Hitchens, of course, is certain that terrorism is attributable solely to the desire of Islamists to destroy western civilization, and that Islamists will be able to recruit people to carry out such attacks no matter what US foreign policy is. It was when Sam Husseini from the Institute for Public Accuracy disputed this, right after the September 11th attacks, that Hitchens went berserk, calling Husseini's perspective "utterly rotten at the very core of it."
So, here's a recent example of Wolfowitz expressing many of the same ideas. (He's actually made the connection between the September 11th attacks and our Iraq policy even more explicitly at other times, but I didn't bother digging them up.)
I hope someone who knows Hitchens will ask him why exactly it's acceptable for Wolfowitz to say this, but not for Husseini to say what he did. (Dennis?) I wonder what his answer would be.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030727- depsecdef0462.html
Wolfowitz: Let me say a couple of things, Tim. People act as though the cost of containing Iraq is trivial. The cost of containing Iraq was enormous, 55 American lives lost, at least, in incidents like the Cole and Kobar Towers, which were part of the containment effort, billions of dollars of American money spent.
Russert: Was Iraq linked to those?
Wolfowitz: Absolutely. Not to the -- I don't know who did the attacks. I know that we would not have had Air Force people in Kobar Towers if we weren't conducting a containment policy. I know we wouldn't have had to have the Cole out there doing maritime intercept operations. And worst of all, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwa from 1998, where he calls for killing Americans, the two principle grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and out continuing attacks on Iraq, 12 years of containment was a terrible price for us...
***
And here's Hitchens:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/analysis/0924sin.htm
Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to "rationalize" the aggression of September 11, or my use of the term "fascism with an Islamic face," and I'll select a representative example of the sort of "thinking" that I continue to receive on my screen, even now. This jewel comes from Sam Husseini, who runs the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC:
"The fascists like bin Laden could not get volunteers to stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem like it was supposed to--and the US stopped the sanctions and the bombing on Iraq."
You've heard this "thought" expressed in one way or another, dear reader, have you not? I don't think I took enough time in my last column to point out just what is so utterly rotten at the very core of it... Not only is it indecent to act as self-appointed interpreter for the killers, but it is rash in the highest degree...
...the deed announces and exposes its "root cause." The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3811 bytes Desc: not available URL: <../attachments/20030730/aea4dce0/attachment.bin>