Saturday, February 16, 2008

Hitchens, again.

Seems I have a knack for stumbling upon essays by Christopher Hitchens. This time I had googled "America post-war Germany". I wanted to find some good material about how long the US and others stayed in Germany after the war and saw to it that the breath of democracy was restored to the German people. From there I was going to look at other instances in the past sixty years, such as South Korea , where the US presence helped to nurture stability and the flowering of democracy. However, a good opinion piece from Hitch always stops me in my tracks.

I might as well admit it, I like him because his views on the subject of Iraq are a perfect reflection of mine, because he is a leftie who gets it, and I was once a leftie who finally got it, and lastly, because with so much of his writing, he expresses those beliefs imminently better than I ever could. This one is a case in point, and these few paragraphs sum it up.

"The United States has not claimed territory in Iraq, as the French did in Algeria: it is not the inheritor of a bankrupt French colonialism, as Eisenhower and Kennedy were in Vietnam; and it is not pursuing a vendetta, as was Sharon in Lebanon.

"It is, instead, in a situation where no superpower has ever been before. The ostensible pretext for American intervention — the disarmament of a WMD-capable rogue state and the overthrow of a government aligned with international jihadist gangsterism — was in my opinion based on an important element of truth rather than on a fabrication or exaggeration. But the deeper rationale — that of altering the regional balance of power and introducing democracy into the picture— is the one that must now preoccupy us more. The United States is in Iraq for its own interests, to ensure that a major state with a chokehold on a main waterway of the global economy is not run by a barbaric crime family or by its fundamentalist former allies and would-be successors. But it is also there to release, and not repress, the numberless latent grievances of Iraqi society. And—something surprisingly forgotten by many who fetishize the United Nations—it is there under a UN mandate for the democratization and reconstruction of the country."

[...]

"It is not without significance that when sectarians are found operating private or semi-official squads and prisons, the victims take their complaints to the Green Zone.

[...]

If our calculations become unduly inflected by considerations of American domestic opinion, then both Iraqis and foreign intruders (and their state backers in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia) have only to set their watches and begin making their respectively pessimistic and gloating dispositions."

[...]

"...we could remind people again that Iraq is the only country in the region, apart from Lebanon, where citizens are regularly called to the polling-booth. This was part of the point to begin with."



Good on you, Hitch!!

2 Comments:

Blogger huffb1 said...

Off topic,

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=306732&p=2

Kates article is very good. Take a read.

Some Bloggers (ON THE LEFT) don't seem to get the point of it.

February 16, 2008 7:52 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

Yes, I read it. It is really, really good. Lefties today have no clue what hardship and loss is or, even more to the point, how to deal with hardship and loss. They think we should be able to avoid both from the cradle to the grave and if we don't it's someone else's fault. Buckdog just doesn't get it.

February 16, 2008 8:09 pm  

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