Herman on Hitchens

[Bradford DeLong]

>>Evidently. These days you can't hold a complex position or you'll get
>>denounced as an apologist for fascism or an apologist for
>>imperialism. The official line - you're either for us or against us -
>>seems to prevail, though the "us" can be treated as a variable rather
>>than a constant.
>>
>>Doug
>
>It was no different in the old days.  "Which side are you on?" 
>"You're either part of the problem or part of the solution."  Etc. 
>And yes, there are times when forcing the issue is a good idea.
>
>Carl

Rarely, rarely...

Consider, for example, World War II:

(1) It was definitely a war of right vs. wrong, and of good vs. evil, 
in which there was no substitute for victory.

(2) But it also had its roots in the failure of the older 
politico-economic system: the mistakes made at Versailles, the 
failure to correct those mistakes in the following decade, and the 
failures of economic management that produced the Great Depression 
that rendered one-third of Germany's workforce unemployed and turned 
the Nazi Party from a joke into a dominant political force.

(3) And more important even than winning the war was winning the 
following peace: rebuilding Germany and Japan and integrating them 
into the society of the industrial democracies in such a way as to 
make a repetition of World War II inconceivable.

If you can't hold that complex a position, you don't have any 
business talking about World War II.

Similarly, today...

(1) Al Qaeda and the Taliban are malignant fucks, and there is no 
doubt that their fangs need to be pulled and that they need to be 
removed--even at substantial cost to innocents who just stand in the 
way...

(2) But Al Qaeda and the Taliban are now a problem in large part 
because of mistaken and misguided U.S. policies in the past, and 
because of the failures of modernization--democratization, 
industrialization, and secularization--in the Middle East.

(3) More important, even, than drawing Al-Qaeda's fangs (and getting 
a better government than the Taliban for Afghanistan, even 
acknowledging the Hobbesian point that any government is better than 
no government) is winning the peace: putting the Middle East on a 
track so that more Al-Qaeda's won't be hatched in the future and that 
the processes we think of as modernization--democratization, 
industrialization, and secularization--will roll forward successfully.

If you are too simpleminded to hold and agree with those three 
propositions, I don't think you have any business trying to do 
politics today--and I would apply this especially to George W. "I 
don't do nation-building" Bush.

Brad DeLong