A War to Be Proud Of. ⇒
31 August 2005, lunch time
Christopher Hitchens is a crack-pot. The first paragraph of the article should convince you of that, though the whole article is a bit suspect. I think there are some wars worth being proud of, but the war in Iraq is not one of them. It is foolish to think otherwise. One must weigh any good that has come from that war against all the bad -- and there is a lot of bad. This link was found via Metafilter -- though I was reminded of the article today by Kottke.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Yeah – he talks in absolutes, extremes, and exaggerations. There is no gray, only black-and-white, but what is so nutty about this paragraph?
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: “Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.”
I would agree that probably less people are tortured in Abu Ghraib now by the US than by Saddam. (Although it less clear who killed more/less per year – the war or Saddam’s regime…)
Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp…Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day.
So this is where he starts to get into trouble…a smaller scale torture operation is still torture…so it’s really more like the different between midnight and a 3 am than “night and day”.
And paragraph eight is where he passes the event horizon of black hole of crackpot-ness…I bet even Fox’s O’Reilly would even rate this as crackpot:
I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago.
by Ryan on September 1 2005, 2:47 am #