Christopher Hitchens is an Idiot

Okay, I know I should come up with a better title for my post then that (and my last one "Christopher Hitchens: Still Insane") but honestly, it's hard to think of anything that more accurately describes how he could possibly put out the sort of nonsense you find in his most recent contribution to Slate.

The title of his pieces is "Tribal Ignorance: What you think you know about Iraq's factions is all wrong." Well, my first instinct is to doubt his sweeping statement that is both over-broad and insulting, but of course it's his very outlandish-ness that suckers me into reading his piece. "What this time?" I think. So I plunge forward, to find this:

"In Iraq there are also two apples and one orange in the media-coverage basket (as well as many important fruits that, as I mentioned above, are never specified). To be a Sunni or a Shiite is to follow one or another Muslim obedience, but to be a Kurd is to be a member of a large non-Arab ethnicity as well as to be, in the vast majority of cases, a Sunni. Thus, by any measure of accuracy, the "Sunni" turnout in the weekend's referendum on the constitution was impressively large, very well-organized, and quite strongly in favor of a "yes" vote. Is that the way you remember it being reported? I thought not. Well, then, learn to think for yourself."

Hitchens appears to be irritated over the media's tendency to label the Iraqi factions roughly by their ethnicity. And while it's true that the media, and you and I, can easily over-simplify the divisions in Iraq, Hitchens is simply being absurd here by insisting on one hundred percent accuracy when using ethnic and religious labels. Hitchens, himself a writer, seems to have forgotten that words mean to us what we agree that they mean. While the "average" American who has paid little attention to Iraq might not know that Kurds are also predominantly Sunni, the American who picks up a newspaper will probably know that they are, and he will probably also know that it makes no difference. After all, even if they are Sunni, they certainly cannot be allied with the Arabic Sunni loyal to Saddam Hussein. Hitchens is just playing games with us here. We know that the term "Sunni" means the latter, not all Sunnis throughout the entire country. Using Hitchens standard of accuracy, we'd be reduced to referring to the Kurds as the "largely Sunni Kurds of Northern Iraq", the Sunni as the "Mostly Sunni Arabs of central Iraq with some sympathy for the insurgency" and the Shia as the "Mostly Shia Arabs of Northern and Southern Iraq sympathetic to Iran." Which is of course ridiculous. And to say that in any sense there was a large and succesful Sunni turn-out on the referendum is just childish wordplay. We know what the media means when they tell us this because we are thinking, and reading, for ourselves.

Of course this is only the first half of his piece. Hitchens either can't confine himself to one theme when he writes about Iraq or (as I suspect) he simply can't write that much about whatever thought has ocurred to him. Here he offers us this insight:

"But as it happens, we know from many open sources that there is a debate among the jihadists as to the wisdom and even the propriety of killing civilians without discrimination, or of slaughtering the Shiites as if they were all heretics or apostates. One of Zarqawi's mentors has even weighed in, on a Muslim Web site, questioning the excessive zeal of his disciple. So even the most stone-cold killers and dogmatists have to wonder, and to worry, about the balance of forces in Iraq. I take this as a sign of encouragement. Perhaps, since they, too, are human, they will have to worry about the enormous casualties they are taking, as well as inflicting."

And if they do worry, then what? Then they'll stop? I honestly question whether a man of Zarqawi's zeal and doggedness will begin to worry that he's slaughtering too many civilians somewhere around the 10,000th dead in a suicide bombing, just because some Sunnis have begun to wonder if all the killing is bad PR. No, men like him will kill and keep on killing until they are killed. Other more reasonable Sunni insurgents may lay down their arms at some point in the future to join the national government. Zarqawi will not. Why does Hitchens toss off this absurdity? Well because Hitchens can't quite bring himself to believe that the progress towards democracy is slower then we hoped, and the insurgency far more intractible then we feared. To do so would force Hitchens himself to question if the war in Iraq was a good idea. And as we are learning, Hitchens appears to have had few ideas that he later saw any reason to re-examine. For him, it's far easier to attack the media and well, reality, then concede that he was wrong about anything.

And of course like in his last article, Hitchens reminds us of his low tolerance for Vietnam analogies:

"Actually, we are already hearing rehearsals of this stupidity. Discussing the possibility of cross-border tussles to deal with Syria's wretched, spiteful sabotage of the new Iraq, the New York Times kept tight hold of its only historical analogy and announced—in a news story, not a sidebar—that this was Cambodia all over again. And so it might just possibly be, if we were fighting the Vietcong in Iraq and if Assad were the cynical but neutralist Prince Sihanouk. As it is, our foes in Iraq are much more like the Khmer Rouge, and Assad's regime is more like the aggressive and corrupt minority rulers of South Vietnam, so the analogy is at the expense of those who repeat it parrot-fashion, and who mostly cannot tell Sunni from Shinola."

Again Hitchens reasons, because the situations are not exactly the same, there can be no analogizing between them. Which of course misconstrues the entire purpose of analogy or metaphor. No, we are not fighting the Vietcong. However, our soldiers are fighting the enemy along a porous border with a nation that has or exerts little control over the insurgents, and to a large degree appears to be functioning as something of a safe haven for those insurgents. They infiltrate Iraq, attack American and Iraqi troops, then sneak or are chased back across the border where they hide out, re-supply, and prepare future attacks. To me, that sounds almost exactly like Vietnam and Cambodia. The major difference is our lack of freedom in pursuing or bombing the hell out of them there.

Again, Hitchens is just playing games with us here. He wants us to think that he knows something that we don't, that he's calling out the "msm" for their simple-minded categorization and analogizing, and ultimately that we are stupid enough to believe him. Don't fall for it.