>I'm with Chomsky and Cockburn on the war, but I think
>Nathan raises excellent points. I know several
>progressives who quietly but passionately support the
>Afghan war and who bite their tongues when anti-war
>lefties (like me) monopolize the table talk.
I took some shit, here and elsewhere, over my ambivalence about the Afghan war. But the war on Iraq is completely different - a pure imperial adventure with nothing remotely self-defensive about it. It was distressing to see Hitchens, and now it seems Nathan, arguing for it as a war of liberation.
Speaking of Hitchens, did people notice this passage from Adam Shatz's article <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020923&c=4&s=shatz>:
>Hitchens's enthusiasm for the war on terror has led him to adopt
>some strange positions. You would think that, as a longstanding
>champion of Palestinian rights, he would be disturbed by Rumsfeld's
>cavalier talk of the "so-called occupied territories" and Bush's
>crude ultimatum to the Palestinians to either vote out Arafat or
>continue living under occupation. But Hitchens told me that while he
>objects to "that whole tone of voice," he prefers Bush's "tough
>love" to the "patronization" of Clinton's peace negotiators. Nor is
>he troubled by the mounting civilian toll exacted by America's
>crusade in Afghanistan. "I don't think the war in Afghanistan was
>ruthlessly enough waged," he says. What about the use of cluster
>bombs?
>
>If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration
>of enemy troops...then it's pretty good because those steel pellets
>will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through
>somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart,
>it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say,
>'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile
>stopped halfway through.' No way, 'cause it'll go straight through
>that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.
>
>"It pains me to hear that," says Edward Said, a friend of many
>years. "He's gone back to nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy--go
>hit the wogs."
And he seems to be in competition with Ann Coulter.
Doug
PS: Memo to Wojtek - sometimes gossip is fun, and political gossip is more than tangentially political.