The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142154 Message #3277601
Posted By: GUEST,Shining Wit
21-Dec-11 - 04:33 AM
Thread Name: Obit: Christopher Hitchens- curmudgeon
Subject: RE: Obit: Christopher Hitchens- curmudgeon
"Just what ARE your convictions?? What ones WON'T you sell down the river to maintain your little cult of personality worship of this good ol' curmudgeon?"
Not everyone is so absolutist in their outlook as you, and you don't understand what Hitchens' arguments if you think it's all so black and white.
Hitchens supported Bush's sordid little war because he felt totalitarianism is one of the greatest threats to free thinking and personal liberty and he had no idea at the time how events were going to play out, the utter ineptitude of the US and UK's policy (what of it existed). To Hitchens, the deification of Saddam within Iraq (the cult of the dictator - one we know so well) and subsequent oppression of his people represented a greater threat than Bush did, and in a sense he's right. Bush doesn't present a long-term threat because the man is such a complete fool and Saddam was far from a fool, plus there is democracy of a sorts in the USA.
So the Iraq war enabled one more totalitarian dictator to be hauled over the side of the good ship Personal Freedom. Of course, the real problems with the Iraq war was that Bush et al were as immoral and corrupt as Saddam, but that wasn't Hitchens point.
Far from being a failure of morality, Hitchens viewpoint was the war could achieve a long-term moral victory, enabling ordinary Iraqis the freedom they lacked under Saddam. The fact the whole enterprise was so fucked-up by neocon maniacs with an insatiable bloodlust is not Hitchen's fault, so you might want to apportion blame where it's due: with Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and Cheney and the torturers of Abu Ghraib and the people ordering bomb strikes that have killed 95,000 people.
Hitchens was right in a sense, it was the people calling the shots who were so very wrong.