Hi. You wrote:
> But that says little about creating the kinds of divides between
> people, and my sense is that Hitchens was reacting to the personal
> interactions he's had on the left in recent months and years.
Though personal invectives are a waste (though occasionally amusing), they aren't the primary source of the political divides at play here. There is a disagreement about what is happening with US foreign policy, what it means, and what is to be done. This did *not* arise simply from a failure to be nice to each other.
Also, Hitch claims to welcome argument for its own sake, and loathes complaints of "divisiveness." The consensus shtick, false unity, charges of "giving ammunition to the enemy", and even populist rhetoric are among the ideological ills he skewered in _Letters to a Young Contrarian_ and elsewhere.
> BTW I've said repeatedly that I am against the Iraq war, as I was
> against the Afghanistan war. As I was against the first Gulf War.
> But it was during that first war back in 1991 that I first realized how
> intellectually and morally bankrupt the sloganeering of antiwar
> organizing had become, failing to deal with the realities of changing
> conflicts in way that was not just ineffective but counterproductive in
> alienating potential allies driven to the other side by it.
Nathan, I agree with you about IAC/ANSWER, which is not the entire anti-war movement. Breaking with them would be a positive step. Yes, there is something robotic in too much of the US anti-war activism, but if that is bankruptcy, it is not a moral one unless it allies itself with a Saddam. But one can recognize every complexity you rise, take stock of the weakness of the anti-war left, oppose the war, and *not* salute the butchers.
> I still think Barney Frank had the most succinct statement of the
> biggest difference between the Vietnam War and more recent conflicts.
> Ho Chi Minh was on the right side back then. Today's tyrants aren't,
> so the issue of war is more ambiguous, much more balancing the costs
> of wars against the gains of displacing the thugs.
The ambiguity clears up when the aim is replacing rather than displacing.
This looks like a case of the former.
-- Shane
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