Drink Scotch Whisky All Night Long and Die Behind A Strawman
By I’ve obviously missed my vocation as a cartoonist: By Sunday I had lost count of the number of them who all seemed to know that, if Saddam Hussein was still the absolute ruler of Iraq, the city of New Orleans would now be bone-dry.
Yes, criticisms of Bush do tend to entail blaming him for the hurricane occurring. If only all the straw that Hitchens has distributed to the pages of various publications over the past year could have been converted to sand; the levees around New Orleans would have been impregnable.
Juan Cole does a nice job with Hitch’s other recent hackwork. Still, I have to highlight this remarkable claim about what Bush can be proud of:
The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
You see, Christopher, the thing is that Hitler and Stalin, actually, you know, signed a pact. Whereas Talibanism and Baathism had no ongoing relationship, formal or informal, of any kind. But aside from that, the analogy is still awful. It is, admittedly, clever, and I think Cole falls into the trap by emphasizing the ideological differences between them; these differences do not preclude a relationship. The real problem with the argument is that there’s no evidence, as the use of the term “highly suggestive” makes clear. As used by people like Hitchens and Hayes, “highly suggestive” means “conclusions drawn without evidence,” and can also be translated as “bullshit.”
And then there’s his claim that pre-war Iraq was a “failed” state. I….oh, to hell with it, I’ll outsource the rest of the critique to Prof. Cole.