Is that Halal?

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at March 20, 2007 5:53 PM

Tell it to the Marines.

Posted by: pez at March 20, 2007 5:59 PM

From the article:

We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers

Is "Naseem" working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s weekly paper Reza Faker now? What's up with the obsession with blue-eyed blondes? It sounds rather racist and supremecist, and won't gain them much sympathy from the multiculturalist crowd.

Posted by: special_guest at March 20, 2007 6:00 PM

Yeah, heh, heh, heh -- This would make yet another great card for Hugh's "Halal/Haram" board game!

Posted by: J.S. at March 20, 2007 6:00 PM

From the article:

and feed them to our fighting cocks.

The quote was clearly truncated.

Posted by: special_guest at March 20, 2007 6:07 PM

“We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks.”

… is it me or is that more than just a little homoerotic?

Posted by: Alone at March 20, 2007 6:07 PM

Roosters? Feed American soldiers to the roosters?

These days I am often led to think of Senator Foghorn Leghorn.

But thinking of Senator Foghorn Leghorn is not a result only of the Iraqis threatening to throw our soldiers to those roosters. No, there are other reasons for such a thought.

Look at Congress.

On the one side, those Bush loyalists, who repeat all the same idiotic phrases instead of showing they have minds of their own. What are those phrases? Oh, that "we can't cut and run." That "failure in Iraq is not an option." That "we can't leave until the mission is accomplished." That "we need to achieve victory in Iraq." That "if we don't deal with them over there, they will follow us home and we'll have to deal with them over here."

Every single one of these phrases does not stand up to ten seconds of intelligent scrutiny. What is the "mission"and why would it, as Bush defines or tries to define it, helpful to the effort too weaken the Camp of Islam? What is that "victory" that he prates agout? What does it mean to say "they will follow us home" and then "we'll have to deal with them over here"? Aren't there millions of Muslims, all of them inculcated with the idea of the duty of Jihad to spread Islam, and at least quite a few of them taking that duty seriously indeed, even if they are inclined at times to lie low, or to conduct Jihad using the "money weapon" and Daw'a and demographic conquest, rather than bombs in subways, while all Bush can talk about, while Western Europe is slowly islamized, is this goddam "war on terror"?

And then there are the Democrats, who oppose the war but have yet to offer the kind of criticism offered here, the unanswerable and deadly kind, the kind that frightens the Bush administration because it shows up the folly of that Iraq War: that it makes no sense if one has correctly identified the war not as "war on terror" but as a world-wide campaign, between the Camp of Islam on the one hand, with its many and varied instruments of Jihad (vast sums --trillions -- of unmerited oil money, tens of millions of Muslims carelessly allowed to enter, and settle, deep within the Lands of the Infidels, where they conduct campaigns of Da'wa that are unhkindered, and procreate at rates much higher than the indigenous non-Muslims, and keep up steady pressure everywhere, never givinig up, for changes in the social arrangements and legal and political institutions of the Infidel nations, to which they cannot, as Muslims, possibly feel any real loyalty, for their loyalty must be, they are tuaght, only to the umma al-islamiyya and the need to spread Islam so that "Islam dominates and is not to be dominated."

No, instead we get Democratic blowhards who appear incapable of explaining to the public that the best reason for leaving Iraq is that it ties us down, it squanders enormous resrouces, it does terrible damage to our military, it preoccupies us and weakens us in the very place where the most important fissures within the Camp of Islam -- sectarian and ethnic -- are there for the exploiting, if only we got out of the way.

What, ladies and gentlemen, would you think of people who cannot stand the American presence in Iraq but apparently cannot bring themselves to recognize, much less articulate, the most convincing and unanswerable of reasons why such a withdrawal -- an immediate withdrawal -- makes sense? Why?

Perhaps you can understand, then, why the mention of feeding American soldiers to roosters made me think again -- not for the first time these last few months and years -- of Senator Foghorn Leghorn. In a certain sense, American soldiers have been fed, for quite some time, to roosters --to all those Senator-Foghorn-Leghorns who simply will not take the time to study the clear doctrines of Islam, or the history of Islamic conquest, or the psychology of Islam, or the history of the mistreatment of non-Muslims under Islam, or all the other things that would inexorably lead them to exactly my conclusions, put up here hundreds of times.

Yes, the Executive and Legislative branches, both of them, with their foghorn-leghorn braggart soldiers and why-can't-we-all-get-alongers, offer, on both sides of the aisle, a spectacle that many Americans, confused, not quite knowing what to support, and expecting to have leaders -- or those "taking a leadership role" -- who will both know how to instruct, and to protect them.

But they mostly don't because they mostly can't because they mostly won't stop to learn what they have a solemn duty, at this point, to learn.

Foghorn Leghorns. Roosters. And other obvious words that come swimmingly to mind.

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 6:07 PM

Sanctions must be drying up their supply of Chicken Feed.

What a cover story for a couple of Iranian Officers getting out of Dodge while there is still time.

Posted by: flowerknife_us at March 20, 2007 6:11 PM

To the powers that be: Thank you for the judicious editing of my previous post. It is an improvement.

Posted by: special_guest at March 20, 2007 6:15 PM

That bantam rooster, Dubya the Dhimwit, doesn't want to look like a loser. He was so afraid of losing the '04 election, that he went ahead and did a little warmongering so he could boast, "I am a WAR PRESIDENT." Predictably, the American electorate did not oust its chief exec during war.

The republican politicos now don't want to look like losers. And the Democrats don't want to be smeared as the party that let America lose.

What frustrates, truly, is that this country is NOW READY TO HEAR AND READY TO LEARN!!!! I know it because I espouse the gospel of Islamophobia at work and at play and when I talk, people listen very, very carefully. If only I had the audience of a presidential candidate...

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at March 20, 2007 6:21 PM

What is a rooster but a male 'chicken'?

Yet is makes perfect sense that leaving the homicide to poultry frees up Amad to the all-CONsuming work of scripting his tirade of threats against the world body. It takes a lot of effort to prepare for his Nora Desmond moment before the world's cameras.

Imagine the shock and awe when he announces Iran has a new and potent weapon, chickens of mass destruction.

Such an announcement is sure to send shivers down the spines of the worlds' leaders. Even Colonel Sanders will turn over in his grave.

Cock and bull is Iran's stock-in-trade.

Posted by: BurkasforHitlery at March 20, 2007 6:21 PM

Damn, Hugh, you beat me to the punch with Foghorn Leghorn. LOL.

Posted by: Foehammer at March 20, 2007 6:22 PM

This is yet another sterling example of the high degree of civilization attained by Islamic culture.

Does anyone have any info on the "recent disappearance of three high-profile Iranian officers"? Who said they were "kidnapped", from where and by whom?

Posted by: USBeast at March 20, 2007 6:24 PM

"feed them to roosters"

Our enemy continues to redefine themselves.

Posted by: champ at March 20, 2007 6:24 PM

Hugh, Foghorn Leghorn was a Warner Brothers cartoon charactor base on a radio and (later) movie character called Senator Claghorn, a well meaning Southern gentleman who believed that 'Dixie' was the national anthem.

Posted by: USBeast at March 20, 2007 6:28 PM

Hugh said

And then there are the Democrats, who oppose the war but have yet to offer the kind of criticism offered here

Just as GWB was justifiably harshly criticised here for the GWOT, the Democrats deserve some bashing now too. The war in Iraq is going badly (based on a perverted standard of "if the Iraqis are suffering, we are losing"), and the gate has been left wide open, beckoning, begging, for someone to step through it and say the obvious, what has been said by Hugh and Robert many times. But the Democrats are not willing to step through the gate either; they're sheep, one and all, Democrats and Republicans, standing and nervously milling about just outside the gate, wringing their hands and blaming each other as the wolves are circling in. Won't someone with the testicular (or ovarular) fortitude step forward and WALK THROUGH THE FREAKIN' GATE? Just say it: "The Qur'an justifies violence. Islam is an intolerant belief system. We need to protect ourselves from it." The wolves are getting closer, so just lead us through those few steps to safety, and close the gate behind us.

Posted by: special_guest at March 20, 2007 6:40 PM

feed them to their cocks? is that code word for chicken little, what happens with this so called bird disease? l say let the US military lose and do some real damage to these iranian chicken littles.

Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at March 20, 2007 6:41 PM

Yeah, heh, heh, heh -- This would make yet another great card for Hugh's "Halal/Haram" board game!

What a fantastic idea...!

Roosters eat Cheeky Humans?

Noooooooooo!

(Although I do have blue eyes, and my sister has blond hair. My mother's mother was also Jewish, making me a an Evil Zionist Palestinian-Oppresssing Joooz™, if only technically.)

- Cheeky Human

Posted by: Cheeky Human at March 20, 2007 6:48 PM

"Hugh, Foghorn Leghorn was a Warner Brothers cartoon charactor base on a radio and (later) movie character called Senator Claghorn, a well meaning Southern gentleman who believed that 'Dixie' was the national anthem."
-- from a poster above

Suh, Ah know all that. Ah am very familiar -- familiar, I say, boy, very familiar -- with Senator Foghorn Leghorn, and Henery Hawk, and all of theah uthah friends at Warner Brothuhs.

And if I do say so, Suh, possibly you are not quite aware, Suh, and in fact, Suh, I must declare that you are positively ovahlookin', a very notable and unfohgettable appearance of our fine membah of Congress, Senator Foghorn Leghorn, when he made a special guest, I say guest, sir, appearance, at this most respectable and welcoming site, run by fine southern gentlemen, if memr'y serves, and it suhtinly should, suh, it suhtinly should if it knows what's good for it, just a year or two ago.

Keep that in mind, suh. Keep that in mind.

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 7:21 PM

Aaah, just another bunch of grouchy brunettes jealous of the fact that blondes have more fun!

/Yes, I'm blonde

Posted by: treehugger at March 20, 2007 7:24 PM

it is time to nuke this evil vile filth and remove these threats from the world.

Posted by: The Texican at March 20, 2007 7:26 PM

Senator Foghorn Leghorn until recently was embodied in the Senate by Senator Fritz Hollings and by Senator Robert Byrd, but Hollings flew the coop, and now only Byrd is left, has been mentioned at Jihad Watch, as is mentioned in the posting just above, before.

Here:

"Last year, while visiting a friend at Fort Jackson, the largest training base for the American army, located on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina, I took a walk around town. The cemetery outside the Trinity Episcopal church, noting down those celebrated names, so many of them Huguenot in origin (I recall reams of Ravenels).

Antebellum mansions, the handful that had escaped the mass destruction inflicted, quite unnecessarily, by Sherman in February, 1865. The magnolias in the garden of the State capitol. The museum, with its early Italian canvases, a legacy of S. S. Kresge, who liked to spread his art wherever Kresge’s stores were to be found – and at his death, one was to be found in Columbia, South Carolina.

And there was the campus of the University of South Carolina which -- now speaking as Senator Foghorn Leghorn –“s I declare has, Suh, the prettiest campus imaginable, with its green, and its South Caroliniana library, and those belles from so many Beauforts who, this being the modern south, without those Vivien-Leigh manors, and manners, are no longer content to study French, dancing and deportment, but these modern young women now come, Suh, I say proudly Suh, these young women come to the University of South Carolina in Columbia to study chemistry, and anthropology, and en-vi-ron-men-tal sciences. And that’s a fact, Suh, that's a fact."

Yet, not a quarter-mile from the campus, on one of the thoroughfares, I spotted, on the second-story wall of a nondescript structure housing a Laundromat or fast-food place, a sign about Islam and a local mosque.

It was one of those "Et in Arcadia Ego" moments. Here, even here, where sweet magnolias blossom, round everybody's door, Islam had made its way.

And now we have the tale of what a single determined carrier-out of Da’wa can do in a single school, to his innocent Infidel victims, among the schoolchildren entrusted to his care. Should he be fired, forthwith, for violating the Constitution and carrying out religious instruction in the most aggressive possible way? Of course he should. And what will the ACLU do? Because if it comes to his defense, it should understand that exactly the same kind of behavior will be permitted to Christian teachers with a mission – and the ACLU doesn’t want that kind of thing, now does it? And precisely what are the doctrines of Islam which this man is inveigling his students into, little by little, starting of course with the seemingly-inoffensive Five Pillars of individual worship (shehada, zakat, salat, Ramadan, and hajj)?

The list of what this one determined Da’waist should, however, give pause. If he can do all of that, and if every Muslim is required to conduct Da’wa, not least in order to justify his living in an Infidel society that has not yet been turned into a Muslim one, then we must worry, greatly, about all the other efforts – in schools and at workplaces, in police stations and fire stations, in coffee klatsches and in soup kitchens, in post offices and in a thousand other meeting-places – at Da’wa by a relentless and determined group of people.

And it is interesting to consider the other prong of the Islamic attack on our ways. For who is it who for so long benefited from Saudi and other Arab largesse, and helped to misinform us about the nature of Saudi Arabia, and hence about the nature of Islam? For the hatred for Infidels that is taught in Saudi schools did not start after 9/11/2001, but has always been central to Saudi life, to Saudi sermons, and textbooks, and attitudes. And who was more influential in confusing matters, in hiding Saudi reality, in defending the Saudis, than a series of ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, some of whom promptly went to work for the Saudis after “retiring,” some of whom went to work even while on the job, angling for jobs for their friends as P. R. specialists for the Saudis.

It is at that same Columbia campus, near to that beautiful horseshoe, that the Ernest R. “Fritz” Hollings (no family connection to the “Fritz Hollings” mentioned in “Under Cover” by John Roy Carlson) Center for somethingorother is situated, and among the Great and Good of the South Carolina establishment, one must mention Crawford C. Cook, whose picture is somewhere on the campus, and perhaps listed at the Hollings Center. Hollings, of course, went out with a rant about “Jewish neo-cons” and has been consistently anti-Israel. Crawford Cook was a friend not only to Hollings, but to former Governer of South Carolina John C. West who defended the Saudis even while he was ambassador, and even while he was ambassador arranged for a P.R. job with the Saudis for his friend Crawford Cook. It is a tight little world, the world of Columbia politics, and West, Cook, Hollings, and others made Washington just a little safer for the Saudis.

So instead of the Horseshoe, think of a triangle. There is the Sunni Triangle, where American soldiers are being asked to fight and die because the government in Washington is still engaged in the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations folly instead of realizing the war is a war of self-defense against Islam, and the best way to conduct that war is to do nothing to prevent the Muslim peoples from realizing that it is Islam itself that is responsible for the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies – and then, perhaps, Ataturk-like, the more level-headed among them will work, quietly, to constrain (for there is no reforming) Islam.

And then there is the triangle in Columbia: this local Muslim, working his relentless Da’wa on innocent schoolchildren, the well-paid and well-connected who used their political power and influence (West, Cook, Hollings) to muddy the waters when it came to the nature of Islam and the nature of Saudi Arabia, and the third part of that triangle – the young Americans training to go to war, but the war they train to fight at Fort Jackson will do nothing about the Cooks and the Wests on the one hand, those who curried favor, directly or indirectly, with Saudis and other potential Arab paymasters, and the local pusher of Islam in the schools. Both are dangerous, both must be stopped – at the low end, and at the upper end.

And those young Americans, especially the Reservists and National Guardsmen, who signed up to defend their homeland, in a case of absolute necessity, should not be sent to Iraq on what is now a fool’s errand (if American soldiers are to be used as a cold-blooded instrument of policy, even of misguided policy, the regular army is that instrument), , should be kept at home to educate themselves, and then others, and to watch vigilantly over both those who conduct Da’wa, and those who sell their offices and their influence – and one hardly knows which side of the Jihad-push – the paid propagandists and apologists, or the promoters of Da’wa – are more dangerous. But they are certainly more dangerous, here and in Europe, than the local Muslims in the Sunni triangle, whom the Shi’a and Kurds, if better armed, will be perfectly capable of holding in check themselves, without any further loss of American life. .

Meanwhile, this tourist guide to Columbia ends on a dendrological note: the trees in the Congaree Swamp, the last large-scale stand of primitive uncut trees in the United States, I say Suh, is certainly worth the visit for the Shagbark (Carya ovata) and the Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata) and the Water Locust (Gleditsia aquatica) and a thousand others standing as still as the Standing Stones of Callanish, and awaiting your visit. And so are the tiny churches, each more adorable than the next, that dot the side of the road as you make your way to the Congaree Swamp from Columbia, and here is the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church right here, with its promised sermon – “I Am My Bro’s Keeper” -- which is a theme that appeals.

[Posted by: Hugh at December 8, 2004 03:42 P]

I think it holds up.

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 7:27 PM

Who can resist?

http://video.aol.com/video-category/foghorn-leghorn/2615?sem=1&ncid=AOLVID00170000000006

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 7:30 PM

The warning comes after the recent disappearance of three high-profile Iranian officers.

==

Sounds like special forces have been at work (Delta or SAS)

Posted by: UK Infidel Lover at March 20, 2007 7:34 PM

I have a dream that one day little american soldier boys and girls will watch this bitch swing from the end of a rope!!!!!

Posted by: OLD SARGE at March 20, 2007 7:56 PM

As an additional blurb, the Russians have pulled out most of their 2000 people from the nuclear plant flying them back to Moscow.
Putin would not be doing this just over money as he was unmoved for 4 years.

Russians and American agent Iranians are fleeing Iraq for a reason.

Posted by: Lame Cherry at March 20, 2007 8:07 PM

Hugh - I'm wondering whether Christopher Hitchens has been reading you lately. Frank posted this article on the "extremists students" thread this morning:

http://www.slate.com/id/2159936/

This was the piece of it that caught my eye:

"I have met a few very hard-line right-wingers who say: So what? If one lot of Islamists wants to slaughter another, who cares? It's very important to repudiate this kind of "thinking." Religious warfare is the worst thing that can happen to any society, and it now has the potential to spread to societies that are not directly involved. For the most part, official U.S. policy in Iraq has been sound in this respect, always working for a compromise and recently losing American lives to rescue the moderate Shiite leadership from a murder plot hatched by a messianic Shiite militia. Even where this policy fell short—as in the appalling execution of Saddam Hussein—the American Embassy urged the Maliki government not to conduct the hanging on the day of the Eid ul-Adha holiday that would most humiliate the Sunnis. We cannot flirt, either morally or politically, with divide and rule."

No doubt you would laugh at the idea that you might be a "hard-line right-winger" for advocating a divisive strategy but I find it interesting that Hitchens is raising the strategy of what you have been advocating, even if he does dismiss it as immoral. Certainly your strategy could be described as Machiavellian. Which is something of a dirty word I reckon in these PC times. As Hitchens dismisses such thinking upfront as morally reprehensible, however, I would be interested in your trying to make a moral case for your position. You may not think that you should need to do such a thing. But from a pragmatic POV, if you are going to so baldly and consistently advocate something so Machiavellian, I wonder whether your case wouldn't be strengthened and gather more adherents, if you attempted to lay out an explicit moral defense for a position that would naturally cause a great many people to cringe at first glance. It might merely be an extended sentence, complete with parenthetical elipses, embedded into one of your paragraphs, that somehow signals to people that you are aware that your strategy is utterly Machiavellian but that it is morally justified. I frankly don't know how to pull that off. I just raise the issue as something to mull over because the fact is that it actually exists as an issue. Certainly there can be much reading between the lines to come to such a Machiavellian conclusion. But if there is some way to hasten that conclusion by addressing the moral concerns more directly, then it might be worthwhile to figure out the kind of language that would aid in that goal.

Posted by: Caroline at March 20, 2007 8:18 PM

Robert - (Spencer that is, aka Bond) - please just admit it - you want "Cheeky Humans" on the front of the t-shirt and you're holding out until we all get accustomed to the phrase.:-) OK - it's growing on me. You have to admit though that "Nobody's dhimmi" (courtesy of aliyah44 IIRC) would continue the theme wonderfully onto the back if you want to go with Cheeky Humans on the front!

Posted by: Caroline at March 20, 2007 9:03 PM

One of the main reasons for the decline of the Mafia in general and the Gambino family in particular was the internal struggles, double crosses, and fear of the other guy. What is wrong with that? John Gotti did more to help destroy his organization than a hundred G-men could in fifty years. The reason Mr Gravano turned on Gotti was Gotti himself.

Just like Joe Valachi turning on Vito Genovese because Valachi believed he was going to be killed. Al Capone's worst enemy was not the US Government; it was the Northsiders, led in the end by Bugs Moran.

I must disagree with those who would criticize us for our methods in acheiving self-preservation. I do not believe that it is immoral to use any method to save one's own life.

Posted by: Pelayo at March 20, 2007 9:30 PM

Hugh, it is nice to be acknowledged, even if it is only as "a poster above".

Being somewhat of newbie, I have yet to delve into the vast archives available here at this highly informative and inspiring site. I am not, therefore, familiar with this Senator Foghorn Leghorn person.

The Warner Brothers character from whom this "Senator" pilfered his moniker was never identified as or claimed to be a senator...stentor, certainly, but not senator.

And the name, suh, is USBeast. "U" (as in Ugly), "S" (as in Smelly) Beast.

Posted by: USBeast at March 20, 2007 9:35 PM

Pelayo - I wonder whether anyone has done an historical study to determine whether the Mafia's notion of protection money didn't actually come from the Muslim idea of jizya, seeing as how Sicily was under Muslim rule for some 2 centuries? Surely this would be an interesting, if non-PC topic for a doctoral thesis?

Posted by: Caroline at March 20, 2007 9:42 PM

From NER (www.newenglishreview.org) a few things last month on Hitchens:

1.

Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Hitchens and Said

There are many examples that one can find on-line of the work of this "good egg" who "writes like a dream." [phrases applied by others to Hitchens]
A great friend and unctuous admirer of Edward Said, and though his tribute to Said does not reach the bathetic depths, or yawning heights, of Hamid Dabashi's tribute (google "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said" -- you won't regret it), Hitchens own tribute to Said is memorable, for the same reasons, on a slightly different scale:
"The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family, insupportable to his immense circle of friends, upsetting to a vast periphery of admirers and readers who one might almost term his diaspora, and depressing to all those who continue hoping for a decent agreement in his birthplace of Jerusalem.
To address these wrenching thoughts in their reverse order, one could commence by saying quite simply that if Edward's personality had been the human and moral pattern or example, there would be no "Middle East" problem to begin with. His lovely, intelligent, and sensitive memoir Out of Place was a witness to the schools and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Cairo where fraternity between Arabs, Jews, Druses, Armenians, and others was a matter of course. (His memory also comprised a literary Beirut where the same could be said.) He took an almost aesthetic interest in the details, eccentricities, and welfare of his own particular confession—the Anglican Christians of Jerusalem and especially St. Georges school in the eastern part of the city—but it's hard if not impossible to imagine anyone with less sectarian commitment. When talking to him about the various types of sacred rage that poison the region, one gained the impression of someone to whom this sort of fanaticism was, in every declension of the word, quite foreign.

Indeed, if it had not been for the irruption of abrupt force into the life of his extended family and the ripping apart of the region by partition and subpartition, I can easily imagine Edward evolving as an almost apolitical person, devoted to the loftier pursuits of music and literature. To see and hear him play the piano was to be filled with envy as well as joy: One was witnessing a rather angst-prone person who had developed the perfect recreation to an extraordinary pitch. To ask him for a tutorial and a reading list, as I more than once did, was to be humbled by the sheer reach of his erudition. I can still hear the doors that opened in my mind as he explicated George Eliot's rather recondite Daniel Deronda.

On one occasion in New York, after giving us a tremendous tour of the Metropolitan Museum during its show on the art of Andalusia (and filling out the most exquisite details on the syntheses and paradoxes of Islamic, Moorish, and Jewish Spain), he took my own wife on a tour of the shops to advise her expertly on the best replacement for a mislaid purse. I never met a woman who did not admire him, and I never knew him to be anything but gallant. As I look back, I am inclined to be overcome at the number of such occasions, where his bearing and address were so exemplary and his companionship such a privilege.

His feeling for the injustice done to Palestine was, in the best sense of this overused term, a visceral one. He simply could not reconcile himself to the dispossession of a people or to the lies and evasions that were used to cover up this offense. He was by no means simple-minded or one-sided about this: In a public dialogue with Salman Rushdie 15 years ago, he described the Palestinians as "victims of the victims," an ironic formulation that hasn't been improved upon. But nor did he trust those who introduced pseudo-complexities as a means of perpetuating the status quo. I know a shocking number of people who find that they can be quite calm about the collective punishment of Palestinians yet become wholly incensed at the symbolic stone he once threw—from Lebanon! Personally, I preferred his joint enterprise with Daniel Barenboim to provide musical training for Israeli and Palestinian children. But for Edward, injustice was to be rectified, not rationalized. I think that it was, for him, surpassingly a matter of dignity. People may lose a war or a struggle or be badly led or poorly advised, but they must not be humiliated or treated as alien or less than human. It was the downgrading of the Palestinians to the status of a "problem" (and this insult visited upon them in their own homeland) that aroused his indignation. That moral energy, I am certain, will outlive him.

I knew and admired him for more than a quarter-century, and I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that his moral energy wasn't always matched by equivalent political judgment. Indeed, it should be no criticism of anyone to say that politics isn't their best milieu, especially if the political life has been forced upon them. Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood. (I am thinking of certain passages in his Orientalism and some of the essays in Culture and Imperialism as well.) He was sometimes openly alarmed at the use made of his scholarship by younger academic poseurs who seemed to despise the classical canon of literature that he so much revered. Yet he was famously thin-skinned and irascible, as I have good reason to remember, if any criticism became directed at himself. Some of that criticism was base and outrageous and sordidly politicized—I have just finished reading the obituary in the New York Times, which in a cowardly way leaves open the question as to whether Edward, or indeed any other Palestinian, lost a home in the tragedy of 1947-48—but much of it deserved more patience than he felt he had to spare. And he was capable of stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones—with whom he did not agree. I simply had to stop talking to him about Iraq over the past two years. He could only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad, and he had a vivid tendency to take any demurral as a personal affront.

But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward's way. His emotional strength—one has to resort to cliché sometimes—was nonetheless also a weakness.

I was astonished, when reading his memoirs, to learn that such a polished and poised fellow had never lost the sense that he was awkward and clumsy. And yet this man of enviable manners could be both those things when he chose. He did come, as a member of Yasser Arafat's Palestine National Council, to meet at Reagan's State Department with George Shultz. (Indeed, he could claim to have been the intellectual and moral architect of the "mutual recognition" policy of the PLO at the Algiers conference in 1988.) When invited to the summit between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in Washington in 1993, however—which I happen to know that he was earnestly entreated to attend by the Clinton White House—he told me that it was quite simply beneath his dignity to take part in such a media farce. Now, by no standard did the 1993 meeting sink below the level of the Shultz one, and by no means had Arafat become on that day any more contemptible than Edward later discovered him to be. But it wasn't just that inconsistency that distressed me: It was the feeling that Edward was on the verge of extreme dudgeon before I could press the matter one inch further. I can't shake the feeling that a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian agony is contained in this apparently negligible anecdote.

There is at present a coalition, named the Palestinian National Initiative, which never gets reported about. It is an alliance of secular and democratic forces among the Palestinians that rejects both clerical fundamentalism and the venality of the Palestinian "Authority." It was partly launched by Edward Said, and its main spokesman is Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, a distinguished physician and very brave individual, to whom Edward introduced me last year. In our final conversation a few weeks ago, Edward challenged me angrily about my failure to write enough on this neglected group, which certainly enjoys a good deal of popular support and which deserves a great deal more international attention. Perhaps then I can do a last service, and also dip a flag in salute to a fine man, if I invite you to direct your browsers toward the sites for Barghouthi and the PNI."
From first to last, this is unbearable, stupid and sentimental and in many places, flatly false. As for that writing "like a dream" - it would take about two minutes to edit the piece, cutting here and there, to make the prose, awful as it is (there's nothing to be done about the thoughts and feelings of this "good egg"), much better.
Said was dismembered in feline fashion by Bernard Lewis in "The Question of 'Orientalism'." Last year Robert Irwin's "For Lust of Knowledge," a refutation of Said, essentially a book-length footnote to Lewis' article, appeared. Irwin demonstrates conclusively what many (but not Christopher Hitchens) knew, that Said's misrepresentations of several centuries of distinguished Orientalists was comical in the things he got wrong, the things he left out, his inability to comprehend disinterested curiosity or disinterested scholarship, so foreign were they to the mind and even imagination of Edward Said. Everything that he could get wrong, Edward Said got wrong.

A few months from now Ibn Warraq's "Defending the West: A Response to Edward Said" will be published. I have read the manuscript. That book deals with how Edward Said, and his acolytes and worshippers and epigones, have so crudely misconceived and misrepresented the nature of the Western world and its art, its literature, its scholarship, its openness to what Said and friends like to call "the Other" and to then claim for that "Other" a long history of victimisation. At long last, that Saidian wind that kills, and has had chilling and killing effects for nearly thirty years on innocent students and on fearful or careerist teachers, who have been bullied by Saidism in how they learn about, how they write about, how they teach about,how they comprehend or fail to, works of lasting artistic and literary value produced in the maligned West, works that always and everywhere, in the impoverished and thoroughly politicized mental universe of Edward Said were always reduced to ideological counters,and playthings, and weapons. For one example, consider only Said's comments on Jane Austen, and the reasons for his dismissal of her. Is that the work of a critic? Is that what Samuel Johnson, or Coleridge, or Matthew Arnold, or Jacques Barzun, or Vladimir Nabokov, or anyone of sense at all, would regard as legitimate literary criticism? Said did, and so did his worshippers. And among those worshippers was, for several decades, Christopher Hitchens, who is a "good egg" and who "writes like a dream." And Said did the same in his treatment -- not exactly reminiscent of Gombrich or Panofsky, is Edward Said -- of painters on Oriental themes (and this, too, is dealt with magnificently by Ibn Warraq).
Said's "Orientalism" gave license not only for him but for others to offer the same approach to books and paintings, and the results we see, circumspectly, all about us. And "Orientalism" was not the only ludicrous work that Said produced. There is his work of blatant propaganda, "The Question of Palestine" which a week in the library would cure anyone of taking seriously. It is so full of falsity, so easily rebutted, but apparently a great many people never took the trouble to rebut, the same people who go about prating about the "Palestinian people" who since time immemorial have been tilling the soil of a place called "Palestine." One wishes that those who took Said's work seriously, as Hitchens did, to have the decency, before continuing to spout off, to read something sober on the matter, such as the studies by the the Australian scholar of jurisprudence Julius Stone, and then the nonsense would stop. But Christopher Hitchens never had time to spare, and still doesn't, to engage in such reading, though he continues to hold all kinds of self-assured views on the "Palestinians" and on Israel, views entirely unaffected, one might note, by the glimmer of understanding he is beginning to show -- but just a glimmer -- about Islam. Nor would he likely to engage in a thorough study of the demographic and cadastral history of the area known as "Israel" or "Palestine," over the past two millennia or over the past few centuries, or even during the period from the establishment of the Mandate for Palestine. Why should Christopher Hitchens, at any time during the past three decades of pontificating about "Palestine" and the "Palestinians," ever have bothered to study the exact terms and intentions of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in establishing that particular Mandate, and how the Charter of the U.N. requires it to honor those terms and intentions, not to change them. That's too much for Christopher Hitchens. He's got a column to write. He's got lectures to give. He's got appearances on television to get ready for. He's got to have opinions on so many things. So many opinions to give, so little time. It would be like asking him to discuss Resolution 242, what those who carefully crafted it intended that Resolution to mean, and who opposed its adoption, or tried before its adoption to change its wording, or who afterwards deliberately denied that it meant what they knew perfectly well it meant (which is why they had tried so long to change it), and endowed it with a different meaning, one which they then convinced many others to accept. Does Christopher Hitchens have the time to find out Lord Caradon said, and Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, about Resolution 242, or such "details" and that little phrase "secure and defensible borders"? Of course he doesn't. It's too complicated, for the broad sweep of that truth-to-power legitimate heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens never saw through Edward Said -- but Edward Said was a collection of things that could be seen through, and were seen through, by those whose, such as Bernard Lewis or Clive Dewey or Keith Windschuttle or a thousand other historians, art historians, literary scholars, were not for one minute taken in by, or inveigled to agreeing with, the primitive notions of art and literature and history that Edward Said held, and put into practice, and preached. This should not be forgotten or forgiven just because more recently Hitchens has properly denounced George Galloway (is that an achievement?)and others of that ilk. If the bar is to be set that low, then all should win the glittering prizes.
What is offered here is just a sample of the quality of the thought, and of the prose, of Christopher Hitchens. Some are apparently satisfied with little here below -- Norman Mailer, say, rather than Nabokov or Joyce. Some may find Hitchens is perfectly acceptable, a "good egg" who even, another someone suggests, "writes like a dream." But I allow myself to believe that not everyone is so easily pleased, and that many not-easily-pleased souls come to this website because they expect something better, from those not so easily pleased.

Much more might be offered into evidence, but I don't have the time. All kinds of things have come up. But for now that is enough. That is more than enough.

#2.

Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Let No Man Write His Epitaph

Christopher Hitchens likes to claim that way back in 1989 he had realized that American power was a Good Thing, and had to be deployed for the good of the rest of the world. Not quite.

For here, as previously noted by Sean Wilentz, is Hitchens in an article in The Guardian published on September 13, 2001:

"With cellphones still bleeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred. Indeed, the very thought, for the present, is taboo. Some senators and congressmen have spoken of the loathing felt by certain unnamed and sinister elements for the freedom and prosperity of America, as if it were only natural that such a happy and successful country should inspire envy and jealousy. But that is the limit of permissible thought. In general, the motive and character of the perpetrators is shrouded by rhetoric about their "cowardice" and their "shadowy" character, almost as if they had not volunteered to immolate themselves in the broadest of broad blue daylight. On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. 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."

Hitchens takes pleasure in attacking those whom he believe are Idols of the Age, so that in attacking them, he is demonstrating his own fearlessness, his refusal to go along to get along, his speaking that truth truth truth to power power power, whether on left or right, that he allows himself to believe is his hallmark: an Orwell come to judgment. Readers at this point may recall Nabokov in the foreword to "Invitation to a Beheading" dismissing "Orwell or other popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction."

Of course he also attacks all the most obvious targets, the targets of those he claims he has broken with. Mother Teresa is easy sport; a devout, even more than devout, Catholic, with views that will set even many Catholic teeth on edge. And Ariel Sharon is even easier to call “brutal” and “demagogic” and “ruthless” (Sharon was never “brutal” and “ruthless” enough toward the marauding Arabs, but was quite “brutal” and “ruthless” toward the Jews he tossed out of Gaza), and to call him "the effective and conscious author of the massacre" at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982 is to ignore the official Israel report, laying “indirect” responsibility on him [he was no more responsible for the unforeseen behavior of some local Arab allies as are the Americans for the behavior of local Arab allies in Iraq].
But Hitchens does relish finding targets among those he pretends have been beyond criticism. For example, he describes Elie Wiesel as a “contemptible poseur and windbag.” And his essay on Winston Churchill bears the subtitle: "Incompetent, Boorish, Drunk, and Mostly Wrong").

But Elie Wiesel has been cruelly and stupidly mocked by many for years: “There is no business like Shoah business” is what those envious of him like to say. Churchill has been fair game for those who have forgotten whatwith Isaiah Berlin knew, that “he saved England,” and now gleefully present him as a Colonel Blimp or worse, a villain intent on prolonging unnecessary war with the Nazis: for the latest example of such attention-seeking revisionism, see Charmley’s book on Churchill.

Hitchens has never attacked those who really have it coming to them, but who are or were the really untouchable ones. Those he is too cowardly to discuss, or perhaps he simply shares in the general adoration. It is beyond the fearless Hitchens to dissect the phenomenon of Saint Nelson Mandela, or to remove the halo hanging in the air just above the hallowed and humorless brow. And of course, he never would have been able to attack the saintliest and most untouchable of them all, at least in the circles in which Hitchens travels or pretends not to travel -- Saint Said himself.

He likes to think of himself as a moral compass, akin to what Elie Wiesel sometimes has been (or tried to be, for Reagan, who didn't know the way out of Bitburg), and as exhibiting political common sense and realism, as others – not Hitchens – believe was exemplified by Winston Churchill. But Hitchens does exhibit those features he wrongly ascribes to Elie Wiesel and to Winston Churchill. Like not the real but his imaginary Wiesel, he is a “contemptible poseur and windbag” and, like not the real but his imaginary Churchill, he is “incompetent, boorish, drunk, and mostly wrong.” Ten little words, that sum him up for posterity.

Let no man write his epitaph. He’s written it himself.

#3.
Wednesday, 21 February 2007

Take Something Like A Star/To Stay Your Mind On, And Be Stayed.

So instead of Hardy or Joyce, or for that matter Walter Bagehot or Jacques Ellul or Jacques Barzun, we are supposed to be well satisfied or impressed with someone who sees himself, apparently, as a version -- a well-paid and spoiled version -- a version having skipped all the slogging through the Spanish Civil War and those sinister commissars, to slog through the Spanish Civil War and never having had to work as a Parisian plongeur -- and whose claim on our attention is not based on anything particularly captivating, in his thought or in his prose. For the shtick is this: having started life, and having for a long time remained, a complete political idiot (see his worshipful comments on Said, his dismissal of the threats to Rushdie, his misunderstanding of the Lesser Jihad against Israel and his sickening sympathy for "the Palestinians") has managed on this or that issue to "bravely break ranks" with Katrina van den Heuvel et al. Big deal. And in breaking those ranks, he seems not to have arrived at an intelligent comprehension of Islam, but rather at an unintelligent one, the kind of thing that explains the nonsense of our Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project in Iraq, pushed by those impressionable and arrogant people whom he, Hitchens, has no trouble identifying with and likes to describe as his fellow "neo-cons" (a phrase not to be used without quotation marks that hold the word up for queasy inspection). There are, after all, those who never had to make that little "journey" from far left to much-acclaimed and self-acclaimed and well-paid muddled middle. There are those who are not quite given to such self-dramatization, and who study things in detail before commenting on them, and who would never have fallen for the likes of Edward Said, nor for the likes of the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project of George Bush. Said and Bush: two forms of intolerable stupidity, and both somewhere in the past and present of Christopher Hitchens, world-conqueror. And to think that the height to which he would wish to attain is to be a downmarket George Orwell. English classes for Freshmen often make good use of that hoary favorite of the syllabuses, "Politics and the English Language."

Certainly that essay does more good, in its simple-minded way, than plenty of other things that might be inflicted -- say, something in impenetrable non-English by Gayatri Spivak Chakravarti or Homi Bhabha or that Sedgwick lady, or an inspirational poem from Clinton's favorite versifier, Maya Angelou -- but can't one aim a bit higher? Just a bit? And once you have read Nabokov's mention of "Orwell and other popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction" and think about "1984" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" and "Down and Out in Paris and London" it's hard to keep from agreeing with that dismissive description.

No need to let the side -- your own side -- down. Think of someone uncompromising and keep that person in mind. It doesn't have to be my mother. It could be Nabokov. If you don't care for Nabokov, then think of Karl Kraus. Or someone else. "Take something like a star/To stay your mind on, and be stayed."

#4.

Tuesday, 20 February 2007

The Truth-to-Power Mountebank

Among the people whom this Iron Age has thrown up is one Christopher Hitchens. Boozy and British (and therefore slightly more articulate than most of the Americans he is likely to encounter) his main claim to fame is that he is a Brave Speaker-of-Truth-to-Leftists-With-Whom-He-Has-Bravely-Broken Power."
Hitchins "broke from the Left" over Iraq. He's famous for that: "Christopher Hitchens broke with the Left over Iraq." That's his claim to fame. Now first try to imagine yourself having to feign respectful attention to the kind of person who says or writes about himself that "I am a man of the Left" or "I used to be a man of the Left" or "I broke with the Left." Try to imagine someone who self-consciously thinks of himself as a new Orwell (come to think of it, try to imagine those whose idea of a Great Writer is the publicistic Orwell).

Now what does it mean to say that Hitchens "broke with the Left over Iraq"? He hasn't had much to say about the only reason given for the invasion of Iraq that made sense. That reason, which at the time appeared to have greater supporting evidence than it apparently had, was to enter that county so as to find, seize, and destroy all weapons of major destructive capacity or to interrupt projects toward the acquisition of such weaponry. No, what Hitchens liked was the idea of the American Infidels entering Iraq, in order to bring "freedom" and, like the Little Engine That Could, toys and good things to eat to all the boys and girls on the other side of the mountain.
As much as Bush or any of the Bush loyalists, Hitchens was attracted by the naive and sentimental part, the part that had failed to identify Islam and the Camp of Islam as the menace, rather than "terror" to be fought in some kind of "war on terror," and he, like the Bush Administration, having failed to properly identify the menace, compounded the error by failing to note the sectarian and ethnic divides, their origins in the very first century of Islam, and the depth and duration of those divides and how they might be usefully exploited by the Camp of Infidels to divide and demoralize, and thereby weaken, the Camp of Islam.

And he's still at it. Never mind his posturing, his mountebankish manner. He has become for some a Great Truth-teller, the Brave Paladin who took on George Galloway, and soundly whipped him. But for god's sake, who could not, above the level of the talk-show hosts who mutter about Islam and speak only so that cats and dogs can understand, do the same to George Galloway? That's not an opponent but a punching-bag, made of straw.
Now here is a bit of Hitchens in "Slate" today, and it is more of his stuff and nonsense, which can no longer be tolerated:

"I have met a few very hard-line right-wingers who say: So what? If one lot of Islamists wants to slaughter another, who cares? It's very important to repudiate this kind of "thinking." Religious warfare is the worst thing that can happen to any society, and it now has the potential to spread to societies that are not directly involved. For the most part, official U.S. policy in Iraq has been sound in this respect, always working for a compromise and recently losing American lives to rescue the moderate Shiite leadership from a murder plot hatched by a messianic Shiite militia. Even where this policy fell short—as in the appalling execution of Saddam Hussein—the American Embassy urged the Maliki government not to conduct the hanging on the day of the Eid ul-Adha holiday that would most humiliate the Sunnis. We cannot flirt, either morally or politically, with divide and rule.

However, the self-generated Islamic civil war does have significance in the wider cultural struggle. All over the non-Muslim world, we hear incessant demands that those who believe in the literal truth of the Quran be granted "respect." We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered "offensive." A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care. A stupid term—Islamophobia—has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam's infallible 'message.'"

Dog. Day. Every. He's had his little run.

Hitchens has even expressed his admiration for Ibn Warraq, even met with him, but it is clear that he missed or misunderstood or did not thoroughly assimilate much of what Ibn Warraq was trying to express. And in Washington, recently, at the American Enterprise Institute, he showed by his uneasy and essentially stupid question that he doesn't quite know how to mentally handle, doesn't quite know how to fit into his pre-fabricated scheme of things another uncompromising truth-teller, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was not about to be impressed or intimidated by the likes of Christopher Hitchens.

He's had quite a run on the bank, Master Hitchens, if tales of his "Vanity-Fair" salary, and those lecture fees are to be believed. But that should be about it. He has entertained, apparently, some of us -- long enough.

#5.

Sunday, 18 February 2007
Re: Martin Amis

I heard Amis on NPR. As with the concolorous Christopher Hitchens, Amis is a bit too self-consciously the Unafraid Truth-Teller (the one who is in this case Speaking Truth to Left-Wing Fashion's Power) and, just like Hitchens, he doesn't quite tell the truth. He writes not about Islam but about something he calls, but never defines, as "Islamism."
Furthermore, in response to some caller asking about other "fundamentalisms" or crazinesses, Amis astonishingly agreed that, on apparent par with "Islamism," were two supposed "madnesses" that had swept America: Prohibition, and McCarthyism.
'Nuff said.

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 9:46 PM

As to the question of morality, I don't even understand the question. The Kurds resent the Arabs for good reason; why should they not try to make a move for independence, and if by helping them the American govenment can weaken Syria and Iran, and have a semi-reliable ally in what was northern Iraq, why not? What is immoral about that?

And as to the sectarian divisions, they date back a thousand years before the founding of the United States. The depth and duration of that division, in other words, owes nothing to us. It is the Americans who have tried, at great human and economic cost, to make the Iraqis less tribal, less selfish, more imbued with a sense of a nation, and a nation that is not merely a place to be controlled by their sect or tribe or family, have tried to encourage entrepreneurial activity instead of reliance, as in so many other Muslim states, on either oil money or foreign aid from Infidels, and to encourage the adoption of a Constitution that would actually move away from the Shari'a. It has all failed. And it is despite the enormous efforts of American soldiers, who were never taught about Islam, and yet persevered, and were puzzled when the Muslims of Iraq did not behave, as those soldiers expected them to, as a grateful "Iraqi people," but rather as a collection--with a handful of exceptions--of grasping, whining, greedy, meretricious people, eager to have the Americans do evreything for them, eager to have them lavish them with aid mooney (thrown around, by the billions, like confetti), and distinctly indifferent to American losses when not taking outright pleasure in such losses, yet always willing to blame the Americans for everything. Does a Sunni bomb go off killing Shi'a? The Shi'a crowds gather, and tell reporters that they blame the Americans. The Sunnis are kidnapped by Shi'a militia, and the Sunnis rant against the Americans. And even so, even though 98% of the Sunni Arabs now say that all attacks on Americans are justified, and that they personally approve of them, and 75% of the Shi'a say the same thing, and only the Kurds express, by a large majority, lack of approval for such attacks.

What is the conceivable offense to morality in no longer sending Americans to fight and die for people who are not and can not overcome Islam, who will in large --and ever-increasing -- numbers, take delight in the deaths of Americans. And does anyone, does even Bush, still think that Iraq could somehow become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations? Bush and Karen Hughes, his loyal and equally unintelligent aide, the one who is most directly involved with "reaching out to Muslims," that is Karen Hughes -- that is the extent of our propaganda effort, an effort that should be made not to win Muslims over, but to fill them with confusion and to demoralize them, and make at least some of them begin to see that their political, economic, and social failures are a direct result of what Islam inculcates, not only the specific doctrines, but the habit of mental submission that it demands.

It is immortal for Bush and others to persist obstinately in a course that makes no sense, and like the general in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," or like the madly complacent generals who sent people to their death in the trenches in World War I, these people are not thinking straight, and others -- the soldiers and Marines of the regular army, and of the Reserves and National Guard, the latter of whom at least had every right to expect that they would not be sent to Iraq except in case of absolute national emergency, and the war in Iraq is most definitely not a case of "national emergency" but of wilful ignorance of Islam, lack of imagination, lack of wit, lack of knowledge about Iraq, at the very top, and then there is always that claque of loyalists, the assorted kagans and kristols or, for that matter, that speaking-truth-to-power admirer of Edward Said, the minor polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who only yesterday began to find out a little about Islam, and he's a dab hand at running with whatever little knowledge he acquires, tout en faisant son petit Orwell.

There is nothing "machiavellian" or "immoral" about refusing to continue to keep various groups of Muslims from one another's throats. Who knows? Maybe they'll all make peace. Let's say that is the outcome. I could live with that. I could also live with the other. It is theirs to make or mar. We got rid of a murderous monster. That murderous monster, it turns out, was about what Iraq appeared to need, if the only conceivable good is an absence of the kind of strife that became inevitable, sooner or later, once the regime of Saddam Hussein was removed.

Perhaps some think k the regime of Saddam Hussein was moral, and that therefore it was immoral to end it, but Christopher Hitchens is not among them. He thinks the removal of Saddam Husseini was justified and desirable. Unfortunately, he also seems to think it is Americans who should pay, and keep paying, the price for that removal, and not those whose belief-system makes them naturally unwilling to compromise, that makes them susceptible to crazed beliefs and conspiracy theories (the Sunni Arabs, for example, really allow themselves to believe that they constitute 42% of the Iraqi population, and they really believe that they have a right to that amount of power, or even more, and certainly they will never acquiesce in the Shi'a rule over Iraq).

No, it would be immoral and cruel to American soldiers to make them stay. All sorts of braggart warriors and chocolate soldiers, however -- Hitchens comes to mind, and so does Frederick Kagan -- are perfectly happy with this.

I find them immoral. .

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 10:08 PM

When Saddam was alive, he did keep things in check with iran. you do not presently have a strong dictator in iraq to keep iran in check. if the US would just leave overnight, dont you think iran would have very litle trouble to take over large portions of iraq, or at the very least control via their shites brothers? you would have all that oil under iran's control, and terrorists organizations would be able to launch larger attacks on Israel, and even dare to attack European cities, including Russia.

Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at March 20, 2007 10:24 PM

Hugh - wow! At first I was sort of sorry I asked and then I wasn't. Your skewering of Hitchens was laugh out loud hilarious! On a less hilarious note you wrote:

"He likes to think of himself as a moral compass" -

I do tend to think that hits the nail on the head in terms of his most important self-identity, which would explain why he has felt the need to go after some of the most basic moral icons of the Christian faith (Mother Teresa) and the Jewish faith (Elie Wiesel). Which makes his fawning over Said, which indeed disgusts, all the more appalling. OK. I am convinced by your complete evisceration of Hitchens (and it was hilarious indeed!). Incidentally, I would love to see the 2 of you debate the Iraq war but it's probably not to be.

But, if you will pardon me for noticing it, you seem to retreat into a bit of a passive mode in your last several paragraphs, e.g

"There is nothing "machiavellian" or "immoral" about refusing to continue to keep various groups of Muslims from one another's throats. Who knows? Maybe they'll all make peace. Let's say that is the outcome. I could live with that. I could also live with the other."

I refer to that as "passive mode" in contrast to something you've been advocating a bit more actively in so many of your posts - namely to encourage those divisions and to state more actively and to actively endorse, from a basic Machiavellian perspective, the desirability of that sectarian strife. I think a great many people would agree with the passive position you now state, which wouldn't require any particular moral defense, as its merely reality. I was basically addressing the need to maybe mount a more explicit moral defense for what you previously appeared to be advocating, namely a more conscious strategy of intentionally perpetrating and welcoming sectarian divisions in Iraq.

Posted by: Caroline at March 20, 2007 11:02 PM

In Iraq there is no need to encourage anything. It will happen naturally. We just need to get out of the way. I was limiting my discussion to the case of Iraq.

But yes, of course we should encourage, wherever necessary, the divisions within Islam that could stand a little encouraging. If an independent Kurdistan comes into being (and would be in our interests to have that happen, as it would not be in the interests of Iran or Syria or for that matter any of the Arabs anywhere), the Americans should do what they can to encourage the Berbers, in Algeria and Morocco, and in France, to become still more aware of their Berberness. We should spread around the books, and the anti-Arab invective, of the Berber writer Kateb Yacine. We should do everything we can to encourage an awareness not only by Berbers, but by other non-Arab Muslims, of the way in which Islam has been for 1350 years a vehicle for Arab supremacism, beginning but not ending with cultural and linguistic imperialism that has caused many peoples to forget, or to despise, their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic history and culture.

And there's plenty more that should be similarly encouraged. Stopping the Jizyah of foreign aid to all Muslims, and encouraging them to seek to get a cut of the fabulous unearned wealth of the rich Muslims, would help to cause resentments over money either shared or, more likely, not shared at all or in amounts deemed insufficient by the poorer Muslims, would do much to cause strife and antagonism.

And that's what we want. We want to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. We are fighting not to succumb to the world-wide Jihad, or that collection of Lesser Jihads, employing all kinds of instruments ("terror" being merely one, and not the most effective -- but it is apparently the only one that Bush can begin to dimly comprehend), and we have a perfect right to do this.

Posted by: Hugh at March 20, 2007 11:18 PM

Bumper sticker for my Car;

My pigs will eat your fighting cocks!

Maybe we should issue all blueyed blonde soldiers defensive pigs as ammunition.

LOL
Aunt Bea

Posted by: auntbea at March 21, 2007 8:45 AM