Hitchens reviews Fukuyama in Slate:
"American blunders and excess" is to "beheaders" as leftover meatloaf is to a rotting corpse. And yet behind those terms we have a numerical disparity of dead human beings - men, women, and children, civilian non-combatants as well as, and greatly more than, active fighters - that's tipped so far toward the non-beheaders as to make the meatloaf a metaphor for ghastly inhuman practices, cannibalism being the least ghoulish.Thus, in the first paragraph, we are told that Iraq has become "a magnet" for jihadists
[...]
The three questions that anyone developing second thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Is it right to say that we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken interventions and given the great moral question raised by the imposition of sanctions? And is it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations. Instead, by his slack use of terms like "magnet," he concedes to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses.
That's why last week was a poor one for him to pick. Surely the huge spasm of Islamist hysteria over caricatures published in Copenhagen shows that there is no possible Western insurance against doing something that will inflame jihadists?
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The phrase "we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq" reminds me of the campaign to get Americans to use auto seatbelts when I was a young boy, back in the late 1950's.
"The life you save may be your own".
I thought it meant if you saved someone's life you could have them.
Hitchens obscures the difference between being "responsible for" the condition of someone because of what you've done to them, and as a parent or guardian being "responsible for" their well-being.
Two completely different kinds of responsibility, both contained in the same vague phrase.
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And to say "the huge spasm of Islamist hysteria over caricatures" as though everything had suddenly stopped just before the cartoons were released and all slates and consciences had been wiped clean and blank, and then, when the world began again with everyone now equal, those violent fundamentalist idiots began rioting and burning flags - creating mayhem wherever they could, and discomfort everywhere. Over some silly drawings.
This is Hitchens' culminating exposure as quisling co-conspirator, and fool.
It's a cowardly technique, used by children who've lost or abandoned their natural nobility, to tease and goad and pester and torment - and then, like little bullfighters, at the moment their victim explodes with rage to turn to the gullible inattentive authority in charge - in this case the naive American public - and bat their eyes and say, "See? See how crazy and violent they are? See?"
It is a lie, no more and no less, to say the rioting Muslims are angry about a few cartoons.
They're angry about their brothers and sisters, their parents and their children, being killed and maimed, and having their religion, as well as their grief and outrage, ridiculed.
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The problem, which gets clearer every day, is that for people whose morality is centered in themselves lies that advance the cause of their own survival are not immoral, nor is mass murder or any other traditionally inhuman crime.
This reduces the conflict, any conflict, to raw power alone, and removes anything like nobility or humane intent as ideals or goals - moves them into the realm of fiction and makes their presentation a trick, like camouflage - a biological strategy, something that can be set aside when it's no longer effective.
Cowardice has become a raison d'etre now.
The assumptions that underly the media discourse that Hitchens plays such a dominant role in include a dedication to the pursuit of truth - work he's obviously ceased to find rewarding.
