Hitchs Last Stand My Article At Salon

Hitch’s Last Stand

My article at Salon.com is “Christopher Hitchens’ last battle.”

‘ The British hawk gives 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. He goes 0 for 10.

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By Juan Cole

Sept. 3, 2005 | Bush administration foot-dragging and ineptitude in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has profoundly demoralized his supporters on the right. The hawkish intellectuals who gathered around George W. Bush to support his “War on Terror” once used language that suggested his machine-like omnicompetence. The Afghanistan War was to be “Operation Infinite Justice” until it was pointed out that Allah was the only one in that part of the world generally permitted to use that kind of language. The images of civilians abandoned to their fates and unchecked looting from New Orleans, however, reminded everyone of Bush’s disastrous policies in Iraq, and suggested a pattern of criminal incompetence.

These bellicose intellectuals–a band of Wilsonian idealists, cutthroat imperial capitalists, Trotskyites bereft of a cause, and neo-patriots traumatized by Sept. 11 are now increasingly divided and full of mutual recriminations. Among them all, the combative British essayist Christopher Hitchens continues most forcefully to uphold the case for the war, most recently in a piece for the Weekly Standard. ‘

The rest is at Salon.

P.S. When you read something like this interview Hitchens did with the Australian Broadcasting Co., you wonder if even he is beginning to have second thoughts . . .