[...]
> My other problem comes from this comment: "The anti-war and neutralist
> forces share the blame here, because there was nothing to stop them
> saying, very well Mr. President, let us commonly design a plan for a new
> Iraq and think about what will be needed. Instead, all energy had to be
> spent on convincing people that Iraq should no longer be run by a
> psychotic crime family - which if the other side had had its way, it
> still would be." The American Left is sort of used to being outside of
> power for a long time, and this has bred a high degree of suspicion of
> working within established institutions. And this was the Bush
> Administration doing this-- people whose record didn't instill terrific
> confidence in rebuilding a nation. One could find fault with this
> suspicion, but it just doesn't strike me as a reason to place such a
> high degree of blame upon the Left.
Hitch's comment reminded me of the recent Thomas Friedman column (the one that FAIR called him on), in which he was complaining that the protest signs should say "we'll take it from here".
An interesting interview along these lines is in a recent issue of Middle East Report, with Isam al-Khafaji:
"Isam al-Khafaji, a contributing editor of Middle East Report, is an Iraqi social scientist. As a young faculty member and a left-wing intellectual, he was forced to leave Iraq in 1978 during campaigns of forced Baathification in higher education and repression of the left....Later, he accepted the Pentagon's invitation to be a member of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC). On May 9, al-Khafaji went to Baghdad as one of around 140 expatriates recruited to assist the US with post-war reconstruction planning. Exactly two months later, extremely frustrated about US reluctance to share policymaking duties, he submitted his resignation to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz."
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer228/228_khafaji.html
I wish the interviewer had asked for more detail about the reasons for his resignation, though. btw, in regard to another thread, his view about the Iraqi Governing Council is quite different than Tariq Ali's.
All that aside, yeah, the interview was sort of fun, mainly because the interviewer was such a Horowitz clone. And I'm not sure if it was noted here, but Hitch did recently review Horowitz's latest book, available on Peter K's Hitch page. I still check it once a week. I don't know why.