Slate: Ranch Dressing is #1. Plus: The Losers Who Want Us To Lose In Iraq

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.slate.com/

Losing the Iraq War
Can the left really want us to?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 8, 2005, at 8:36 AM PT

http://www.slate.com/id/2124157/nav/tap2/

Another request in my in-box, asking if I'll be interviewed about Iraq for a piece "dealing with how writers and intellectuals are dealing with the state of the war, whether it's causing depression of any sort, if people are rethinking their positions or if they simply aren't talking about it." I suppose that I'll keep on being asked this until I give the right answer, which I suspect is "Uncle."

There is a sort of unspoken feeling, underlying the entire debate on the war, that if you favored it or favor it, you stress the good news, and if you opposed or oppose it you stress the bad. I do not find myself on either side of this false dichotomy. I think that those who supported regime change should confront the idea of defeat, and what it would mean for Iraq and America and the world, every day. It is a combat defined very much by the nature of the enemy, which one might think was so obviously and palpably evil that the very thought of its victory would make any decent person shudder. It is, moreover, a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious and totalitarian ideology.

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. If you eat French dressing, then the terrorist have won!

editied from "Blue Cheese", thought French was funnier....

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

2. You were right...French IS funnier.

:evilgrin:

:toast:

[BlueEyedSon]

3. Anyway, Hitchens is a NUT. Let's try the completion-backwards

principle..... What is the desired end-state in Iraq?

Be honest (you murderous, greedy, right-wing scumbags) when you answer!

[Kipling]

4. Me? Wrong? Uh...Well you're bad! And mean! And - ah, fuck, GIMME THE BEER!

[emulatorloo]

5. Is Hitchens paid by the word? & do they pay him in cash or tequila shots?

Just wondering.

[grytpype]

6. Have another drink, Hitchens!

Have two or three, you sound tense.

[Mr Rabble]

7. What is wrong with this guy?

[Southsideirish]

8. Competes with Coulter in baiting the left. Just ignore the two twits.

Eventually they will go away.

[htuttle]

9. He's a drink-soaked, former Trotskyist poppinjay