Today, the House passed legislation that would pay all back dues to the U.N. http://nytimes.com/2001/09/25/international/25DUES.html
Of course it was buried on page 8 or 9 or thereabouts. I'm not going to defend Hitchens, just point out a few things that people have glossed over. First off, I think Hitchens is trying to stress and press 1) out of the three items Gulick listed. (Perhaps this is hopelessly reformist.) See H's campaign against Henry Kissinger (in case some of you didn't catch it, 60 Minutes recently ran a segment on Kissinger and the coup in Chile and I don't think it would have happened had it not been for the efforts of Hitchens, among others. )
I realize some people believe he's helping out 2) and 3) by his support for U.S. imperialism in taking out Milosevic and the Taliban. (by the way, here's an interesting article from last year on the Taliban by William T. Vollmann, a wacky, intense writer and person: http://www.newyorker.com/FROM_THE_ARCHIVE/ARCHIVES/?010924fr_archive05 ) Tariq Ali was recently quoted in the New York Times saying "The underlying maxim is, 'we will punish the crimes of our enemies and reward the crimes of our friends,'..." Hitchens seems to be pointing out that he thinks some (most?) of the left is against punishing the crimes of our enemies, and former friends, because they feel it legitimizes U.S. imperialism (or does more harm than good) and he thinks that's a mistake. Hitchens is against rewarding the crimes of "our" friends, however (from the two Nation pieces people have been selectively quoting from):
"With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton's rocketing of Khartoum--supported by most liberals--was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the "bounce in the polls" achieved by their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers Street.) "
and: "(It ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian self-determination is, as before, a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as ever. There are millions of Palestinians who do not want the future that the pious of all three monotheisms have in store for them.)
This is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby former clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban cease to be our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. At such a point, a moral and political crisis occurs. Do "our" past crimes and sins make it impossible to expiate the offense by determined action? Those of us who were not consulted about, and are not bound by, the previous covert compromises have a special responsibility to say a decisive "no" to this."
and Hitchens is still against the ruling class: "The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient."
Not something you'd hear Martin Peretz or Andrew Sullivan say.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19962-2001Sep24.html something interesting from today's Washington Post to get you going:
"....In the New Yorker, Susan Sontag, the highbrow novelist and essayist, directed her rage at Americans. "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others."
Sontag's stated point -- "a lot of thinking needs to be done" -- is undeniable, if banal. But her tone -- belligerent, self-righteous and anti-American -- is astonishingly wrongheaded. Regular people can be dim at times but it takes a real intellectual to be this stupefyingly dumb.
In the Nation, columnist Katha Pollitt reveals that her teenage daughter wants to put an American flag in the window. "Definitely not, I say," Pollitt replies. "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."
Oh, really, Katha? Is that what it stands for?
Fortunately, another Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchens -- himself a man of the left -- rips Pollitt's facile insipidities to shreds on an adjoining page: "The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state."
Christopher Hitchens as the voice of sweet reason -- these are indeed grim days for America."
Sorry this is so long. Again, I don't want to get into it over Hitchens, because I don't know what I think about the current situation or about Hitchens vs. Chomsky/Zinn/Finkelstein/Cockburn, maybe partly because I'm still sorta in shock even after 2 weeks, but here's something Hitchens wrote in '98 that came to mind amidst all the flag-waving and prayer to our merciful Lord
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n04/hitc2004.htm "One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more."