Christopher Hitchens has cancelled speaking engagements at SUNY-Stony Brook and Colorado State University. When Slate magazine announced that Hitchens would go on leave in order receive radiation treatment, I decided to interview an oncologist who is a friend of mine.

I must make it absolutely clear that the oncologist has never treated Hitchens. In fact, he has never even heard of the writer. Of course, I have never met Hitchens, either. Based on my limited knowledge, I simply described Hitchens’s illness and treatment to the physician. In June of 2010, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The doctor explained that esophageal cancer comes in two forms. The first type is adenocarcinoma, which is mostly related to acid reflex. A condition known as Barrett’s esophagus can be a precursor to this cancer. When I told the doctor that Hitchens has the second form of esophageal cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, he said: “That is clearly linked to alcohol and smoking.” Although smoking alone is linked to esophageal cancer, “the combination of smoking and alcohol increases the risk further.” Hitchens Watch readers who would like to learn more about esophageal cancer should consult Dr. Sugar Singleton’s educational videos, which were helpfully posted by Greywolf in September of 2010.

Anyway, I explained to the oncologist that Hitchens remained relatively active during his chemotherapy. Now that the journalist has embarked on a course of radiation treatment, he has withdrawn from public life. “It is not a good sign,” the oncologist said.

When Hitchens received his diagnosis, he was already at Stage 4. As he pointed out in his famously blunt manner on C-Span: “There is no Stage 5.” In January of 2011, FGFM posted this latest C-Span appearance on Hitchens Watch. Hitchens’s discussion with Brian Lamb covered his health extensively.

Let us turn back to my own brief interview with the oncologist. He explained that when a patient receives a diagnosis of Stage 4 esophageal cancer, chemotherapy is administered for palliative rather than curative purposes. In fact, there is no cure at this stage. The median survival rate is less than a year. By shrinking the tumor, chemotherapy can control pain and relieve difficulty in swallowing. Thirty percent of patients, or slightly more, respond well to chemotherapy. In rare cases, patients can even live as long as two years, but even they cannot be cured. “The tumor starts growing again several months after chemotherapy is completed,” the oncologist said.

Since Hitchens has now resorted to radiation therapy, I asked the doctor if the journalist’s condition has worsened. “That is a likely scenario,” he said. Like chemotherapy, radiation therapy is a palliative procedure. Chemotherapy has likely proven ineffective for Hitchens, so his physicians have turned to radiation therapy for the same reasons: to control pain and ease swallowing. “There is also a possibility that the disease has spread,” he said, adding that in some cases, the cancer spreads to the bone. Of course, Hitchens acknowledged to Lamb that the cancer has already metastasized to his lymph nodes, and perhaps even to one lung.

I asked the physician to estimate how long Hitchens has to live: “Less than six months.”

Problem, Hitchens?

2011-03-23T10:09:00.001-07:00

Christopher Hitchens Is Unwell

Christopher Hitchens is undergoing radiation treatment and wasn't able to write this week's column on his usual schedule. He hopes to file soon.

Lubna Qureshi's Response to Mark

2011-03-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

Mark, since I respect your contributions to Hitchens Watch so much, I would like to respond to your contention that the old work of Christopher Hitchens was shallow and unoriginal. I would also like to thank you for Edward Herman’s article, “Toward a Homeland ‘Favorable Climate of Investment.”

http://www.zcommunications.org/toward-a-homeland-favorable-climate-of-investment-by-edward-herman

I agree that the deep analysis furnished by thinkers such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky contrasts sharply with the superficiality of Christopher Hitchens’s 1990 book, “Blood, Class and Nostalgia,” which I had coincidentally been reading when you recommended it to me (I have no interest in reading the revised 2004 version, “Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship).
Hitchens is a journalist rather than a historian, so he would have done better to focus on the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, supporting his conclusions with original reporting. He wasted too many pages on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as you argue, relied too much on the historical scholarship of others.

Nevertheless, I insist Hitchens did some brilliant reporting in the past. His journalistic collections, “Prepared for the Worst” and For the Sake of Argument” are sparkling gems. Unlike “Blood, Class, and Nostalgia,” Hitchens’s book on Henry Kissinger is based on considerable primary research. His two chapters on Chile rest on his analysis of recently declassified documents, which proved extremely helpful in my own research on the assassination of Chilean General René Schneider. Moreover, I do not believe that any scholarship reliant on the new Chile documents had been published at the time. You cannot tell me that “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” did not help my own research if I know that it did.

Since his conversion to neoconservatism, as you point out, Hitchens has attacked Herman and Chomsky for their systemic criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Before his betrayal of his leftist colleagues, however, Hitchens did engage in systemic criticism himself. As a Socialist, he had the ability to see patterns, a comprehension that he has now lost. His criticism did not stop with Henry Kissinger. He condemned the Gulf War as well as the Vietnam War as imperialist ventures. He also made clear his disapproval of Reagan’s Central American interventions. Hitchens devoted special attention to Henry Kissinger because he believed that the newly declassified documents made the war criminal potentially vulnerable to international prosecution. When British journalist William Shawcross asked Hitchens why Kissinger should be singled out from other ruthless practitioners of realpolitik, Hitchens responded:

“Why do most school productions of Henry V leave out the bit where Shakespeare puts in King Henry’s massacre of the French prisoners at Agincourt, and should this case not be reopened, and should we not now rather view King Henry V in the light of a war criminal? I’m all for that…but I also have a maxim permanently in my head in these matters: ‘Don’t make the best the enemy of the good.’ In the case of Kissinger, we have someone who is still around, very much in our midst, and we have all the evidence about the crimes that he committed in a series of countries, making it look as if aberrations couldn’t form a defense, say, in the matter of Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Chile, or Laos, or Bangladesh, or Cyprus, or East Timor, because after a bit, it stops looking like coincidence…”

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Kissi

(relevant section begins at 1:14:00)

Hitchens also despises Kissinger, as I do, for his inflated reputation. A family friend recently said to me, “But I thought Kissinger was a nice man!” I overheard no one at my local shopping mall say: “Robert McNamara! Ooh, I like him.!”

Admittedly, Hitchens’s radical deconstruction of international capitalism did have its weaknesses. He actually defended NAFTA in 1993:

(relevant section begins at 7:33)

In spite of their imperfections, Chomsky great admired Hitchens’s contributions to journalism before 9/11. In response to old friend’s about-face afterward, the linguist wrote that he would “await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past.” You may think that Hitchens’s radical journalism was shallow and unoriginal, but Chomsky did not.

http://www.counterpunch.org/chomskyhitch.html

Additionally, Chomsky has also been wrong. In 2008, the linguist urged people in swing states to support Obama, which entailed acceptance and tacit of the policies which he now actively opposes.

These are the same policies that Herman criticizes in his essay:

“Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union address promises a five-year freeze in federal domestic spending, which is incompatible with his promises to improve education and the sagging infrastructure. His support of the huge military budget and permanent war system has kept massive resources from availability to the crisis-ridden civil society, at the same time contributing to a dangerously irrational spiritual environment that bodes ill for the future.”

Would Herman have written differently about President John McCain?

An Essay from Lubna Qureshi

2011-03-01T05:05:00.000-08:00

Visitors to Christopher Hitchens Watch may speculate why the contributors have not created a David Horowitz Watch or a Dick Cheney Watch instead. The answer is that the former has never possessed talent and the latter has never demonstrated virtue. I sense that the contempt that the contributors have for Hitchens has arisen from their spectacular disappointment in him. Indeed, the journalist’s career since 9/11 has been nothing but contemptible. The best way to challenge the Hitchens we all despise is to examine the man we all once loved.

In order to understand Hitchens’s support for the invasion of Iraq, we must comprehend his opposition to the previous Gulf War. His early pieces in The Nation magazine are truly a treasure to read, and they contradict all the positions that he has assumed since his ideological surrender to the right wing. On September 17, 1990, Hitchens ridiculed the justifications made by the United States for its occupation of Saudi Arabia: “The young men and women who find themselves pitchforked into a prelethal standoff in the Saudi desert had been given little by way of instruction, aside from the usual ahistorical stupidities about Hitler and Munich.” Incredibly, the author of this witty and penetrative line has now popularized the destructive and ahistorical expression “Islamic fascism.”

In the days leading to the Gulf War, Hitchens understood that Saddam Hussein actually had a case against the emirate of Kuwait. As with the rest of the Middle East, Iraq had fallen victim to European colonialism decades before. “When the British drew the borders, they did so with the specific intention of denying Iraq access to the sea, and thus of making it more dependent on Britain,” Hitchens pointed out in an article dated October 1, 1990. Even a former advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could acknowledge this, and Hitchens helpfully quoted him:

"In the Iraqi subconscious, Kuwait is part of Basra province, and the bloody British took it away from them. We protected our strategic interests rather successfully, but in doing so we didn’t worry too much about the people there. We created a situation where people felt they had been wronged."

Despite the strain of the situation, Hitchens recognized that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait did not make American military intervention inevitable. In fact, diplomacy among the Arabs could have prevented the war entirely. After the war, Hitchens mournfully noted the rejection of Algerian peace initiatives. “At an early stage Algiers had sent its Foreign Minister to Baghdad and arranged terms of mutuality – an Iraqi commitment to leave Kuwait if the army was not attacked from the air or the land after doing so – that have formed the basis of all subsequent proposals,” Hitchens wrote on March 11, 1991. A pledge from Washington to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict could have further resolved matters. After all, the Israeli expansion into the Palestinian territories was also a process of aggression. Unfortunately, as Hitchens reported, the Algerian president “was denied the chance to land his plane in Saudi Arabia and was cold-shouldered in all his efforts to visit Washington.”

Since his conversion to neoconservatism, Hitchens claims to have undergone a moral epiphany. In the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war, Hitchens said later on BBC Radio, he found himself a passenger in a jeep driven by two Kurds. He asked to them remove a photograph of Bush the First that had been taped to the windshield.

The Kurds responded that “without his intervention, without the umbrella in Northern Iraq, that we, and all our families, would be dead.” Hitchens suddenly “realized that co-existence with the Saddam Hussein regime was not longer possible. And that was in 1991.”

http://www.labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/archives/000579.html

Interestingly, Hitchens presents a different version in his vastly overrated memoir, Hitch-22, which leaves one to wonder if either is true. “Without your Mr. Bush,” the Kurds responded somewhat less articulately, “we think we and all our families would be dead.” Hitchens writes that he “it seemed increasingly obvious to me that Saddam was not a rational actor, did not understand the elementary business of deterrence and self-preservation, and for that reason remained a danger, as psychiatrists phrase it, both to himself and to others.”
The blogger Dennis Perrin has provided his own perspective on Hitchens’s alleged encounter with the alleged gratitude of the Kurds:
"He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the…quote is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush’s “mad contest” with Saddam, much less opined that “co-existence was no longer possible.”

Perrin was a personal friend, so Hitchens had no reason to misrepresent himself in these private, presumably alcohol-drenched moments.

http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2005/06/punchy.html

According to Perrin, Hitchens made a similar argument during a 1993 appearance on C-Span: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/EventsintheNews112

I have listened to this program, most of which is boringly dated, but the relevant comments begin at 01:24:00. A caller asked Hitchens to place himself in the position of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Would Hitchens have overthrown Saddam Hussein? Hitchens’s reply indicated his belief that Hussein was neither psychotic nor a threat:

"…If you wanted to make a stand against Saddam Hussein, the time to do it
would have been in ’87 when he began his campaign of genocide in Kurdistan. And those of us who did try to raise that subject at the time found that to the contrary, Iraq was flavor-of-the-month in Washington. Saddam was our great ally Iran, and the build-up that led to the invasion of Kuwait began then. These are things that a Schwarzkopf can do nothing about. In other words, by the time you’ve got to that stage, you’re basically having a war between former business partners, and that means they are not going to finish each other off, because they may need each other again."

If Washington had the best interests of the Kurdish people at heart, it would have cut off all aid to Iraq in rapid response to the chemical attacks. Principled pressure would have saved lives Kurdish lives. Moreover, Hitchens did believe that co-existence with Saddam Hussein was possible, contrary to present claims. Otherwise, he would not have envisioned future collaboration back in 1993. The international community essentially disarmed the Iraqi dictator after the 1991 war. Since Hitchens knew that Hussein’s actions before his disarmament did not warrant military intervention by the United States, he certainly knew that it was unjustified afterward. In fact, Hitchens still privately expressed doubts in 2002 that Hussein was a threat, telling Perrin that “W. could have to convince him on ‘about a zillion fronts’ before he could sign on” to another war. By this point, Hussein presented a far weaker strategic challenge to the international order. Therefore, Hitchens’s decision to endorse the second Iraq War was calculated and insincere. He has betrayed his own moral code to advance himself, but ironically, the courage and defiance of the peoples of the Middle East have now rendered his amorality irrelevant.

Spy Magazine and the Glorious HitchHunt

2011-02-18T14:46:00.001-08:00

It came to my attention that the back issues of the defunct Spy Magazine have been made available on Google Books. After reviewing the cover of their Bohemian Grove exposé (featuring Henry Kissinger!), I wondered what they had to say about Our Boy and was delighted to find that they had bashed The Great Man as a Decent proofreader in their Review of Reviewers column of March '93 titled "Bullyboys." There are other Hitchian delights which you can find for yourself such as a caricature of The Foremost Intellectual of Our Time thumbing his nose at a bearded Marty Peretz and a declaration that The Hammer of Beirut "[doesn't] believe in journalistic ethics." Indeed. Let us enjoy these simple gifts as we await Hitch going the way of Graydon "Nice Nose Hair" Carter's previous effort!

Mini Hitch has a theory, and its a conspiracy one!

2011-02-18T05:18:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Lubna Qureshi for the video link!

Is Alex "Hurricane" Hitchens taking after Julian Lennon and Jason Dylan by moving into his dad's business?
Here we see him as a talking head on BBC WORLD, going on about Islamist terrorism, explosives, Al Qaeda, and how we'd all better get used to Muslims exploding like dropped vials of nitro glycerin in crowded shopping malls. Apparently, he's got inside information that it's absolutely so - which is rather scary considering the outfit he works for.

Not being a conspiracy theorist myself, when I hear about a person blowing up in public I try not to form a judgment as to why, how, whether they did it deliberately or who helped them on their way. Because it is often hard to tell from all the little bits left over whether they actively blew or were passively blown. And there are times when one can't completely rule out spontaneous combustion. For instance, if in his pre-cancer days, Hitch the Elder had gone off bang on the pavement while lighting a Rothmans after downing a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, how many of us would have taken it as a deliberate act of atheistic terror?

But if a Muslim explodes in a built-up area for any reason whatsoever, even before the chunks of meat and splinters of bone have been cleaned off the walls and pavements, Alex and his dad have no reticence about speculating why it happened. It's reminiscent of the "experts" who went on TV on the morning of 9/11 and mused about whether it was the work of Osama Bin Laden. These people scatter confidently-voiced opinions around like confetti at a Moonie mass wedding about the forces behind this or that attack — opinions they have no business voicing based on the scanty amount of real knowledge they could possibly possess about said incidents. But then again, when one's bread & butter business is catapulting the propaganda, the slickness of the packaging is far more important than the quality of the product.

But enough for now about Mini Hitch. Let's lighten up with a vid about another Alex Hitchens.

Hitchens Watch Officially Solves Chris' Moral Challenge

2011-02-11T17:14:00.001-08:00

As you know, just a few short years ago the exalted one, His Hitchness, loftily descended from the heavens and truly mystified the great unwashed with a mighty challenge, one so baffling that to this very day it still confounds all mere mortals.

And at the Pew Center last fall this same sage, during a debate against that worthless, no-good brother of his, again reannounced the ~~cheap publicity stunt cynically designed to sell books~~ I mean, the very serious and profound philosophical challenge:

I used to ask a question. I’ve now asked it in public, on the radio, in print, in TV debates with quite a lot of leading religious figures and thinkers. It’s simply this: You ought to be able to tell me of a moral action performed or an ethical statement made by a believer that I couldn’t make because I’m a nonbeliever. You ought to be able. Given what you think, it must be very easy for you to say, here’s something you couldn’t say or do that would be morally right or morally true. No takers; I haven’t found a single example. I’ve tried everyone now — and by the way, there’s a prize. And I’ve even entered myself for it, as I’ll tell you in a second.

Now our preening Popinjay does strike me as the kind of chap who would proudly award himself his own trophy in some made-up contest (where he's the only judge), so what, pray tell, was this valiant stab at it?

Here is my attempt to win my own prize. When Lech Walesa was starting his work in the Polish shipyards and the Polish militia, the outer ring of the Polish army were closing in on Gdansk, he was interviewed with his then-fairly small group, and he was asked, aren’t you frightened, aren’t you afraid? You’ve taken on a whole all-powerful state and army — aren’t you scared? And he said, I’m not frightened of anything but God or anyone but God.

This came back to me, I thought, well, this meets my two criteria. It’s certainly a noble thing to have said, a distinguished thing to have said, and I certainly couldn’t have said it. So it does meet both my criteria. But it was also the slogan of Gen. Edwin Walker of the John Birch Society in a different situation — the man whom Lee Harvey Oswald took target practice on, right-wing, paranoid Crusade for Christ nutbag in the ’50s. Doesn’t sound so good when it’s said by him and it’s a summons to think of nuclear war as not too bad, for example.

It’s not quite the same.

So there, I’ve partly answered the question. I hope I partly asked one.

I do have to confess that ever since Chris 'Itchens declared his little challenge a few years ago I've been utterly amazed at how unpersuasive, fatuous, and downright pathetic the "answers" submitted by the religious have been. "What about praying?" they ask. Please. "Tithing?" Excuse me? "Well how about submitting your whole heart and mind to Christ forever, and blindly obeying him for all eternity like some abject, groveling slave?" (Or something like that). Honestly, are you people joking? But alas, they are not. Yes, one would really have thought that adherents of one of the greatest intellectual traditions in human history would have been able to come up with something a tad more clever than this tripe.

Though there appears to have been a small handful of efforts that have almost grasped at something more substantive. Some variation of "How could Michelangelo have painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without Christianity, or how could John Donne have possibly written all of his elegies, sonnets and poetry without religion?" They could not have of course, but this is a little like pointing out how Eisenstein could not have shot October without Bolshevism and the 1917 coup. Besides, art can be beautiful, but it is not really a moral nor ethical action per se. Or there's an argument, though usually put a bit more crudely, that no moral action can be done by a nonbeliever because for them morality, in the end, is just an illusion and nothing more than a meaningless, biochemical reaction occurring in the brain (and regardless of whether or not there is a divine the true atheist should always reject all of His "morality" outlined in the Bible). Maybe no act by an atheist is objectively moral, but at least there is always the possibility, minute as it is, that a theist's act could be moral if God exists. However there is a salient weakness in this position. Namely, it is typical Christian hypocrisy. It turns out that the religious are actually the relativists. When God orders you to slit the throat of your most beloved son for no reason, that is suddenly moral. When the Lord commands you to commit genocide against your neighbors and then, as a spoil of war, brutally rape and enslave their daughters, that too is now moral. Morality is in flux, oscillating with the caprice of an erratic deity, so ultimately there is no absolute, moral objectivity. It is only objective in the sense that it is consistently God's fiat, which is not really objectivity but more like a sort of omniscient solipsism. And the interpretation of these "eternal" verities and morals by all the priests and clerics is constantly changing, and always will. The religious often claim that if there is no God then they can't believe in the idea of objective morality, so since there is not, they must be relativists as they suggest.

Thankfully, without God morality can exist: an innate, universal moral grammar hardwired into our heads like language that has objective, physical existence and is manifested in the mysterious, beautiful and awe-inspiring works and actions of humankind.

In a debate against 'Itchens at Biola, the pompous pseudointellectual William Lane Craig offered his own laughably weak attempt:

Now Mr. Hitchens says, 'Name one moral action that an unbeliever can not take.' Well, that's trivially easy. If God exists there are all kinds of moral duties that we have that the unbeliever cannot recognize. At the panel discussion last week in Dallas, when Mr. Hitchens demanded that someone name such an action, a pastor on the panel immediately piped up, 'How about tithing?' Well, leave it to a pastor to think of that. Clearly, that's an action that only a believer would take. Even more fundamentally, what about the first, and greatest, commandment? 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength, with all your mind.' That is an action that only a believer can take, no unbeliever can discharge even this most fundamental of moral duties.

To which CH replied:

Second, on the matter of my moral question: Yes, it's true that Doug Wilson said that tithing was something I couldn't do, but then not just—I'm not moving the goal posts here—I don't think I'd regard giving all my money to the New Saint Andrews church as a moral act. The only challenge that I've had so far that I really couldn't get out of—I should share it with you—was I was told well you couldn't do this: You couldn't say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." No, but nor could you as people of faith, you wouldn't dare. It would be blasphemy to do it. There's only one person who can do that even on your account so, with respect, ladies and gentlemen, I think both my challenges stand.

But this exchange does underscore an important point concerning the challenge. There is an unstated condition that's absolutely critical in answering the question, a tacit requirement that the theists have consistently neglected. Namely, 'Itchens himself has to rule that it is a moral action, as he is judge and jury in this trial.

So let's turn back to CH's own attempt at the Pew Center. His brother Peter, that worthless, antidisestablishmentarian dog (there's nothing I hate more than a vile antidisestablishmentarian!), was quite impressed by Chris' undertaking on the question and declared in a post on his blog that the unsolvable puzzle had finally been solved, once and for all (somehow missing how Chris explicitly stated that his so-called answer is inadequate given the Birchers, and that there were still no "takers" nor "a single example" yet of a successful answer). Peter then even viciously denounced some poor, swooning Hitch-lovers over this in a subsequent post on his blog (OK, so maybe Pete is not so bad after all).

I don't think that this is the first time that Chris has attempted to solve his own challenge in public with a specious answer like this. Take the Craig debate that I mentioned, and I believe that there are other occasions. Another thing Peter has missed. As for the merits of the "partly" valid answer itself, it's a pretty lame effort, as fearing God is obviously not a moral nor brave action whatsoever. In fact quite the opposite, it is an example of gross intellectual and moral cowardice. Rightly fearing a nuclear war is far more legitimate than trembling over some morbid, masochistic delusion like a celestial Big Brother (Incidentally, I can't help but wonder if Orwell was alluding to a line from Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not A Christian when he named that character). Of course Walesa and Solidarity participated in all sorts of admirable and important activism, but I'm a bit surprised that 'Itchens would zero in on such an intellectually pusillanimous piece of political rhetoric like that. Does Chris actually believe that fearing God is moral? No, of course not.

So that's the background here. Now let's proceed to the next question: is there actually an answer to Chris' challenge?

It sounds like our boy is about to give up, as he has "looked everywhere" and "tried everyone." Well, seek and ye shall find. It's always, ironically, in the last place you look.

Early in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov there is a rather curious exchange. The bastard Smerdyakov is at his father's table when the elder Karamazov notices that his lackey has been piqued by a rather gruesome story:

That morning Gregory had gone in Lukyanov’s shop to buy something, and the owner had told him a story about a Russian soldier who, while serving somewhere far away, on the frontier, had been taken prisoner by Asian tribesmen.

Under threat of torture, he was ordered to renounce the Christian religion and be converted to the Muslim faith. He refused and underwent the ordeal. They flayed him alive and he died a martyr’s death, praising and glorifying Christ.

....

"It's about that soldier, sir." Smerdyakov said in an unexpectedly loud, brisk voice. "Even if his act was very brave, I still think he would not have sinned if he had renounced Christ on that occasion, as well as his own baptismal vows, so as to save his life for good works, which in time would have made up for his moment of weakness"

"What do you mean, would not have sinned? You’re saying wicked things and you’ll go straight to hell for it. They’ll roast you there like mutton," Mr. Karamazov declared.

…

"As for the mutton, sir, that’s not so. I won’t get into trouble for it there. I couldn’t if there’s true justice," Smerdyakov declared sententiously.

"What do you mean 'if there’s true justice?'" Mr. Karamazov said, gaily egging him on and nudging Alyosha with his knee.

"He’s just no good, that’s what!" Gregory suddenly blurted out, glaring at Smerdyakov.

"Don’t you be in such a hurry to call me names, Mr. Gregory," Smerdyakov parried with quiet self-assurance. "You’d better try to work it out for yourself. If I happen to be in the hands of Christ’s enemies and they demand that I curse the name of God and renounce my holy baptism, my reason tells me that I have the right to do it, and that there would be no sin in doing so."

"You’ve already said that. Don’t just keep repeating it again and again — prove it!" Mr. Karamazov said challengingly.

"Just listen to the miserable cook!" Gregory hissed scornfully.

"Again, don’t be in too much of a hurry to call me names instead of trying to reason things out, Mr. Gregory, because the moment I say to my captors, 'No, I’m no Christian and I curse my God,' I at once become anathema by God’s highest judgment and am banned from the Church, just as if I was a heathen — all that not within a second of when I say it, but the moment I think it; before a quarter of a second has passes after I’ve thought it, I’m already excommunicated from the Church. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gregory?"

…

"You’re anathema and you’re damned already!" Gregory exploded suddenly again. "And how dare you argue after that, you scum, when…"

"Stop that, Gregory, don’t keep abusing him like that," Mr. Karamazov interrupted him.

"Why don’t you wait a short moment, Mr. Gregory, and hear what I have to say, because I haven’t finished yet. Because at the very moment when God damns me, at that exact, precise moment, it’s just the same as if I’d become a heathen and my baptism is taken away from me and no longer counts. Don’t you agree at least with that?"

"Come, my boy, get to the point quickly," Mr. Karamazov urged, sipping his brandy with relish.

"Well, then, if I’m no longer a Christian, it’s not a lie if I told my torturers when they asked me whether I was a Christian or not. Because by that time God Himself has stripped me of my Christianity, just for having thought it, before I even said one word to them. And if I was already stripped of it, how could they accuse me in the other world of renouncing Christ since, before I could renounce Him, I had already been deprived of my baptism? It’s the same as for a pagan Tartar: who could hold him responsible, even in heaven, Mr. Gregory, for not having been born a Christian, and who would want to punish him for that, since no one can strip two hides off the same ox? Besides, God Almighty Himself, even if He decides to punish the Tartar after he dies (since it’s impossible not to punish him at all), would give him only a very small punishment, considering that a Tartar cannot be blamed for having been brought into this world by infidel parents…”

Now I'm going to take a wild guess that Chris would not consider converting to Islam as a particularly moral act, but Smerdyakov ignores that aspect of the story and more narrowly focuses on the morality of renouncing Christianity in such circumstances. Bear in mind that this is not some trivial exercise that Dostoevsky is engaging in here. He writes about this for good reasons. CH knows his Bible, and must be aware that being persecuted for one's faith in such a manner is a test, a leitmotif, that occurs throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Jesus himself, early Christians, many others.

I could without hesitation claim to renounce my atheist socialism at gunpoint, but there's an enormous moral distinction, and no equivalence at all, between that act and a Christian denouncing Christ in such a situation. It's easy today to underestimate how much ethical and intellectual courage it must have required then for a theist to commit such a hypothetical act. Many good and moral people at that time had been tricked by clerics and religion into believing that foolishness and cowardice at such a critical moment would in fact be virtue and valor.

So what Smerdyakov broadly recommends is a moral act that a religious person could do but which a nonbeliever could not. A nonreligious person can't overcome such deep theistic indoctrination and renounce a faith that they don't possess to justifiably save their life. And it satisfies Chris' tacit requirement: He no doubt believes that renouncing Christianity under such a scenario, and averting a needless and stupid suicide, would be the moral and just thing to do. Plus Hitchens is such a faggot for literature that I don't know how he could resist an answer like this plucked from a passage in arguably the greatest novel of all time, a book whose whole purpose was tendentious, Christianist propaganda. This answer lives up not only to the letter of the challenge, but its spirit too, as this also vindicates the whole implication of the contest. The only answers to such a challenge are ones that further discredit the faithful concerning questions of morality.

Yes, one could imagine Ol' Hitch curtly replying to such an answer with a "Listen you scoundrel, you are as stupid as that flunkey Smerdyakov!" However, we have prepared for that contingency. "But Mr. Christopher sir" we'd say "it's always rewarding talking to a clever man, so who would that make you if you insist on such a comparison?":

"You’ve already said that. Don’t just keep repeating it again and again — prove it! [that the act is moral]" Mr. Karamazov said challengingly."

...

"Ah hell, I can't even think what I would do to whoever it was who first invented God. Hanging would be too good for him." [said Fydor]

"If they hadn't invented God, there would have been no civilization today" [said Ivan]

"No civilization without God? Why?"

"Nor would there be any whiskey. I must take that Johnny Walker away from you."

"Wait, wait, my boy, just one more little glass of Johnny Walker... Tell me, Ivan, do you like Alyosha?"

"I do."

"I want you to like him." Mr. Karamazov said, now visibly drunk.

So let the word go forth that Hitchens Watch has now incontrovertibly solved the riddle. In fact Comrades, we've been aware of this solution for years but did not bother claiming our trophy. Why? Well, let's just say that it would have made us feel a little bit too much like the Zionists Avraham Stern and Lehi when they reached out to Hitler. And we all know how well that went. But just for the public record, and for our vast audience of entire dozens of readers out there: Hitchens is a deadbeat who owes us big, yet again (Hitchens Watch is still awaiting our cut of the profits from GING. The cheque must have got lost in the mail. Poor Mark G. is in penury, toiling away in some arctic wasteland right now, and how has 'Itchens repaid him for enriching him beyond his wildest dreams of avarice? Like this. I haven't seen somebody so happy to see an old friend since that photo of Clinton meeting with Kim Jong-il last year. Indeed, 'Itchens will be hearing soon from our lawyers, perhaps with a frivolous lawsuit -- Obama hasn't brought in tort reform yet!).

Granted Our Antagonist would probably not be too keen to bestow the prize upon his most hated enemies who have been besmirching and sullying his good name for so long, but he has to admit that this is the winning answer, and that he owes us our prize (even if it is probably going to be an autographed copy of GING or something worthless like that). After all, while it sure may not look like it, Hitchens is trying to be intellectually honest. And who knows, Chris is just queer enough of a cat to concede that we've won.

Egyptland

2011-02-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

Stabler has asked me by email if I had any thoughts on this Egypt of ours. Interesting choice of phrase, I thought: "this Egypt of ours." Do we own it and have we broken it? Or could he be referring to the larger, deeper, more nebulous and all-pervading "Egypt" that people as diverse as Jesus of Nazareth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Smith, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Gauguin, Bob Marley and William Cooper had issues with?

From my position as an boring old fart in roughly the same demographic layer as the Hitch Brothers, I think Richard Thompson put it best around 20 years ago. While the optimists were celebrating the death of communism and the end of history and the upwardly mobile were busily climbing as high as as they could go up the ziggurat of power and wealth, Richard the strolling minstrel was telling it like it looks to the folks condemned to live and die at the base of the pyramids.

Christopher Hitchens Q & A 2011-01-23

2011-01-24T02:57:00.000-08:00

Hitch takes a malignant trip down memory lane with his old pal Brian Lamb, pausing to curse the barbaric Islamic Pakistanis.

He's on C-SPAN Now!

2011-01-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

Q & A

Christopher Hitchens discusses his cancer in this Q&A interview and his wish to continue writing about it as well as advocating more attention to cancer treatments currently in advanced experimental stages.

Hitchodamus

2011-01-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

The big story so far in 2011 has been the Tunisian revolution, in which the Arab masses of Tunisia finally rose up against their US backed dictator, threw off the shackles of oppression, and took their first tentative steps towards democracy. As Juan Cole has pointed out, this has the potential to be far more significant than the Iranian revolution of '79: despite its anti-imperialist rhetoric, the Iranian revolution really only had appeal to the minority Shia Islamic sect, and the specifically Persian nature of the Iranian regime made it of less interest to Arabs. But Tunisia is a (majority) Sunni Muslim country, and an Arab one to boot, which makes its revolution possibly of far greater import: the majority of American puppet dictatorships in the 'Middle East' are Sunni Arab, and they are hopefully feeling a lot more nervous after hearing the news from Tunisia, as well as reports of riots breaking out in Jordan and Algeria.

Luckily for this blog our fat little friend managed to waddle to Tunisia in 2007, and admirers of his prophetic gift (who can forget his enigmatic prediction of WMD's in Iraq?) would have expected nothing less than searing insights into Tunisia's future. And so it proved.

'On the face of it, [Tunisia] is one of Africa's most outstanding success stories. In the 2006–7 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, it was ranked No. 1 in Africa for economic competitiveness, even, incidentally, outpacing three European states (Italy, Greece, and Portugal). Home ownership is 80 percent. Life expectancy, the highest on the continent, is 72. Less than 4 percent of the population is below the poverty line, and the alleviation of misery by a "solidarity fund" has been adopted by the United Nations as a model program. Nine out of 10 households are connected to electricity and clean water. Tunisia is the first African state to have been accepted as an associate member of the European Union. Its Code of Personal Status was the first in the Arab world to abolish polygamy, and the veil and the burka are never seen. More than 40 percent of the judges and lawyers are female. The country makes delicious wine and even exports it to France. The Tunisian Jews make a potent grappa out of figs, which is available as a digestif in most restaurants....I remembered what my old friend the late Edward Said had told me: "You should go to Tunisia, Christopher. It's the gentlest country in Africa. Even the Islamists are highly civilized!" ' (Note: the word 'friend' has a technical definition in the Hitchens lexicon (Hitchecon?), meaning 'someone who hates me'. 'Old friend' on the other hand means 'someone who hated me but who is safely dead, and who, therefore, can't rebut my lies').

Hitchens then goes on to describe the main threat to this paradise. Would it by any chance be the torturing, murdering, thieving, dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali? Of course not.

'Mr. Ben Ali does not make lengthy speeches on TV every night, or appear in gorgeously barbaric uniforms, or live in a different palace for every day of the week. Tunisia has no grandiose armed forces, the curse of the rest of the continent, feeding parasitically off the national income and rewarding their own restlessness with the occasional coup. And the country is lucky in other ways as well. Its population is a smooth blend of black and Berber and Arab, and though it proudly defends its small minorities of Shiites, Christians (Saint Augustine spent time here), Baha'is, and Jews (there is a Jewish member of the Senate), it is otherwise uniformly Sunni. It has been spared the awful toxicity of ethnic and religious rivalry, which makes it very unusual in Africa. Its international airport is named Tunis-Carthage, evoking African roots without Afrocentric demagogy.'

In other words, although Hitchypoo is far too coy to state it, this was an American backed dictatorship, and, as we all know, American backed dictatorships are always rather super when compared to bad, wicked dictatorships that defy the US, like France.

Of course there must be a snake in this Eden, and there is. And guess what? It just happens to be Islamism. What a shocker.

'Tunisia's achievements, though real enough, are fragile. When the terrorists target tourists, they pick the economy's most vulnerable spot. (The Djerba atrocity had a real effect on that year's overall figures.) But, of course, they also isolate themselves, first by creating poverty and unemployment and second by violating the inflexible laws of Muslim hospitality. So this is the edge of uncertain awareness on which an outwardly happy and thriving society is poised.'

So there you go. It is 'Islamic terrorism' that has created all the poverty and unemployment in this 'thriving' country (and not say, Ben Ali's systematic looting of the country).

Hitchodamus concludes: 'An enclave of development, Tunisia is menaced by the harsh extremists of a desert religion, and ultimately by the desert itself. As with everything else in Africa, this is not a contest we can view with indifference.'. The word 'we' of course has a technical definition in the Hitchecon, meaning, 'rich white people like me'.

Well! The foolish masses of Tunisia, obviously having let their subscriptions to Vanity Fair lapse, chose not to believe in the good intentions of Mr Ben Ali, even though they have Christopher Hitchens' own personal word for what a splendid chap he is. What follows next is anyone's guess, but it would be difficult to be worse than the ghastly kleptocracy that has been overthrown. The main surprise is that Hitchens, his brilliant mind attuned to the very souls of the Tunisian masses, failed to see the coming upheaval. Perhaps he should have actually read the quote from Pliny the Elder that he copied and pasted out of the Wikipedia to up the word count at the beginning of his piece: "Ex Africa semper aliquid novi" ("There is always something new out of Africa").'

Santacide

2010-12-24T07:29:00.000-08:00

How Christopher Hitchens Murdered Santa

When my daughter has grown old enough to articulate (what I'm convinced she already secretly believes) that my every parenting decision has been wrong, thoroughly damaging, and clear grounds for lawsuit to cover therapy costs, I will at least be able to explain why I did not raise her to believe in Santa.

"Christopher Hitchens," I will say, as her eyes well up with tears. "Christopher Hitchens killed your Santa."

Wicked Wikileaks

2010-12-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

From behind Murdoch's firewall at Times (of London), we learn that Christopher has been sipping wine and nibbling cheese with the impeccably attired Ollie Kamm, although what these two could possibly have in common socially I am at a loss to articulate. Meanwhile, the Wikileaks Odyssey is providing far more entertainment value, so as a service to the thousands who still turn up here regularly in search of a laugh, here's one with a hilarious impersonation of Hilary.

Hitchens Meets Mary Worth

2010-12-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

Original

The Blair-Hitchens event in Toronto

2010-12-16T03:23:00.001-08:00

The Hitchens Watch Shura recently convened and has now declared a hudna against that infidel Peter Hitchens. Our Qassams shall not fire at that Zionist entity today. We had heard a treacherous and false rumor that the infidel Peter had made peace with The Great Satchens, given his brother's illness. But thank Allah, it looks like we can put those awful rumors to rest with PH's post, one that would have been more appropriately published here than at the Daily Mail. He calls bullshit on Chris' tedious, hackneyed, and self-indulgent "debates," and on his publicity-whoring in general. And he makes some perspicacious observations regarding Mr. Blair and the vulgar Chris Cult out there. That's why Peter, even though he'd like to lock up a chap like myself and toss away the key (just for enjoying more than the odd jazz cigarette!), is our "Hitchens Watch Hero Of The Week":

Guest post by Peter Hitchens

I'm asked to comment on my brother's encounter (styled by some a 'debate') with Anthony Blair in Toronto, recently broadcast on BBC radio. Delighted as I am that the BBC (which can and often does reduce an important Parliamentary event to three jokey minutes) has taken to broadcasting debates on major issues on Radio 4, I do wonder whether the habit will last, and why this particular one made it so swiftly on to the air.

I haven't in fact heard it in full, and don't expect to, though I've read a few accounts. I have in the past watched or listened to YouTube versions of many of my brother's meetings with opponents. These were at least interesting because his opponents were in fact opponents, and in many cases also scientists or theologians of note.

But I know from long experience and observation that Mr Blair is not an intellect of any kind, knows little about anything important and speaks (with a vacuous charm that passes me by) in cliches, both mental and verbal. I've also had for some time a grave problem with his self-description as a man of faith. When his actions are questioned, on Christian grounds, by leading exponents of that faith, Mr Blair tends to assume that he is right, and to imply that, in that case, we really ought to find another Pope, Archbishop, Moderator etc. He certainly took that view on the Iraq war, and I think his views on the Church's positions on sexual politics are of a similar sort.

Which is my second reason for reluctance to bother with this occasion. I'd also place Mr Blair - who famously said in Stevenage in April 1997, days before he came to office, 'I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation—the Beatles, colour TV, that’s the generation I come from' - very much on the same side as my brother in the moral and cultural arguments of our time. Perhaps he should really have said 'Rolling Stones' rather than 'Beatles' to achieve full congruence. He would now, but at that stage he was worried about votes.

I used this quotation as the opening epigraph in the original version of my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain' (it's not in the new edition, which has a new and different introduction) and was recently fascinated to discover on the web an account of the Stevenage evening by that fine writer Ian Jack, in the 'Independent'. In this, it's clear that Mr Blair greatly pleased his audience by promising not to spend any money on the Royal Yacht, and by underlining his commitment to sexual liberation.

In fact, I'm quite sure that both men owe a lot of the popularity and success of their lives to being in tune with the post-1968 Age of Aquarius ethos of a whole generation of successful, prosperous and self-satisfied baby-boomers. The two men's radical interventionist, anti-sovereignty, utopian support for the Iraq War (though entirely consistent with this position) goes a little too far for most boomers, whose strong sense of their own goodness forbids them to support any sort of war. I seem to recall an occasion a couple of years ago when my brother actually took a ride in Mr Blair's armoured car, for a friendly chat about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But, interestingly, most of my brother's fan club are prepared to forgive and forget about Iraq, and even for his sympathy with the Blair creature, because what really matters to them is the liberation from 'old-fashioned' and 'mediaeval' and 'repressive' moral systems, which is the real foundation for 21st century militant Godlessness. And it is his espousal of that position which has propelled him into intellectual superstardom in the USA. The ditching of Christianity is, alas, an idea whose time has come among the college-educated young of the USA.

After all, the same people generally still hate and despise me (where they've heard of me), even though I opposed the Iraq war, which they also opposed. And it's my attitude towards sex, drugs and rock and roll which causes them to do so.

Whereas what passes for the conservative movement in the USA (and to some extent here) is actually much more comfortable with my brother (thanks to his enthusiastic anti-Islamism, the badge of membership of the neo-conservative movement) than it is with me, with my inconvenient insistence on domestic conservatism which they find difficult and unattractive, and my preference for actual liberty over illusory security. My opposition to mass immigration (which some of my sillier critics like to pretend I never voice) also has something to do with this.

This is most educational, and it was pondering upon it which caused me to write 'The Cameron Delusion', where these paradoxes are addressed.

I'd also say that my brother gives more or less the same speech at all these debates, whoever his opponent is. I've joked for years that there was a major problem with the sound system at our clash in Grand Rapids, which meant that the speakers could not hear what the other one was saying properly (at one point I sat on the edge of the stage trying to catch what he was saying, and it was still so difficult to hear that I pondered going to sit in the audience. I probably should have done, and stayed there). While this bothered me quite a lot, it didn't trouble him, since he would have said pretty much the same thing whatever I said, and his assembled fan club (mystified by their very recent discovery of my very existence, and none too pleased by that discovery) would have whooped with joy over it.

Like many jokes, this is founded in truth. If I hear that thing about North Korea and the Celestial Dictatorship one more time, or the one about 'Created sick and commanded to be well', my eyelashes will start to ache. One of the pleasures of our recent non-debate, rightly described as a 'conversation', in Washington DC was that neither of us was performing, and so there were one or two genuine exchanges.

So I doubt if I'll get around to listening to the whole thing. And the reason I place the word 'debate' in inverted commas is that, like many others, I wondered - when I heard about the event - who was going to be on the other side.

By the way, a few words about the votes on these occasions, under which one side or the other is said to have 'won' - often because of a large switch of votes during the evening. I am suspicious, even when I win by these rules. Very few people come to such debates with an open mind or anxious to hear the other side. The system of taking a preliminary vote (in which the voters know that they will be polled again at the end) is an invitation to the mischievous and partisan to give a false or misleading vote the first time, and follow their real inclinations at the end - thus giving a false and misleading impression of the debating powers of those involved. This is so obvious, and such an obvious trick to play, that I am amazed nobody else ever seems to even ponder it, and that such votes are taken at face value.

I'm told by someone who was present at my brother's (and Stephen Fry's) attack on the RC Church in Central Hall Westminster that the size of the pro-RC vote at the beginning was absurdly out of tune with the whole mood of the audience. Of course that 'vote' had collapsed at the end.

This is no surprise. The debate-going classes in central London are far more likely to be urban secular liberals than suburban Christians, for a thousand obvious reasons.

Paths Of Glory Right Up Hitch's Ally

2010-12-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

By Stabler

This past month the left tried to make a little hay out of a revelation in George's W. Bush's ungodly horrible "Decision Points." Mitch McConnell, Bush's ghostwriter clumsily reveals, was publicly decrying the Dem's call for troop withdrawals at the same time he was asking Bush for them to help with the election. So, we learn, sometimes politics actually enters into matters of war and peace.

McConnell is only echoing, of course, Adolph Menjou's pragmatic Gen. George Broulard in Stanley Kubrick's "Paths Of Glory (1957)," just given a loaded-with-extras rerelease by Criterion. We shouldn't be too hard on McConell's two faced gamesmanship. Kubrick's much beloved anti-war film seems to softly echo "this is how it always been and will always be." Obama, who was elected on the basis of a no risk vote against Bush's invasion of Iraq, can be charitably seen in no hurry to set the Military indulgences he ran against right.

Hitchens, in his daring-of-progressives-days, once used Kubrick to pummel Clinton, I think mixing up the Sterling Haden and Keenan Wynn characters in "Dr. Stangelove." Yet when it was time for W to make War, Hitchens was way beyond satire, celebrating Haliburton and shrugging off the few bad apples of Abu Garab.

"Paths of Glory" is, I think, a simple film, yet it's not only the likes of Hitchens who seem to miss or evade it's point. War is a commercial and political endeavor where people's lives are weighed like any other product, and the risk of death in ennobled and celebrated by those who are noticeably not dead. Gen. Mireau (a perfect performance by George Macready) is not a phony when he says "the man you stabbed in the back was a soldier!" The point is a soldier can easily be just another man: vain, stupid, corruptible.

Bush's book also contains what might be the final pathetic burp in the ugly history of what Hitchens still euphemistically refers to as "regime change." Screaming for George W to further abuse his power of Presidential Pardon, Haliburton's boy, deferment king Dick Cheney, screamed at his heretofore pliable Boss "You don't leave a wounded man on the battlefield!" W hoped his old friend would eventually forget the anger forged by his incident, and apparently he did.

Some are repelled by the scene at the end of the film where Kirk Douglas suffers a brief moment of weakness, allowing his superior to witness his frayed contempt for the whole grotesque, stinking enterprise. I think it's critical and, again, rather the point of the whole thing. I think it nicely captures a correct response to a slimy war monger like Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens' lame-ass attempt to pile on Julian Assange

2010-12-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

On Wikileaks and Assange, Hitchens got it completely backward. He encouraged Julian Assange to turn himself in - not to Interpol to answer questions about the Swedish sex case - but directly to the lynch mob that wants Assange 'eliminated' in one way or another. Smart advice, eh?

Hitchens vs. Assange: Who's the real megalomaniac?

I repeat, Hitch's recommendation to Assange on Monday was this: hide from the "laughingstock" Interpol ("what he really ought to do," wrote Hitch), but instead face the juridical system for his Wikileaks work, like Hitchens would've done back in '76 when he had the chance to reveal a state secret: "I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences." The bravest of them all, that Hitch, esp. 35 years in hindsight.

Here's just one problem with Hitch's scenario: In relation to his work with Wikileaks, Assange has not been charged with any crimes. Nor is or was he ever 'wanted' by the authorities for questioning in relation to Wikileaks activity. So, what the hell is Hitchens talking about? Has Assange dodged any court challenges related to his work? Absolutely not.

A couple other essential points. Hitch's description of Assange as a "micro-megalomaniac" couldn't have been more poorly timed, if you think about it. Assange has just been demonstrating his actual power and grandeur by effectively taking on the entire United States government. Megalomania is defined as, "a mental illness characterized by delusions of grandeur, power, wealth, etc."

Delusions? If anything, Assange is not just flavor of the week and man of the year; he's a historically significant individual. Not that he's one to boast: Assange has behaved rather modestly throughout the whole process...unlike, say, Chris Hitchens who comes a lot closer to being a megalomaniac.

Hitchens also criticized Assange for "resenting the civilization that nurtured him." You really gotta love this one, coming from Hitchens: A man who spent much of the 70's, 80's and 90's resenting the "civilization" that nurtured him. I guess because Hitchens failed at his resentment, he took a 'well, if you can't beat him, join 'em' turn.

As for Assange having been 'nurtured by civilization', I refer readers to the New Yorker profile which makes plain Assange's family's attempts (largely successful) to avoid so-called civilization. And a very good thing too, for us.

One line I do agree with Hitchens on is this: "The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy."

And yet in the same article Hitch tries to tell us Assange is suffering from delusions of grandeur?

On WikiLeaks

2010-12-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

Hitch's position:

http://www.slate.com/id/2276857/

Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange

The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.

My position:

Give early and often!

Crippled, dying Iraqi child: Christopher Hitchens is my hero of 2010.

2010-12-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

From now until Christmas Eve, the Guardian will be asking people to nominate their heroes and villains of 2010. To kick off, the paper asked a nameless, dying Iraqi child, who lost his mother and father in the sectarian bloodshed of 2009.

'Eloquent, witty, literate, intelligent, knowledgeable, brave, erudite, hard-working, honest (who could forget his clean-through skewering of Mother Teresa's hypocrisy?), arguably the most formidable debater alive today yet at the same time the most gentlemanly, Christopher Hitchens is a giant of the mind and a model of courage,' argues the nameless child, who will not live for much longer. 'A lesser man would have seized the excuse of a mortal illness to duck responsibility and take it easy. Not this soldier. He will not go gentle into that good night; but instead of a futile raging against the dying of the light he rages, with redoubled energy (and concentrated power in his vibrant, Richard Burton tones) against the same obscurantist, vicious or just plain silly targets as have long engaged him,' the child continued, pausing only to sob uncontrollably at the thought of his dead brother, killed in an American air attack. 'But he never rants. His is a controlled, disciplined rage, and don't get on the wrong side of it,' argued the child, who has suffered almost constant psychological and physical ill health after prolonged exposure to depleted Uranium and white phosphorus, both used illegally by the Americans.

'Like Bertrand Russell, Hitch "would scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation". He laughs off the spiritual vultures eager for a death-bed conversion, and dismisses – but with unfailingly gracious courtesy – the many schadenfreudian prayers for his recovery. As Daniel Dennett said, in similar circumstances, "And did you also sacrifice a goat?"' stated the child, who, unlike Hitchens, was born into poverty and who will die there, having never having had the advantages of a public school/Oxbridge education, nor the constant attention of the world's media.

'I devoutly hope (not pray),' the boy continued, after wheezing and pausing for breath ''that we shall see realised the 5% chance of recovery that modern doctors (not ancient gods) can offer. And if it is not to be – if, in his own gallantly insouciant words, he has to leave the party early – he will bequeath us an example worth following for centuries to come.' The child then paused,before hobbling off to beg for change from the constant stream of passing Iraqis desperately trying, economically, to keep their heads above water, before he was lost from sight, as another power cut plunged the street into darkness.

Phony Tony and his whiskey drinking crony Bitchin' Hitchens talk baloney in Toronto while fans pony up to $500 a ticket

2010-11-26T23:53:00.001-08:00

Man with his burning soul
Has but an hour of breath
To build a ship of Truth
In which his soul may
Sail on the sea of death
For death takes toll
Of beauty, courage, youth
Of all but Truth.

~ John Masefield

From CBS News: Original article Here

Blair argued for the proposition that religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it.

Preliminary results on the Munk website said 68 per cent of the votes backed Hitchens and 32 per cent Blair.

Both men gained about 10 percentage points from the pre-debate standings, when 21 per cent were undecided.

Hitchens argued that religion is divisive and causes conflicts or makes them worse.

Blair conceded that "horrific acts of evil" have been committed in the name of religion, but said people like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, who opposed religion, had been evil, too. "I agree in a world without religion, that the religious fanatics may be gone, but I ask you: Would fanaticism be gone?"

Blair pointed to the Northern Ireland peace process as an example of different religions working for peace.

Hitchens replied that 400 years of religious warfare in Ireland entailed "people killing each other's children depending on what kind of Christian they were."

"To terrify children with the image of hell … to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?" Hitchens said.

Blair said bigotry and prejudice are not "wholly owned subsidiaries" of religion. But he said the hardest argument he faced was the assertion that evil done in the name of religion is based in scripture.

The ancient religious texts contain many ideas that now appear "very strange and outdated," he said, but religions must be seen as a whole.

Betrayal was his business, and business was good

2010-11-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

Photo of Hitch by Jamie James Medina for the Observer, who have been talking to The Man Himself.

—By Stabler
As most of us noticed, the Bluementhal affair never found it's way into "Hitch-22". Well, there's never room for everything, but since things have been kind of QUIET on the Watch; let's let Richard Thompson cover the whole thing.

Unfortunately, embedding of this video has been disabled, so you'll have to visit YouTube.

Let's rock the soul of America

2010-11-10T22:39:00.001-08:00

The greatest US-based British public intellectual of his generation, Ian Hunter, brings tears to my eyes every time I hear Soul of America. The lyrics of this song are open to manifold interpretation, but I very much like the way the creator of this video has chosen to illustrate the story.

Tricky Hitch: A cancer on the literacy

2010-11-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

By Stabler

Mark Feldstein's "Poisoning The Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the rise of Washington's Scandal Culture", argues well against those smitten fanboys who still insist Hitch's bloated doggerel is "good writing." The subject of the book is, of all things, the subject of the book, not the writer's assorted bigotries and dubious assertions. Sorry Hitchens fans, Feldstein seems to have gone in for the kind of "overly literal fact checking" Hitchens the "journalist" decries. When a point is in dispute (most notably weather Nixon gave Howard Hunt the order to murder Anderson) it is presented as such.

You want to read this book. Hilarious, frightening, stranger-than-fiction stuff on almost every page, Feldstein raises some terrible questions about the Nixon Era and leaves some for the readers to ponder themselves. Feldstein's premise, that Nixon and Anderson were different sides of the same coin, may not fully blossom, but it's at the very least an amazing compare and contrast.

Indeed, Hitchwatchers may find some interesting points where Anderson and Hitchens meet on the graft. Anderson had dogged Nixon for years by the time he became President, exposing the shady aspects of his early campaign financing and reaching a critical mass during the amazing but now forgotten ITT scandal of Nixon's first term. Anderson became a household name, liberal hero, and was on the cover of Time when it was still a mark of distinction. His often questionable scruples were no problem for his loyal readership.

At the height of his celebrity, however, Anderson damaged his credibility by printing falsehoods about McGovern's would be running mate, refusing to retract them even after they had been shown to be false. After somehow being left behind on the Watergate scandal, he tried to keep his mojo going by nonsensical attacks on Carter. Reliably far right ABC rewarded him with a silly regular segment on "Good Morning America" and Anderson spent years as a rather pathetic toady for Ronald Reagan, who stroked his ego and made him the high access equivalent of what Bob Woodward is now.

At book's end, of course, Feldstein notes that Nixon would somehow have his revenge through Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Hitch's pro-Iraq comrade Henry Kissinger. When Hitch first assisted Bush in getting elected (term one) and then flat out endorsed him (term two) he was clearly casting his vote in favor of Richard Nixon's far right conception of the Imperial Presidency; a notion of unrestricted power the man or woman in the White House is unlikely to ever give back without a fight.

Like Anderson, Hitchens got very rich. We should laugh mordantly, however, when Hitch now dreams in print of Kissinger's death. Those in Nixon's motley brood can now go to their maker with a sense of mission accomplished; and Hitchens was there to lend full support when the chips were up.

Only language they understood

2010-11-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

This is from the recent meeting at the Pew Forum. It's nice to see that since becoming a skinhead, Christopher has lost none of his bloodlust against the mullahs or his enthusiasm for Bolshevism. (The link will take you to a full transcript of the discussion.)

PETER HITCHENS: On the question of Stalin, yes, it is absolutely true that at that moment, when the mummy of Lenin had been dispatched, I think, to Kuybyshev and the Soviet government somewhere else, and the whole thing was in headlong, total retreat and Stalin’s pact with Hitler, which Stalin had believed in long after Hitler had ceased to do so, had been shown to be wrong, but to such an extent that Stalin would not actually order his own troops into the defense of the motherland because he believed the pact was still in existence for some days.

In the case of that, yes, he did call on the church. He also called on Russian patriotism, and statues of Mikhail Kutuzov began to appear in the streets. All this was dragged out because it was a matter of total desperation. What people should observe is that as soon as the danger was over, the persecution was redoubled, and particularly under Nikita Khrushchev. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a very severe persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. It was purely opportunist, and it was the only moment at which they made that gesture at all.

So I don’t think it undermined — one small point I do want to come back to, by the way — Christopher was praising Kemal Ataturk for his treatment of the mullahs. And I often wonder how he views Stalin’s exactly parallel treatment of the same people in Soviet Central Asia at the same time, almost identical — ceremonies in which veils were burned in the public square, mullahs were indeed shot. Now, because that was done by Stalin —

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Only language they understood.

PETER HITCHENS: — was that bad, or was it OK?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine.

PETER HITCHENS: Right, OK. I’d like to have that settled. You’re never asked anything like enough about your attitude towards the Soviet Revolution, but —

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine, I’m long overdue. People will be nostalgic for it before long.

PETER HITCHENS: I’ll bear that in mind.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yeah, they will. Wait and see.

Mad Sam Harris (Continued)

2010-10-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

Mainly because Blogger seemed to be having a nervous breakdown over the size of my post, here is a continuation of my brief look at the 'thought' of Sam Harris. To continue quoting from Meera Nanda's article, here she looks at three of his key, most important, political and metaphysical assumptions.

'Here are three of his assumptions, in an increasing order of obfuscation. First here is this nugget, tucked away in the end notes, which celebrates the prospect of (a) revival of (the) occult: Indeed, the future looks like the past… We may live to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate …the mind –in dreams, in trance, in psychedelic swoon – in search for the sacred” (end note 23, p. 290).

It is hard to believe that the author of this stuff is the most celebrated rationalist of our troubled times.

Secondly, Harris rejects a naturalistic understanding of nature and the human mind......this is nothing but the good old mind-matter holism, the first principle of all New Age beliefs.

Again, the problem is not that Harris holds these beliefs. The problem is that Harris wants to convince us that it is the very height of rationality to hold these beliefs.

Thirdly...Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences, or as he puts it, altered mental states induced by spiritual practices can “uncover genuine facts about the world” (p. 40).... Again, as before, he tries to distance himself from the more extravagant metaphysical schemes. But he buys into the basic idea that what mystics see in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds....'

To put it mildly these are all highly questionable propositions. But this is the context for his main political propositions, which are, essentially, to support George Bush's 'War on Terror'. However, to merely state that is to be grossly unfair...to George Bush. In reality, Harris is far to the Right of Bush: indeed, one has to look to the extremist, armed 'militias' to find people, at least in the United States, as right wing as Harris. Harris has apparently argued that 'some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them'. Not for stating them, mind, or acting on them. For believing them. His views on Islam have been described as 'scientifically baseless, psychologically uninformed, politically naïve, and counterproductive' by Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has actually studied Islam (unlike Harris, who, until recently, had no post-graduate academic qualifications of any sort). When he isn't proposing the existence of ESP or reincarnation, Harris is also supporting the invasion of Iraq, terror bombing of Muslims, and torture. (Harris's 'defence' against the argument that he supports these positions can be found here: since he essentially admits all the charges and makes some more borderline racist/ethnocentric comments in the process, whether it really gets him off the hook is a bit of a moot point).

To repeat, in the United States, Harris is politically at home with extremist militias. In the UK and Europe, on the other hand, he feels most at home amongst fascists.This last position is so right wing that even Christopher Hitchens was driven to murmur that this was slightly 'irresponsible'.

Needless to say, the fact that Harris is, not to put too fine a point on it, a nutter, has not restricted his access to the Western media. Indeed, this enemy of Western science was recently given a fawning interview in New Scientist, where his ramblings about morality (play to your strengths, Sam, why don't you) were indulgently received. But of course to state that the success of a bug eyed right wing loon like Harris (who is, in addition to his other charms, clearly a humourless imbecile) might indicate that something is rotten in contemporary Western culture is of course verboten. But, as we continue to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen, and new concentration camps and torture chambers are being built by 'us' yearly, and new wars even now are being planned in the Pentagon: perhaps it's something worth thinking about. As Tony Blair might say, (and Christopher Hitchens once did say about Paul Johnson) it's not enough to be tough on Sam Harris.

We must be tough on the causes of Sam Harris.