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The torch in the darkness, Christopher Hitchens - R.I.P.
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Well, other than to verify that they, in fact, existed. Hitchens argued that for an informed opinion you have to actually be informed. The idea that one needs to merely have heard of an atrocity is rather silly in his opinion.
I wonder if, had Hitchens had a psychic gift of foresight, and had known that by the end of the occupation that the US military would be caught dumping bodies into landfill, if he still would have supported US military action in Iraq.
The simple fact is that we knew Saddam was evil. We knew that he was killing people, violating human rights, suppressing basic freedoms, supporting unconscionable inequality of wealth.
This is not a matter of controversy. The matters of controversy were whether a military occupation would result in worse outcomes than non-military sanctions - whether the loss of life, civilian and military, would be worth it; whether the economic cost would be worth it; whether the regional political chaos it would bring would be worth it; whether the potential violations of international law would be worth it.
The personal experience Hitchens describes does not address the fundamental matters of disagreement. All it says is, "Saddam was a really bad man."
Furthermore, his hawkish attitude wasn't simply in regards to Iraq. He was intensely hawkish regarding Afghanistan as well, and while I supported the war in Afghanistan on basic self-defense grounds (we were attacked and we have the right to retaliate against our attacker), his articles and essays on the subject bordered on Islamophobia, and his justifications for supporting both wars were often spurious. He was also an ardent supporter of the Saddam-Al Qaeda link, and while I'm not going to argue that such a collaboration was impossible, he treated it as a matter of settled fact when the evidence for it is still, to this day, tenuous.
I feel for the experience he had. I'm not confident that I would have been able to witness what he witnessed without breaking somehow myself. However, Hitchens self-identified as a skeptic, and the first duty of a skeptic is to stick to rational argumentation using logic and evidence. This does not mean a skeptic must be unemotional; however it does mean that the intense personal anecdote should not override basic burdens of proof.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So this is pretty much a lie.
And you deny that the confrontation with the Barbary states occurred?
yeah he probably wouldn't have liked you much either.
To appropriate a quote from a more creative author:
When a true genius appears in the world,
you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Of course not, but I'm also not the kind of scum who'd think to connect it to America's War With Islam, because 'Jefferson also fought Islamic terrorists'.
He didn't make that connection. He wrote about Jefferson's engagement with the Barbary States in response to an ignorant outcry that the idea of an imperialistic American export of democracy was some recent trend.
There's a relationship between the Barbary Wars and the export of democracy? Really?
He could be a very conflicting person. Part of me thinks that some of his position was him simply being a contrarian for the sake of debate. He obviously loved to debate, and I'm wondering how many times he took and stuck with a position just to play Devil's advocate. Whether you liked him or not, he could really make you think hard about your own positions and your reasoning.
Holy crap. I fully expected Kissinger buried somewhere by now. Like, maybe he saw Obama get elected, but that's as close as I can get that guy to 2011. ...This is all coming out wrong, isn't it?
Well his collapse would probably be disastrous, it's a question of whether or not intervening would give a better result.
Hitchens undeniable had a hawkish attitude towards foreign intervention. But it wasn't an unreasonable one. He was against the idea that military intervention is bad "because violence never solved anything, dude" and thus supported a war on Iraq because he thought it would work. And it's still hard to argue that not intervening would've been better. Amercan mismanagement of the war is a given, even the motivations for the war were probably less than pure, but the idea that a war against Iraq was a bad thing in the first place is rather unclear.
And to be honest, my thoughts about whether war is a good idea or not have been heavily influenced by this exact war.
If by 'great' you mean 'disgusting and childish, as is the norm for goonspeak', then I agree.
No. That historical fact is brought up in response to the idea that American Imperialism fuels terrorism. His thought boils down to "they would hate us anyway" because in the Barbary Wars, the Barbary states felt it was their duty to make war on sinners and those that didn't recognize their authority. On Bill Maher, he says that Bin Laden isn't anti-Imperialist, he doesn't care about Palestinians, and that he wants an Islamic empire/return of the caliphate.
I'm still sorting it all out in my head.
That's pretty much total bullshit. Osama disliked us because we are propping up a sinful elite in Saudi Arabia. Honestly, there's a kernel of truth in that, as the SA monarchy is basically Versailles.
Well, Dawkins wrote one of the most influential books on evolution if that helps.
No, Osama disliked you because he was a fanatic, and had a toxic view of the world (see: his reaction to improving conditions in East Timor).
Seeing as at no point was our intervention in Iraq because of the humanitarian conditions that would have resulted from the fall of Saddam, I would say that yes. Yes it was a bad idea from the getgo.
Generalizations to the tune of "the US totally did it only for the oil and power" are to be laughed at. For most it was a war against the evils of Saddam.
Yeah, because I said that. One, it was because Saddam was supposedly a threat against us, which was disingenuous at best. Two, we had absolutely no plan for when Saddam was gone, so I am somewhat leery of that justification.
His demands included the removal of American bases which did not exist (so, that's a pretty difficult demand to appease), the ending of an occupation which had never occurred, the establishment of Sharia law across the Persian Gulf, the eradication of such deprivations as homosexuality, gambling and drinking,
He also believed in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, that used the 'Western Crusaders' as pawns against Arabic states:
That is the raving of a mad man, not a legitimate grievance. It's killing your neighbour's dog, and then screaming in the courtroom about how It was being trained to enslave you with it's hypnotic gaze.
Look at his biography. He went radical over the excesses of the Saudi royal family and court.
The obvious argument is that there are a lot of countries with a lot of evils, and I never really got clarity on what Hitchens had to say about that. I mean, I guess it's possible he wanted to intervene in all of them? Or maybe he imagined intervention to be a quick, minimalist process like Libya? Or maybe that Iraq had a special place as a threat and as an inhuman evil that the war as it was carried out was warranted?
You do not think he was a radical when he was murdering his colleagues in his teen years?
For most who? The humanitarian justification for the war mostly started showing up once it was obvious that the mushroom cloud was a bad joke. Yes, Saddam was evil blah blah was constantly being said, but it was a side dish to the main course of imminent threat of massive WMD attacks that Iraq was about to be capable of (man, totally). And a bunch of bullshit about 9/11.
I depended on which TV stations or new articles you read. Fox News (in concert with Cheney, Rove, Juliani and Rumsfeld) played-up the ridiculous 9/11 'connection', and the nuclear weapons potential. Yes, Hitchens was on the nuclear bandwagon (I suspect that he was just using it as a way to mobilize support rather than actually believing it himself, as I said before), and it's pretty clear now that there was no Iraqi program to construct nuclear weapons - though I will have to say, it's not like it's difficult to put together a fission bomb anyway.
In Canada, the CBC was divided strictly over the humanitarian pros vs cons, as was the left-wing print & blogosphere. If you did not allow the fascists to bisect your view of the opinion surrounding the invasion, the sane portion of the debate (it was by no means equal, of course - but just because the pro-war left was in the minority doesn't somehow discount their arguments) was about whether the costs of the invasion would outweigh letting the Ba'ath party run it's course.
By now, I'd say it's pretty cut and dry, thanks to the methods used by the American military, that the average Iraqi citizen would've been better off just left in the shadow of the dictatorship. Which is embarrassing.
I included "threat against other countries" as one of the evils. Unless you want to argue that it would've been fine if he had promised to keep the killing within his own borders it's rather hard to separate.
Well from what I've read he basically though it would be a quickish intervention, and during the time he gave an indication of also supporting such things against other "evil" nations. Keep in mind that it was 2003 and the Iraq-war hadn't become the massive shitfuck of a clusterfuck it is. Afghanistan looked like a succes and a relatively prominent idea was that showing how the west was totally cool and awesome and helping the people would result in a positive effect in those regions that were more ambiguous on evuls.
I mean, we're about 7 years or so past that. Shit changed. We found out that a whole lot of shit told to us wasn't actually true, we saw that the US military didn't actually know how to do it and also that the peoples weren't as impressed as was thought. But that's fucking hindsight. Most of those against the invasion at the start didn't object because the intel was bullshit, they objected because they disagreed with the principle. (or distrusted the US, which while understandable now wasn't that common during the time)
You're confusing the plan with the idea. Yes, the plan turned out to be absolutely shit. Duh. Do you think Hitchens agreed with the way they war went or something?
He wasn't a fucking politician, he was a writer/journalist. He said little else than "Saddam is evil and should be gotten rid off because holy shit people are way dying over there." He used the same arguments as a bunch of people used to intervene against Hitler during the 40s.
Well then, he was a damn hypocrite because Saddam was not alone in being a head of state that was a monster to his own people. So why didn't we intervene elsewhere? Oh right, because WMDs. Well, oopsies. And since he was not involved with the planning or execution of the war, than the methods should absolutely have been considered. Look, he was a very smart man. But on the Iraq issue he was wrong.
Man, nuclear weapons weren't even a thing in any of the news I got. WMD's like mustardgas or some shit yes but no direct threats to us.
yeah the discussion was basically over whether intervening would quicken and solve the problems or whether letting shit get nasty would solve it. Hitchens was in the minority but by no means alone. In a time where none of us knew what the fuck would eventually happen it wasn't unreasonable.
The initial discussion had no idea about the methods that were going to be used, nor the more general war or terror shit that happened anyway.