There is no argument that non-soldiers have less right to argue for war, except maybe from some soldiers. Hitchens has to be a willful imbecile to base a column on it, or totally dishonest.
The argument is about hypocrisy. It is not about "non-soldiers"; it's about those who avoided service they otherwise could have accepted, who then impugn the patriotism, loyalty, or character of those who oppose war. Like Hitchens.
The best clue to the effectiveness of the argument is the degree of fury it arouses -- the anger of moral poseurs who are called what they are.
And what great arrogance. You get on Charley Rose a few times, you're ready to conquer the world with a keyboard and a bottle of gin because you're an "intellectual militant." Like the proverbial one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. You're going to write a column that puts this canard to rest once and for all. Oh sure.
And I love this drama-queen rhetoric:
"Thus, while I was traveling last year in Pakistan, on the Afghan border and in Kashmir, and this year in the gulf, my wife was fighting her way across D.C., with the Pentagon in flames, to try and collect our daughter from a suddenly closed school, was attempting to deal with anthrax in our mailbox, was reading up on the pros and cons of smallpox vaccinations, and was coping with the consequences of a Muslim copycat loony who'd tried his hand as a suburban sniper. Should things ever become any hotter, it would be far safer to be in uniform in Doha, Qatar, or Kandahar, Afghanistan, than to be in an open homeland city. It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls. . . . "
As someone who works in D.C. and lives 5 minutes from six of the sniper attacks, let me translate: 'fight her way across D.C.' means getting stuck in traffic, not battling scimitar-wielding apostles of Saladin on 16th Street; the Pentagon, "in flames" or otherwise, is nowhere near downtown D.C. or wherever the H's live; NOBODY here was looking for anthrax in their mailbox; and the snipers never got further inside D.C. than a block from the District line, once. Most of the time they were up the street from me or killing people near Fredericksburg, hours out of the city. Wasn't this the guy who said the Pentagon was "in a residential neighborhood"? Sure it is. Just like the Statue of Liberty. Then there's the utterly unsupported implication that all these things are somehow related.
Hitchens is approaching giant cosmic blowhard status, up there with Peggy Noonan.
mbs
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2073772&device=
"Armchair General" The ugly idea that non-soldiers have less right to argue for war. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, November 11, 2002, at 2:04 PM PT
Continuing with the hidden vernaculars of "regime change" and hoping to build toward a Bierce-like series (last week the Straussian language of revolution from above and next week "terrorism"), one must pause simply to expel one term, to retire it, discredit it, and make its further employment an embarrassment to those who use it. The word is "armchair."