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Hitch-Fest

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I hate Christopher Hitchens for dragging me out of my blogging vacation.

I can agree with the first point he makes in his effort to blame Haditha on dirty liberals. While awful things will always happen in war, the policies pursued by military organizations can increase or decrease the incidence of Haditha-like occurences. Policies pursued during Vietnam made massacres more likely than they are today, and the US military should be commended for changing its procedures over time.

But then there’s the rest.

First, Christopher tries again to explain why he thinks the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise and Iraq is hunky dory:

In My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples’ army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us.

Riiiiggggghhhttt. This is one of those comments that makes you wonder whether the author is stupid or just lying. My bet is the latter with Hitch. While it’s true, of course, that the Viet Cong operated a a very high level of skill and was reasonably popular among some sectors of the South Vietnamese populace, it’s also true that they didn’t shy away from using brutal tactics when appropriate. They pursued a campaign of assassination across South Vietnam, executing ideologically suspect landowners, but also many of the civilian professionals who make life work. The Viet Cong also commonly used violence against peasants who were suspected of supporting or working with government and US forces. The Viet Cong rarely used suicide attacks, but as Mia Bloom has shown, that has more to do with the recent spread of the tactic than with the quality of the organization. The point is that no insurgency has clean hands, and if you think that insurgencies can be distinguished between viscious “terrorists” and high minded people’s warriors, then you’re a freaking moron.

It gets worse:

There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar’s fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away.

Sure. If you believe that stationing troops outside the National Museum in order to intimidate potential looters would have been a good idea, then you’re basically just calling for more Hadithas. The point of having more troops, and in general for having a police presence, is that the situation is rendered more peaceful by the plausible threat of state violence. When a football team hires extra security for the playoffs, it is in order to render a disturbance less, not more, likely. Thus, it’s entirely consistent to argue that there were too few troops to keep order, and to suggest that the troops there were not employed correctly, and at the same time to decry further Hadithas.

I also love the non-sequiter about Centcom lawyers; it nicely demonstrates that Hitch has so swallowed the neocon kool aid that he can no longer make a meaningful distinction between military officers following rules of engagement and Ward Churchill.

Resuming vacation now.

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