Wow, Christopher Hitchens has really lost it these days
As part of the brand extension, we will occasionally be looking at other Decentists as well as Dave and Nick. Although I have to say that if they are all like the state of Christopher Hitchens these days we will not be doing it very often. Didn't this guy used to be at least the intellectual equal of Aaronovitch? Regular commentor Sonic and The Poor Man Institute have the goods. I am presuming that Aaro does not endorse Hitchens' conclusion that "the last phony pacifist should be strangled with the guts of the last suicide bomber", Nick I am less sure about.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 3/21/2006 09:26:00 AM
5 Comments:
And kudos to the editors of Slate for the links to Hitchens's previous articles at the foot. The first one is quite brilliant: invasion is necessary because Saddam's regime is about to implode and Shia and Sunni will then be at one another's throats. Invade now to forestall this possibility?
Incidentally, isn't there a subsequent Hitch article where he argues that without invasion Saddam would have continued indefinitely until replaced by the worse Qusay and Uday?
Capt Cab, I believe there is. It's in his book "Regime Change" which I seem to have tossed aside lightly. Or perhaps hurled with great force. Either way, I can't find it. If I do, I'll let you know.
among other delusions, doesn't this reveal his advanced state of SCOOBYDOOBYDISMUS? He shakes his raging fist, his masterplan ruined by those pesky meddlesome kids the "phony pacifists" -- when actually of course, even if the entire anti-war left had swung in joyfully behind him, the problems this war faced from the outset as a viable project wd have been the same... THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: take ALL the column-space CH has wasted on the sins of the stoppers, and imagine it had been devoted instead to fiercely ensuring the war got fought the way he now says he'd have liked -- no torture, at least some forward planning etc etc
what difference might it actually have made? if none, then his war was a hideous bust from the outset; if lots, well, who forced him to choose to use so much more of his energy harrying the (in the end irrelevant) "phony pacifists" anyway?
What does that last line mean? That he hopes anti-war protestors get blown up by suicide bombers?
The middle bit reads like a slightly more sophisticated version of Steven Den Beste's famous explanation of how France could intervene on Iraq's side, and how the US would counteract it (it mainly involved the Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier sailing around in circles in the Gulf being blown up by F16s).
replace pacifists with kings and bombers with priests and google, it's a well known quote.
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