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October
3, 2001
Ariel
Dorfman:
America
the Wounded
Lennie
Brenner
Dr.
Watson in Afghanistan
Steve
Perry:
Ashcroft's
Scare Tactics
October
2, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn:
Inside
an Afghan Hospital
Richard
Manning:
A
Vietnam Vet on Patriotism
St. Clair/Cockburn:
Tarnished
Star,
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
October
1, 2001
Noam
Chomsky:
Memo
to Hitchens
Hizam
Bitar:
Refuting
Michael Kinsley
David Grenier:
The
Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Douglas
Valentine:
Homeland
Insecurity
Carl
Estabrook:
Stop Bush's Killing
Mahajan/Jensen:
Food,
Fear and War
Patrick
Cockburn:
Ready
to Strike
Cockburn/St.
Clair:
Things
Could Be Worse
Terry
Allen:
Early
Profit-taking and 9/11
September
29, 2001
Steve Perry:
The
Pentagon's Blueprint
Patrick
Cockburn:
When
Will the Missiles Fall?
September
28, 2001
Edward Said:
Backlash
and Backtrack
John Troyer:
When
Language Fails
Patrick
Cockburn:
In
Afghanistan, Waiting for the Real War to Start
Steve Breyman:
War,
Oil and Renewables
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A Pocket Guide to
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October 3,
2001
Hitchens and Coulter: Love at Last?
By Peter Bell
Christopher Hitchens shows a surprising reversion
to British mental reflex in his commentaries on the recent events
in New York and Washington.
I gather he's been watching a lot of
Fox programming, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch's British station.
He makes the point that the goals of
the bin Laden adherents are simply insupportable. In context,
though, he cites no one else's reporting, and were it not for
the valuable contribution of careful journalists such as Robert
Fisk, I would find myself unable to believe any fraction of his
characterizations of bin Laden and his allies.
The reason for that is because from that
start Hitchens leaps to a truly strange conclusion: that the
US is somehow newly in a position of moral authority to continue
its long policy of selecting winners and losers at the level
of nations. Undoubtedly, Hitchens is thinking of a more moderate
Western-commanded coalition - featuring, naturally, the smart
British boys who've done so well at seeing to peaceful solutions
in the territories over which they once held sway.
The British reputation as mapmakers and
following on that as peacemakers does indeed preceed them, but
in a way which Hitchens seems completely to have forgotten.
"Very well then, comrades. Do not
pretend that you wish to make up for America's past crimes in
the region. Here is one such crime that can be admitted and undone--the
sponsorship of the Taliban could be redeemed by the demolition
of its regime and the liberation of its victims," Hitchens
writes.
Hitchens is but a single notch less unhinged
than his comely comrade Ann Coulter, who capped a column for
the National Review which she began by distinguishing the right
sorts of people from others, moved forward to rail about luggage
checking by the wrong sorts of people with a spectacularly extreme
call to arms:
"We should invade their countries, kill
their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
But now I see that Hitchens, under the
banner of opening a new front against fascism, agrees with at
least two thirds of the prescription - and quite frankly he may
well agree with the last as well, but be working up to coming
out in support of it.
The essential problem is that Hitchens
is leaving his back covered by the fascists I'd assumed he knew
stood in power behind him, from the openly discredited Republican
contributors with records as war criminals who were exposed years
back and driven off into the World Anti-Communist League, there
to plot with terrorist groups admitted to WACL such as Alpha-66,
to our modern allies like Silvio Berlusconi, who went on the
record last week openly advocating the need for Christendom to
"continue to conquer peoples." For their own good,
of course.
In the past fifty years, we - or the
United States Government, rather - have proven to a degree of
near-mathematical certainty rarely available to students in the
social "sciences" our congenital incapacity to be of
assistance to other nations in their movements toward self-government.
Should any faction with enough social rank to be included in
a government threaten to elevate their nation's interest to equal
or worse yet superior rank to that of our businesses' "interests,"
our first reflex is to order them killed. This does a number
of things, including priming people in our client states to distrust
their own governments, to hate our government, and to correctly
identify anyone who accepts its assistance as having blood money
in their pockets.
Any honest call for a response to the
terrorist actions in New York and Washington simply must keep
this in mind. Anyone we choose to assist will be branded for
all time as a collaborator with the enemy.
We cannot be in the business of picking
leaders, much as Mr. Hitchens and Ms. Coulter might fantasize
that we successfully could. Even were one to credit us with a
newfound sincerity of purpose in light of our understanding,
through these attacks, of the immense harm we've waged abroad
- and no one in the war camp as yet, including Hitchens, is prepared
to argue for us to adopt a tone of understanding - that would
not oblige others to believe us; trust must be earned, as parents
say to their misbehaving children, over time.
Turning up in Afghanistan waving our
dicks, throwing our money and hurt around behind whoever's conveniently
willing to prolong the civil war for us is not a trust-building
exercise. Mr. Hitchens need only reflect on England's current
standing in the world for confirmation of this; despite its exile
for decades into the lower tier of powers, its fawning eagerness
to act as our proxy combine with its own history to leave its
government immensely suspect in much of the world.
If US politicians are able to go over
and wave the dicks of their constituents' children at a Foreign
Menace, they will certainly not be indulging themselves in my
name. Hitchens' peculiar eagerness to lend his name to this exercise
leaves me in agreement with Chomsky, who politely suggests something
in Hitchens' head has broken. One hopes not irretrievably, but
his record in continuing to defend our actions in support of
the Kosovo Liberation Army, lately engaged in carrying their
war of aggression into Macedonia, leaves me thinking that Hitchens
will always be, first and foremost, sympathetic to the arguments
of Britain's unapologetically interventionist elite. CP
Peter Bell
lives in Oakland, California.
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