Face to Face

This Michael Totten tale of a long night of drinking with Christopher Hitchens and some occasionally hostile Iraqis, besides being interesting in a Portland-kid-hits-the-Beltway-circuit kinda way, strikes me as a good Rorschach Test for how one feels about American policy in Iraq, or at least on where one stands nowadays with Da Hitch. One sentence that jumped out:

Believe me, you don't know what a tense political fight feels like until the person yelling at you is from a country you recently bombed and currently occupy.

Comments

[gaius marius]

?If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.?

that some people really don't understand why this statement would not only be offensive to iraqis but make a mockery of everything bush supposedly wants to do in the mideast is just amazing to me. hitch may be british, but he is no gentleman if he can utter such a thing at a table of iraqis. just. another. frustrated. victorian.

[Pavel]

I don't know how a guy as intelligent as Hitchens doesn't appear to see the problem of using political and military solutions as the cusp by which we induce cultural change in the Middle East.

It's a dangerous logical circularity. "We're going to give you vote, we'll even fix the results, so that you may acquire the cultural traditions that make democracy possible."

It'd be a potentially interesting debate. Though I'm surprised Hitchens got a word in with Totten's lips so lovingly nuzzling the underside of his ballsack.

[D Anghelone]

Did you know there have been at least three Fort Tottens?

[Ken Shultz]

The striking thing to me is that he seems to have trouble coming to terms with the real life effects of war and occupation and bombing and death--as if these things only exist in cyberspace and on television.

There are real people in Iraq, both Americans and Iraqis, and many of them have endured real suffering, mostly, because of people acting on the ideas of Mr. Hitchens and others who agree with him--deal with it!

...Don't change the subject to mutual friends and blackjack.

P.S. If Hitchens had written this piece, much like his eulogy of Ronald Reagan, I would have read it as a confession.

[SM]

"If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.?

Exactly how would "we" prevent them from taking power ? I'd really like to see Totten or Hitchens answer that question.

[tpd]

SM, probably by building escape hatches into the agreement process. Notice how they have to have women elected. That's a no-no under Sharia. They back out of that, we go back to square one. Have you even been paying attention these past two years?

If you mean how would we physically prevent, rather than rationally, it would probably involve guns.

I know the whole Iraq/Iran thing is the new going naysay (unwinnable to Stalingrad to quagmire to no elections to postponed elections to violent and low-voting elections to cut and run after the elections to IT'S IRAN) but if you really want to be cutting edge, try to predict what the new one will be when the constitution is written up, it doesn't lay down the sharia law, doesn't include a overseeing religious body (ala Iran) and then a moderate president of Iraq is elected. What will be the buzz then?

[norbizness]

Michael Totten's thought process, channeling Admiral Ackbar: "Why isn't this Iraqi praising my being an American while brandishing a purple finger? IT'S A TRAP!"

P.S. Is it really a good idea to keep Hitchens up all night drinking like that? I know this is a libertarian site, but I think we need a guardian ad litem for his liver.

[tpd]

You're right norbizness, I completely forgot to add the mandatory, "Hitch is a drunk" line to my comment. Why would anyone take me seriously without it. Here goes.

That Christopher Hitchens, he hasn't uttered a single coherent word since he started drinking on Sept 11th.

[Visitor]

> he is no gentleman if he can
> utter such a thing...

This is the start of an accusation that someone else is VICTORIAN?

Why is it that the antiwar types seem so eager to believe that 'the little brown people' are just savages without democratic aspiration?

[Pavel]

You don't have to be savage to not have democratic aspirations, Visitor. That's the modern version of the Victorian fallacy.

Look at China and tell me, are they savages or an aspiring democracy? The truth is they're neither. If anything they're progressing towards stronger nationalist authoritarianism. Sure there's dissent. That doesn't mean pressuring for a western democracy there is either a good idea or the will of the people.

That attitude is only condescending if you truly believe Western democracy is The End of History.

[norbizness]

Oh come on, TPD, I would never claim that Hitchens just started drinking a mere 3 1/2 years ago. Sheesh. In all seriousness, I've always found him remarkably coherent and respect his opinions... well, maybe not his "last man standing who defends Chalabi" series.

As for the main thrust of my point (concerning Totten and his "Gee whiz, lookit the angry Iraqis!" observations), maybe I'm all cloudy after just having seen Robert McNamara's recollection of his 1995 meeting with the foreign minister of North Vietnam in The Fog of War.

I'm just waiting for Totten's revised post, which replaces the last word "occupy" with "liberate."

[Jason Ligon]

"That doesn't mean pressuring for a western democracy there is either a good idea or the will of the people."

The problem, of course, is that if you don't have a representative government, you have no idea what the will of the people is. It by definition has no bearing on the shape of the government. The truth is in the mechanisms for change. Is there a way to get rid of the guy sitting in the posh chair without having to mount a revolution? Whatever the institution may be if it isn't western democracy, it has to be a channel, regularly open, for power to flow from the people to shape their government.

We can't talk about popular will under any government absent this feature, and all such governments are illegitimate for that reason.

[SM]

"We can't talk about popular will under any government absent this feature, and all such governments are illegitimate for that reason."

That's not what the Totten/Hitchens/tpd axis is saying. Their contention is that "we" will prevent a sharia government-by-election from coming to be by means that would (quoting tpd here) "probably involve guns". The defining feature of a sharia government is not "one vote one time", or the lack of women in office, but that it is based on sharia. Pakistan has elections, dictators, & also blaspemy laws. Bangladesh has a woman Prime Minister. As this article points out, that hasn't tempered the zeal of fanatics for sharia. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F0081EF6395C0C708EDDA80894DD404482&incamp=archive:search

Now I think that all the noise coming from iraqi clerics and their followers is probably just minorityism amplified by the media echo-chamber. Iraqis can't not have learnt from the iranian cautionary tale. But still - if there are mass demonstrations for sharia, how do "we" stop it ?

[Cridland]

> are they savages or an aspiring democracy?
> The truth is they're neither.

Bogus bifurcation. Given the choice, don't you think they'd prefer more say in their lives?

> That attitude is only condescending if you
> truly believe Western democracy is The End
> of History.

No, the condescension is perfectly clear. Antiwar types were obviously charmed by western employment of murderous thugs to run these regimes in the past. Why, why, why are they so eager to think that there's an alternative approach to decency outside the capitalist/democratic/sexually and relgiously tolerant model?

1 - It's like the Cold War. The fantasy of switching teams --if their own achievements in western society come up lacking-- *must* be sustained. (The dreamer can always imagine that if he crosses over the Iron/Muslim curtain, he'll be rightfully seated at the chair of some committee.)

2 - Racism.

Myself, I think it's probably a blend.