Ranting to /dev/null

Perhaps Hitchens portrays an accurate picture of the anti-war left, but he certainly fails to understand the different "anti-war" arguments. Hitchens implies that all anti-war arguments are founded solely on the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He dismisses, or ignores, however, the anti-war crowd who use as their base not 9/11, but rather the United States' foreign policy over the last 50-75 years. To suggest that the starting point for all anti-war arguments is 9/11 is just dishonest. Perhaps Hitchens would be well-served to look outside of the leftist/progressive anti-war arguments, and to consider some of the other anti-war arguments from outside of the Democratic party.

Fine. We'll just examine Islamic foreign policy for the last, oh, I don't know, 500-1000 years. Maybe that'll give us a broader perspective.

You just can't get away from blaming the victim, can you?

Obviously, the War in Iraq, and the so-called "War on Terror" are important issues, and they should be debated. I was not taking a side on the issue, I was simply pointing out that Mr. Hitchens does not understand the views that he is critiquing.

History has an important place in this debate. Ignoring every historical event prior to 9/11, as Mr. Hutchins seems to do, does not lead to a healthy debate. Criminals attacked the United States on 9/11 for a reason. Analyzing that reason is, I would think, quite important. Simply assuming that they attacked the United States for no reason whatsoever, other than blind hatred, and ignoring every event prior to 9/11, is not an intelligent viewpoint.

"Mr. Hitchens does not understand the views he is critiquing."

I don't know if I've ever heard a more inaccurate, presumptuous, wrong-headed statement in my life. Hitchens has, for the past five years, been perhaps the most accurate, piercing, insightful critic of the anti-war movement in particular and the left in general. He's Oxford educated, and was on the ground in Pakistan about a month after 9/11/01. Who are you calling ignorant?

I don't think that he or I are the ones guilty of ignoring history. Maybe you should take a look here for a fairly complete timeline of Islamic imperialism from 630 through the First Crusade, in 1096. Maybe the fact that the 200-300 years of relative quiet experienced from the mid-17th century through the late-20th century had more to do with the fact that the majority of the Middle East lived in medieval conditions under crippling poverty than because the Muslim world stopped wanting to conquer. Maybe it's no coindicdence that pretty much as soon as wealth - oil wealth in this case - started to appear in the Middle East and the more immediate problem of the Cold War resolved itself that Islamic militarism returned to the forefront of global politics. Maybe the terrorists - and do not insult anyone by referring to them as "criminals" - want to destroy us, not for what we've done, but who we are.

To make things worse, your argument seems to somehow hinge on the idea that US foreign policy decisions justify terrorist activity, and that if we understood the "root cause", it'd suddenly become okay.

Nothing justifies flying planes into buildings. Nothing justifies strapping dynamite to a teenager and having her blow herself up at a crowded cafe. Nothing justifies indiscriminately launching rockets into heavily populated areas with the express intention of killing civilians. Nothing justifies the use of schools, hospitals, and houses of worship as military staging areas. It doesn't matter what we did or didn't do to "provoke" such actions. The people who do such things are, by definition, barbarians.

"Hitchens has, for the past five years, been perhaps the most accurate, piercing, insightful critic of the anti-war movement in particular and the left in general."

That's my point. Hitchens seems to make the assumption that all anti-war arguments are from the progressive left. The left has been particularly vocal in making illogical, mindless arguments against the War in Iraq, but many other non-leftists have been making arguments as well. Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts can hardly be considered to be leftists. Nor can the late Harry Browne, Rep. Ron Paul, or pretty much the entire Libertarian Party.

I used to staunchly support the War in Iraq and the War on Terror, in part because I flatly rejected many of the ridiculous anti-war arguments coming from the left. My views changed, however, only once I started reading the much more well-informed arguments that originated far outside the leftist crowd. Only after reading Hayek, Jefferson, Bastiat, and others, did I realize the extent to which governments like to make war. It's what they do. And given that perverse incentive for government leaders to go to war, you should always approach a war with suspicion. The "Road to Serfdom" spells that out quite well. Certianly, when one looks at history, even in just the USA, nearly every substantial increase in government power has come only after the president made the American people feel unsafe.

And since when did I ever suggest that US foreign policy justifies terrorism? War is certainly biblically justifiable when it is used in defense, but I don't personally believe that the War in Iraq is a matter of defense. I just don't believe that a tiny group of fanatical, backwards Arabs is capable of destroying a nation as large and powerful as the United States. And I don't believe that a government that a) forcibly prohibits airlines from protecting and defending their own property, and b) completely failed to perform its most basic function to protect the security of its citizens (by failing to prevent a small group of terrorists from flying planes into the WTC) is not a government that can competently wage a war to protect anything. Do you understand the irony of the War on Terror? "Because we failed to protect you, we now need to go to war to protect you." The only reason we need to be "protected" from terrorists is because the US government failed to protect us to begin with!

Insisting that the current war be predicated on short-term, quantifiable indicators of safety is narrow-minded in the extreme. Unless you want to buy into the conspiracy theories, the US wasn't specifically aware of what was going to happen on 9/11 and, in fact, most of the tools that they would have needed to be aware were illegal.

I would also offer for your consideration that not a single terrorist action has occured on US soil since. That's got to be worth something.

Furthermore, the war isn't about just preventing terrorism. It's doing a pretty effective job, this notwithstanding, but it's not the point. The point is a war on cultural extremism that would see the end of modern, liberal, free societies in general and Western civilization in particular.

I don't particularly think governments need biblical justification for war anyways. Waging war is something that they do.

In terms of your "Hitchens doesn't know what he's talking about" argument, I have this to say.

Whether Michael Moore or Pat Buchannan makes an argument is irrelevant if the talking points are the same. The arguments I've heard you make are little distinguishable from those made by Noam Chomsky, so it doesn't matter that it's you that are making them. You're attempting a weird kind of inverted ad hominem.

Here's a quote from Martin Amis' essay "The Age of Horrorism", about which I shall blog at length later:

"The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million."

Yeah, it was US foreign policy that caused that hatred and those deaths, Ben. If anything, it was a supine, spineless foreign policy that allowed it.

I wasn't trying to start a debate over the poorly named "War on Terror." Really. I was simply pointing out that the anti-war rhetoric coming out of the Democratic party is fundamentally different than the anti-war rhetoric coming from other sources.

The Left does not oppose the "War on Terror" because they are peaceful. They oppose it only because a Republican president is running it, and because it takes funds away from their domestic wealth redistribution schemes. I think their rhetoric clearly displays that fact. I mean, look at John Kerry. As the "anti-war" candidate in the last presidential election, his "anti-war" solution was to send more troops to Iraq. Furthermore, Bill Clinton demonstrated quite clearly that Democrats are quite happy to wage war when it suits their purposes.

The anti-war message coming from the paleoconservative and libertarian crowd, however, is fundamentally different. The objection here is not that a neo-conservative republican is running the war, but that declaring and waging war is an unconstitutional use of the Executive office, and that the "War on Terror" is really a cover for expanding the size and scope of the federal government. You can either agree or disagree with the validity of these objections, but at least it should be clear that they are very different than the objections coming from the Left.

Those are indeed distinct from the arguments made by the Left, but they are not, in fact, anti-war arguments. They are procedural but not necessarily substantive unless you add further arguments that would make them that way. One may disagree with the ways and means with which the war is being prosectuted, as I myself do, without disagreeing at all on the necessity of the war. The arguments that Hitchens and I, through him, object to are against the necessity of the war.

I would point out that the arguments you have made and/or referenced thus far have far more to do with the necessity of the war than with objections to the way that it is prosecuted. You have on more than one occasion implied that terrorism is our fault.