(Apologies in advance, as this is a little longer than I usually prefer, but occasionally the Big Lies need to be debunked. Back to regularly scheduled brevity next time, I promise.)
While I'm hating on Hitchens, it's worth pointing out that his inane review of Harry Potter wasn't even the worst thing he published that day. In Slate, he embarrasses himself further with a profoundly misbegotten analysis of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Hitchens may have been a great thinker at one point, but that time has long passed; what he is now, rather than a sharp analyst, is a sharp arguer. Without the benefit of actually being right on the facts, a skilled debater can still make a case by setting the argument on his or her own terms, skewing or framing the question so wrong becomes right and the ridiculous appears to make sense. There are few better than Hitchens at rigging an argument in this way, and he does it with frequency (and relatively impunity) on Iraq. He argued yesterday that it is a "self-evident fact" that so-called "al Qaeda in Iraq" is "a branch of al Qaeda itself." I suppose he claims it's "self-evident" because, well, the words match. One would think a professed disciple of Orwell wouldn't stoop to such foolishness, but there it is nonetheless.
Al Qaeda proper attacked us on 9/11, al Qaeda is responsible for various terrorism in the Middle East and beyond, and it is a funded, organized, and hierarchical -- if decentralized -- entity that looks to export violence against, primarily, the U.S. and Arab regimes. I'm leaving out a lot, but those are the broad strokes. These guys are primarily located in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and they're overwhelmingly Sunni. The Iraq group is simply not made up of the same people from Afghanistan and Pakistan. While some may have come to fight, the vast majority of those who call themselves al Qaeda in Iraq have no real ties to bin Laden. More importantly, though, AQI is a tiny percentage of the Iraq insurgency, and continuing the Iraq war *helps* al Qaeda by providing a never-ending recruitment video and the potential for live "training." So with apologies for the long explanation, it's far from "self-evident" that al Qaeda proper and al Qaeda in Iraq are the same thing or the same threat.
Hitchens goes on to prove his point by thrashing to death one straw man ("It is argued, first, that there was no such organization before the coalition intervention in Iraq.") which is an argument about the idiocy of going to war, and how it had nothing to do with real efforts against terrorism, not an argument about the presence of self-proclaimed al Qaeda in Iraq today. He then says it's wrong to claim that al Qaeda Iraq is different than al Qaeda proper, and that it's wrong to say that the "real" fight against al Qaeda is in Afghanistan rather than Iraq.
Of course, he's wrong, and those disdained assessments are generally correct. His argument ultimately begs the question: he claims it's wrong to say that the invasion of Iraq created the problem of al Qaeda, which works if (and only if) one assumes that AQI and AQ-proper are one and the same. The invasion of Iraq did indeed create al Qaeda in Iraq, and the idea of "we're fighting them there so they can't come here" has been debunked over and over -- it's really embarrassing that he'd use such a trope.
Additional proof of connections between the two groups is, apparently, that they're both nasty and vicious -- no, I can't explain what that has to do with the actual question at hand -- and the lack of support of AQI by many Sunnis in Anbar is also presented as evidence that AQI is our primary enemy and connected to al Qaeda as we generally think of it. Wha??
He saves the worst for last, though, claiming,
The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d'être and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.Well, he certainly beat the hell out of that straw man! If anybody *actually thought* that, it would be pretty silly. The real argument goes something like, "If coalition forces withdraw, AQI would lose recruiting power, funding, and attention, and immediately be wiped out by Iraqis who overwhelmingly hate them. Only through our presence does AQI remain popular and sympathetic enough to continue to exist."
But that line of reasoning is way harder to counter than a ridiculous made-up argument, so it goes unmentioned -- again, the classic Hitchens move of presenting a case in a way that only allows for his predetermined conclusion to prove correct. He continues to equate "being bad" with "being a real threat" and his writings suffer greatly as a result. It's one thing, though, to be wrong, and another to constantly dismiss legitimate views in favor of destroying imaginary ones. Really just embarrassing.
Oh, and while yesterday's review had the "I" pronoun nine times in 2000 words, this one raises the stakes: seven "I" in just 1000 words. Just in case, y'know, you forgot who it's all about.
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