Why Does Christopher Hitchens Hate the Troops?

Christopher Hitchens, May 16, 2005
[A recent New York Times article] portentously headed "The Mystery of the Insurgency," ... rubbed its eyes at the sheer lunacy and sadism of the Iraqi car bombers and random murderers. At a time when new mass graves are being filled, and old ones are still being dug up, writer James Bennet practically pleaded with the authors of both to come up with an intelligible (or defensible?) reason for his paper to go on calling them "insurgents."

I don't think the New York Times ever referred to those who devastated its hometown's downtown as "insurgents."

It's time for respectable outlets to drop the word, to call things by their right names (Baathist or Bin Ladenist or jihadist would all do in this case).

Well said, Christopher! My one criticism is that you didn't get in a gratuitous shot at Newsweek. Or indeed every other publication giving aid and comfort to our enemies by using the term "insurgent" to describe individuals who can surely only be described correctly as nihil-islamo-terro-fasco-binladeni-jihadi-baathi-embodiment-in-human-form-of-unspeakable-evilists.

It is such a shame to see these publications putting the final nail in the coffin of that lost, lamented luxury: freedom-of-speech. We so wanted to keep it around, it's just a shame the New York Times had to force us into getting rid of it by consistently broadcasting their terrorist propaganda with the sole purpose of undermining our armed forces in their fight for goodness and purity and freedom.

But lets not go easy on these terrorist-enabling miscreants by failing to hold their words up to the light with their names highlighted beside them. Let us detail all those fifth columnists who have stooped to use the word "insurgent" to describe those attacking our brave boys in Iraq. Here are some of the very worst offenders - enemies of freedom to a man - I found via a quick google search:

Andrew Morton, 78th Division (TS) PAO, Oct. 7, 2004:
A number of the convoys encountered insurgent resistance and weapons fire, however, Hershkowitz unit miraculously suffered no major casualties after months of operations

Lt Col Paul Hastings Dec 13, 2004:
Iraqi Security Forces and Multi-National Forces repelled separate attacks by anti-Iraqi insurgents as they attempted to seize a police station and attack an MNF convoy on Dec. 11 in Mosul

Spc. Curt Cashour, Army News Service, Feb. 15, 2005
[T]he Army, along with scores of defense contractors, started developing various armor technologies in August 2003, when insurgents ramped up improvised explosive device attacks in post-invasion Iraq.

Name and shame them Christopher! Name and shame!
- posted by Brian OC @ 10:11 AM
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Trump Stumps for Military in Primetime

Fort Dix Website

The main character of the [new Department of Defense] commerical, aimed at parents, teachers and other who may influence the decisions of young men and women to join the Army, is former Ranger and West Point graduate Kelly Perdew. For most, he is better known as the man who was hired by Donald Trump during the hit series, The Apprentice.

If Donald Trump and Kelly Perdew (winner of Apprentice II) want to appear in ads for the Dept. of Defense to promote recruitment in these lean times for the military that is certainly their business. Personally I'm not sure it's the lack of encouragement from 15-minute cardboard celebrities that's failing to convince the youth of America that a couple of years in Iraq with second class equipment, a high risk of death and no exit strategy sounds like a great career option. But then, what do I know, I've never been to Westpoint.

And it certainly doesn't seem like Perdew for one has much better things to do with his time:

Perdew's desk is in a small, windowless space next to the assistant to Donald Trump's wife, Melania (Perdew has no assistant). The walls are bare, except for a dry-erase board and a U.S. map, stuck with pins marking the distributors he's signed to buy his boss's new line of bottled water, Trump Ice.

My problem comes not with the paid and clearly demarcated DOD advertisement that appeared during an ad-break during last night's season finale of Apprentice III, but the (unpaid?) underhand unannounced advertisement that Trump and Perdew slipped in during what was supposedly the "editorial" meat of the show:

At one point in the finale Trump turned to Perdew and in an exchange almost as wooden and scripted as the ad itself the following snippet of conversation ensued: (NB I'm not quoting, this is only from memory but I think I got the gist)

Trump: Kelly, do you feel your career in the military helped you to win the Apprentice?
Perdew: Absolutely yes. The military taught me team-work, enthusiasm and commitment.

I suppose this is only the next logical progression from the hour long Product Placement in Paradise show which is broadcast for most of the year on CBS Thursdays under the working title "Survivor", but it still stuck in throat a little. A career in the military is a much too serious a product to be trying to sell underhandedly (even so ineptly) in the midst of a light entertainment hour.

But hey kids, the message was loud and clear - if you want a chance to work phones in a windowless office trying to hawk bottled water, why not risk your life for a bogus war in the Middle East first?
- posted by Brian OC @ 6:06 AM
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Revenge of the Scot

One doesn't have to agree with every past utterance of Respect Party MP George Galloway or to harbour no qualms about his (alleged or actual) conduct to feel a great surge of exhilaration watching his performance versus Norm Coleman's Kangeroo Committee in the US Senate yesterday. (My emotions viewing his opening remarks were somewhat akin to those I felt watching Michael Owen score against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup.)

"I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as [US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld met him," Mr Galloway said. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns."

Nice.

We Northern Irish and Scots have long shared a special affinity (largely based on mutual disdain for the English), so it was with something akin to pride that I was able to view Galloway's barnstorming performance. But it also occurred to me that in a parallel universe it could have been a plain-speaking politician from N. Ireland who came to the United States senate and gave the bizarrely coiffed and preening Coleman the hairdryer treatment at his deluded little show trial.

We certainly have world class ranters back home - if we weren't so concerned with our tedious little internecine squabbles in N. Ireland maybe we could take these skills to the world stage. Were he to turn from the dark side, Ian Paisley could have had Coleman in tears. Were Gerry Adams not so concerned with his image (and fundraising ability) in the US maybe it could have been him.

If nothing else Galloway has stuck one in the eye for the tiny nations of the world against it's greatest lumbering behemoth.

But Northern Ireland - what a waste of our national talents, our national politics are.
- posted by Brian OC @ 9:21 AM
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History Repeating

Steve Gilliard quoting the Telegraph (UK)
The officer said: "US troops [in Iraq] have the attitude of shoot first and ask questions later. They simply won't take any risk.

"It has been explained to US commanders that we made mistakes in Northern Ireland, namely Bloody Sunday, and paid the price.

It can't be all that much of a surprise that US Commanders failed to learn the lessons of counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, when the British who were actually there apparently didn't learn them either.

For years the British government used to insist that to call the N. Irish Troubles a "war" was to give the terrorists a legitimacy they did not deserve. (Thus the Hunger Strikes aimed unsuccessfully at gaining for POW rights for Republican prisoners.) It was felt that treating the IRA etc. as common criminals and defeating them using the criminal justice system would undermine their cause and help keep it from escalating into an ever-growing Irish insurrection. (Despite the deployment of troops Martial Law was never declared in N. Ireland)

While a lot of mistakes were made - particularly in the beginning (notably Bloody Sunday), the British government did make serious attempts to avoid collective punishment of the Catholic population - it least when you compare the British Army to the US Army in Afghanistan or Iraq or the IDF in the Occupied Territories. They also spent time actually trying to address the (often legitimate) grievances of the Catholic populace.

This is not to say that terrorist killers - like for example Bin Laden, or Dessie O'Hare - aren't often psychopaths with whom all reasoning is futile. Simply that in an aggrieved populace, certain actions which would not normally be tolerated will be rationalized by the notion that "at least they're doing something". Criminal gangsters can thrive in an atmosphere where the population have lost their respect for the forces of law and order, so those forces to prevail must attempt to gain that respect. The extent to which this is happening in Iraq is highly debateable.

As a result of the UK government's less "you're with us or against us" approach we have a kind of peace in N Ireland. Not perfect by any means but a lot better than it was in the 70s through the early 90s.

Yet somehow no one in British administration with any kind of knowledge of how the IRA was effectively neutralized, appears to have spoken up during Bush's drumbeat for war. Tony Blair's Labour party - who were in power during some of the darkest days of the 1970s - were eager to fall into step behind Bush's War On Terror. And no one seems to have mentioned that the UK's own "War on Terror" in the early 70s had to be abandoned when incidents like Bloody Sunday and Internment sent IRA recruitment skyrocketing, and replaced with something a little more nuanced, and a little more discriminatory with its targets.

So I don't particularly blame American soldiers' for failing to learn lessons from history when it seems British politicos didn't either. Eventually I suspect the relentless succession of propaganda victories the US is handing to Al Qaeda, with their witless tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere will force a rethink there too.

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" and all that.

***

Also on this topic I read a book recently "Making War, Thinking History" (written before September 11) by a Professor in the US Air Force, Jeffrey Record, who feared that the tactics (ordnance dropped from a great height by pilots far from danger) used in the Gulf War and particularly Kosovo might lead to an erosion of something he called the "Warrior Ethic" which held for example that the military should be prepared to give up their lives as opposed to killing civilians. It is difficult to square this "warrior ethic" with what we know about US Army Standard Operating Procedure in Iraq.

***

Finally many of my friends would probably be mightily offended by any implication that the British troops in N. Ireland were paragons of decency. It should go without saying that many of them did despicable things there but I'll offer this story of one of my earliest memories as a counterweight. And invite the reader to wonder if this could happen in Iraq 2005.

I must have been about 6 or 7 years old (so this was the late 1970s in N. Ireland) when my parents bought what to me was an excellent toy facsimile of a machine gun. The ack-ack-ack noise it made when I pulled the trigger was extremely satisfying. Nothing felt more natural, when the truckload of British troops drove past the garden where I was playing, than for me to point it at them and "fire". I couldn't understand why my mother panicked as she did and dragged me into the house. After all, and I still remember this vividly, the soldiers themselves had all laughed good-naturedly and waved. Funny that.
- posted by Brian OC @ 1:22 PM
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More Bad News for the Troops

CROWDS 'FONDA' JANE COMEBACK
May 16, 2005 -- J.Lo and J.Fo rocked the box office over the weekend, as moviegoers flocked to see Jennifer Lopez and Jane Fonda battle it out in "Monster-in-Law." The brassy comedy, Fonda's first picture since 1990, was the No. 1 film in North America, with a take of $24 million, exceeding studio expectations.

What surer sign can there be of waning support for the troops on their foreign adventure than that US movie-going audiences have put Jane Fonda at the top of the box office? What clearer signal could there be that Americans want to bring their boys home?

"Audiences obviously ignored reviews, as they were roundly awful," analyst John Hamann said on the Box Office Prophets Web site."

By the same analysis, audiences obviously also ignored all of Jennifer Lopez's previous movies. At least since she became "J-Lo" around 1999 and has thus been able to pick and choose her roles, as far as I can tell Jennifer Lopez has failed to be associated with anything but "roundly awful" movies. (I have seen The Cell, The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, Shall We Dance and Gigli - the blame for most of this is my wife's* but for Gigli it's my own morbid fascination). Which is apropos of nothing of course, but I thought it warranted mentioning.

*In fairness I should confess that my wife does not have a monopoly on insisting we watch terrible movies together, and that within the next few weeks we'll be going together to see Revenge of the Sith.
- posted by Brian OC @ 9:56 AM
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Who Cares About Winning Elections?!

I read quite often fellow liberals (I have decided to try to force myself to use this term of self-description. I don't like it, but I have a sneaking suspicion this is just because I've been brainwashed into not liking it by the Right Wing Noise Machine) objecting to what they see as internecine feuding by saying we should bury our differences with fellow liberals/Democrats and concentrate on the true enemy - Karl Rove, the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News etc.

That kind of cosy thinking sounds well and good until you hear those kind of exhortations being offered on behalf of someone like Kenneth Baer, a former Gore speech writer. Baer recently wrote this piece while guesting on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog:

"Word just came in that the far-far-far left, Islamist candidate George Galloway has defeated Oona King - daughter of an ex-pat African-American civil rights activist and Jewish mother - in the east London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow. Galloway is not just anti-war and anti-American, he is pro-Saddam.

[]

As Forsythe goes on to explain, a Galloway win could spark a backlash against Muslims as: - it could lead many Britons to conclude that Muslims threaten the country's liberal political culture. Galloway's win is a loss for us all."

I had already written a (I hope) stinging email to Baer in response to this ersatz LGF drivel, before I stumbled on Atrios lambasting the same piece as the "f***ed up thinking of DNC insiders". Predictably Atrios (and those who agreed with him) were subsequently attacked by some of his commentors categorizing this as not-sticking-together etc, asking how we could ever expect to win elections, and of course saying we should attack the real enemy. (Unfortunately the Haloscan comments had already mostly disappeared by the time I went to write this so I can't offer exact quotes.)

Those people perhaps missed the point that Kenneth Baer is the enemy. And no liberal in their right-mind should ever want his type of thinking to prevail in an election, even though - as is the way of things - it probably will some time in the not-so-distant future. I have read Talking Points Blog religiously for months, but am sadly looking on it in a whole new light since Josh Marshall returned from his sojourn and neglected to offer a public mea culpa and disassociation from Baer's absurd comments. (George Galloway = "Islamist"!?, "Far left" as a term of abuse - as if Stalin's Gulags and mass murder were just progressive social activism taken to its logical conclusion) I would no sooner want to help Kenneth Baer into office than I would Zell Miller, Democrats though they may be.

Now admittedly that kind of thinking doesn't win elections, but I have long ago come to the conclusion that I don't care that much about winning elections by selling out my principles, or even winning them at all for that matter.

I have next to zero faith in the electoral system for bringing worthwhile change which is not to say I'm for tyranny or dictatorship, just that democracy is a nice idea that I've never found has been of all that much use to me.

I was raised in Northern Ireland under the rule of the United Kingdom and at 18 blessed with a vote that I could do nothing but waste. I'd lived most of my childhood under the suffocating cloud of military occupation-lite and Thatcherite Conservatism but the parties who had a chance of winning power from Thatcher (Labour, Liberal Democrats (barely)) in the UK didn't even run candidates in N. Ireland. In the US I appreciate that a Republican voter in Massachusetts might feel his vote is a waste but at least he can vote for his favored party. I couldn't vote Labour and was left with selecting from one of N. Ireland's numerous religious-based parties. The only alternative was which religion you wanted to vote for, so the choice seemed completely irrelevant for those of us who didn't have much of a preference either way. OK I could have voted for the simperingly bland middle-of-the-road Alliance party but that seemed like a close equivalent of just ticking a box marked "neutral", so I ended up in frustration voting for the N. Irish Conservative (affiliated with but distinct from Thatcher's UK Conservatives).

In case there should be any confusion, I did completely despise the party for whom I cast my vote, but my 18-yr old logic told me that if a party affiliated with the UK Conservatives started getting votes then maybe the Labour party might think about fielding candidates in N. Ireland. This has still never happened, a N. Ireland voter still can't cast his vote for Tony Blair's party or one of his direct challengers which I think is incredible. An object lesson in the tricky question of how to give a populace a vote, yet still completely disenfranchise them. In the following elections I think I mindlessly cast all my votes for the SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) - the least extremist party that didn't consider me an incipient Vatican insurrectionist. But I was sufficiently numbed by the depressing nature of electoral politics - especially in the wake of Tony Blair's New Labour - to not even bother to vote in the last General Election before I left the country.

Now I'm in the US and as a non-citizen I don't even have a vote so I am relieved of the burden of having to feel guilty about not using it. The high end of the Democratic Party stinks even if there are many good people in its rank and file. It hasn't even only begun stinking recently, it pretty much always has, and it most likely always will. My wife though intending to vote for Nader, for whom she'd voted last time, was surprised to find he wasn't even on the local ballot so ended up practically voting at random.

All of which is to say I am largely unaffected by exhortations to "support the team" and swallow my objections to odiferous liberals like Mr Baer by helping the Democrats into power (lesser of two evils though they may be). Sure I may not "win" any elections but then I'm in my thirties and I never have so far and I think I'm going to have to be OK with that.

Not that that means I'm apathetic or would encourage anyone else to be. I run (or have run) several political blogs, I've give money to causes I support, I've represented low-income individuals in benefits tribunals against the state, I've done years of work gratis for non-profit organizations, I fire off rude emails to Joe Scarborough or Tim Russert every couple of weeks, and I get really angry about the state of things in this country and the world almost every day, all of which makes me far from apathetic. I'm just not going to support Baer's Democratic Party just because it has a chance of winning an election, and I'm not going to feel in the slightest bit bad about it either.

***

Postscript. The mail I sent to Kenneth Baer (and Josh Marshall):
Your comment:"Word just came in that the far-far-far left, Islamist candidate George Galloway has defeated Oona King -- daughter of ... [a] Jewish mother... Galloway is not just anti-war and anti-American, he is pro-Saddam. ...

a Galloway win could spark a backlash against Muslims as: it could lead many Britons to conclude that Muslims threaten the country's liberal political culture. Galloway's win is a loss for us all."

I am a daily reader of Talking Points Memo, but occasionally I like to glance over at Free republic or Little Green Footballs for example just to see what the reactionary halfwits are mulling over at the moment. I take it Josh has decided to spare me the effort by letting you guest here for a bit. (I'm surprised you omitted a reference to "Eurabia" there.)

I can't even imagine how long it would take me to dissect everything that's wrong-headed, clueless, ignorant, and baselessly inflammatory about what you've written and as it's my lunch break, and I suspect you are beyond help, I have no intention of taking the time.

Since you are now such an expert on the UK I hope you will be familiar with the analogy when I tell you that your appearance on Talking Points Memo is like seeing a monstrous carbuncle appearing on the nose of an old and dear friend.

Josh, dear God, what were you thinking. Still I hope you had a good honeymoon.

Yours,Brian OC(expat N. Ireland)

P.S. And while I'm at it, didn't it even occur to you that perhaps the fact of the native food being bland is the *reason* the Brits like curry so much! [BOC - a reference to a previous assinine comment from Mr Baer that he couldn't figure out why curry was so popular in the UK, when the native food was so bland.]
- posted by Brian OC @ 5:50 AM
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Cunning Killer Plots Death Row Escape: One Body Part at a Time

Seattle Times:

INDIANAPOLIS -- Gregory Scott Johnson's sister suffers from liver disease and will die without a transplant. Johnson wants her to have his liver.

"Chances are I'm not going to be needing it very long," he said.

Johnson, 40, is scheduled to die by injection at 12:01 a.m. May 25 for the 1985 murder of 82-year-old Ruby Hutslar.

The story about a death row inmate who wants to donate his liver to his sister who will die without it raises a whole raft of ethical issues.

Top of the list:

(a) What if the sister goes on to murder someone, and receives the maximum penalty? How are they then going to execute the liver twice?

(b) If the liver is allowed to live on the basis that it is not personally responsible for Johnson's crime, then on what grounds can we justly execute his kidneys? In fact given that Johnson's crime was "stomping an 82-year-old woman to death" isn't there a strong case to be made that we should just execute his feet, and let the rest of him go free?
- posted by Brian OC @ 5:21 AM
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No More Munichs!

It is very common for US warhawks to cite the example of Hitler's appeasement Munich as a reason why the country has to go to war NOW! and not waste a moment to nip in the bud aggression from their Evil-doer-de-jour - Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Kim Il Sung, General Noriega.It should not be surprising that such people are pretty ignorant of what was in fact the cost of Munich. It was not - as some seem to think simply the psychological cost of letting a nasty piece of work think you don't have the guts to stop him. In fact there were numerous clear military advantages that were sacrificed by not taking military action against Germany when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 and waiting until the Poland invasion in 1939.

i) In 1939 came the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact when the mutually distrusting Russia and Germany made an agreement that assured Germany it could turn it's attentions away from it's Eastern front and concentrate on the West

ii) Germany's war machine grew much faster proportionately over the next year than did the allies as Hitler was able to harness the Czech arms industry (the biggest in E. Europe to his war machine)

iii) Czechoslovakia had a 35 division army that was completely neutralized by the invasion.

In fact Hitler's own generals didn't believe they could win a war over Czechoslovakia in 1938.

In the case of Il Sung and Hussein of course while argument (ii) in terms of their armies' conventional strength potentially outstripping that of the US in time is plainly bogus, the WMD angle did/does provide some cover to say they are getting more militarily dangerous as time goes by. But the Munich analogy has been wheeled out by the Hawks against all sorts of people (in Vietman and Bosnia for example) with no feasible evidence that this applies.

"No more Munichs!" has become a meaningless and much-abused cliche by those without the faintest clue of what was sacrificed there.

(I put some of this in the comments section at Eschaton)
- posted by Brian OC @ 1:41 PM
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Not Dead Yet

Since some recent comments I've left on a few other blogs have caused the hits here to skyrocket - almost reaching double figures one day! - I've decided I might actually resurrect this blog and start posting here occasionally.

On the other hand, this is only one of six blogs I have and I lose and gain interest in contributing to them so frequently that I don't imagine my best intentions will amount to much.
- posted by Brian OC @ 11:27 AM
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