>
> "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."
>
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