I watched Christopher Hitchens on Tim Russert's show after the Cardinals game, and he dropped some whopping
Alas, there's no transcript that I can find but, to paraphrase, in admitting that the resistence was underestimated in Iraq, he says that this just prooves that Iraq was in far worse disrepair than we'd thought, hence another justification for the war. He calls this a fair induction. Right. Then he drops another bomb by saying that the Iraqis can vote out the United States if they wish (a defence against the Truth of the argument that no one native likes an occupier), and thus it's a fair to draw the conclusion that the resistance is in the great minority because their violence has the effect of delaying elections, which they do out of fear that the majority would vote to continue the American presence.
This is shitty reasoning on so many levels, but the main one is this: the Iraqi resistence, like any resistence in any country that has had a colonial history, will assume that the occupier operates in Bad Faith. Vis Iraq, that assumtpion has proven correct innumerable times. In fact, that assumption is why many -- whom Hitchens sneered at and slandered in the grossest way -- were anti-war to begin with. You can't expect ex Nixon and Ford hacks to operate in Good Faith; you can't expect The Enron Administration to be honest with regard to its motives involving petroleum-producing countries; you can't expect people who've thwarted democracy in Florida and attempted to in Venezuela to be honest democracy-builders elsewhere. You can't expect cynical and crooked bastards to be honest and idealist, which was how the "liberation" was marketed.
Opposite of Hitch was his boss at Vanity Fair, who argued, excellently, that what we've done was a mistake and what it's cost US at home is precious and possibly, scarily, permanent. Hitch was mild -- no charges of fellow-travelling with fascists and no sneering at protestors this time -- and it's small wonder why: one doesn't insult the boss in public. Hitch knows who butters his bread.
Still, his "Anything Goes" anti-jihad rhetoric (so much like the "Anything Goes" rhetoric and policies of the True Believer anti-communists he rightly despised back in the days that he was human) was pretty much his standard issue as of late. He closed by "joking" that he was going to invest in some military industry stocks. Ha hah.
Fuck you, Hitch.
** -- Sorry, I had to edit and clarify a bit, because I was a bit sloshy when I first wrote it, something Hitch himself can fully appreciate.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 9:56 PM
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