"Ex-Ministers and ex-diplomats are the bane of the screen at times like this, clogging the airwaves with conventional unwisdom. Dust flies from the Roladex as networks search out the has-beens with which to fight the last war. Still, I could not repress a twinge of sympathy for the former United States ambassador to Britain, Philip Lader, when I read about BBC's Question Time and the way he cracked under pressure. "One needs to be unambivalent here. I have written-more criticisms of American foreign policy than most people. I have no time for the way in which the Sharons and Pinochets of the world profit from their Washington connection. (It was only four months ago - and please feel free to pass this on - that the Bush administration handed the Taliban a $43 million subsidy for its kind and fundamentalist help in the war on drugs.)
"When Clinton rocketed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, to give himself a bounce in the opinion polls, I wrote in this newspaper that it was a war crime, and I found the applause as sickening as last week's footage of destitute refugees making a fiesta out of the news from New York.
"But the mass murder of last Tuesday is in no sense a reprisal or a revenge for past crimes such as that. The people who destroyed the World Trade Center, and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to free Gaza. They are fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi. They didn't just destroy the temple of modernity, they used heavy artillery to shatter ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan earlier this year, and in Egypt have plotted to demolish the Pyramids and the Sphinx because they are un-Islamic and profane.
"Look at what they do to their own societies, from Algeria to Afghanistan, and then wonder what they might have in mind for ours.
"Liberal masochism is of no use to us at a time like this, and Muslim self-pity even less so. Self-preservation and self-respect make it necessary to recognise and name a lethal enemy when one sees one.
"And that's just me emoting. Whereas, without even trying (so to speak), I know of a husband who lost his wife, a mother who lost a stepdaughter and a colleague who lost her child's favourite godfather. The degrees of separation in a society this size should be far wider, but the fact is that everyone I know seems to know someone who knew someone. And the ghastly truth of the matter is this: the haunting will go on and on, for material as well as emotional reasons.
"No more survivors will be found: most of them were burned so there may be no need to spray the rubble with disinfectant. But the most optimistic corner of America will most probably have to be converted into some sort of mass grave. Not only is this a terrible scar, but it's one that is right on the face, which can't be covered up and which will look raw and livid for as long as can be foreseen.
"To build again on the site would be somehow obscene; to refrain from rebuilding is to admit defeat. Nice alternatives."
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/top_story.html?in_review_id=458292
What "liberal masochism" is Hitch talking about? I've seen precious little of it in the corp press; and those (like the fine sturdy folk of LBO-Talk) who have made the obvious link between US policy and the bloody reaction to it are not blind to the pre-modern nature of the perps, nor have they excused the terrorist attack or tried to play it down.
I think Hitch is having a political (personal?) identity crisis. He's not sure how to approach this, and I wager that he doesn't want to be caught on the "wrong side" of history again, as I'm sure he felt he was when he first opposed NATO's bombing of Belgrade, then, after conferring with Gens. Sontag and Reiff, came out fully for it. Will he do the same if the US starts pounding the Muslim world? Will he frame it in faux-radical terms (the Cockburn, "if ever a country deserved rape, it's Afghanistan," stance)? Or will he just toss it all aside and become our Peregrine Worsthorne?
Tick, tock. Tick, tock . . . .
DP
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