1. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70592 by dae on September 16, 2007 at 7:36 am

Keith,
One more thing you said, "why can't we try to get rid of the trouble-making Imams and at the same time try to convince the majority of Muslims, a la Hitchens and Harris, that their beliefs are silly and potentially dangerous. Why do we have to chose the one and abandon the other. Why not both?" Fine by me. And how do you do it? First decapitate the serpent. Second abolish our antiquated respect for "freedom of religion". No more preferences given to churches, synagogues or mosques. Tax them and their properties. Close down their schools. Force them to "worship" on their own dime. If you're serious about the "god delusion" and the threat it poses to our civilization accept the fact that the 800 lb. gorilla in the room is our absurd deference to religious freedom.

2. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70586 by dae on September 16, 2007 at 7:09 am

Keith,
I do appreciate your positions and this will be my last reply. It's not a matter of gloating or saying "I told you so". It's a matter of not continuing to make the same mistake over and over again. And whether or not Hitchen's had a different perspective on the future of Iraq than the Neocons is irrelevant. The fact is anyone who thought they could mold Iraq in their own image is and was a fool. The fate of Iraq is in the hands of Iraqi's and we should have left them to determine it on their own. It's sort of like the time machine dilemma. If you can return to the past you wouldn't be able to change the outcome of events no matter how hard you try. Our going in just exacerbated things. We could have continued isolating Saddam (not with the barbaric sanction regime but with other tactics), supported opposition forces, etc. As far as I'm concerned war was and is not the solution to affect "regime change". And I'm not a pacifist. Was the Soviet Union the west's biggest enemy in the 1980s? I didn't think so then and I don't think so now. The Soviet Union was on the brink of historic change whether we pushed it over or not. Communism fell like a house of cards and would have done so irrespective of our supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. We should have let history take its course as is happening in China today. The Chinese people, the Russian people, the Iraqi people have to determine their own destinies. Our interventions have not been for noble causes but to further the economic and geopolitical interests of our elites. Sorry Keith you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

3. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70526 by dae on September 15, 2007 at 10:54 pm

Of course, "Saddam openly sought alliances with theocratic elements, the most brutal of them being the murderous thugs in Sudan," and so have US administrations over the years. And yes "Saddam adopted the propaganda and regalia of the Islamists to buttress his failing regime; he began an enormous mosque-building project, he often wore the robes of the Imam, and he used the language of jihad to celebrate the attacks on 9/11". No denying any of that. Saddam was a wicked, wicked man and he cynically employed every trick in the book to buttress his rule. So did Stalin who Saddam idealized. Stalin was also a great "secularist". I'm not arguing in favor of either of these beasts, but historically Baathist ideology was secular in nature. And while Syria is allied with Iran because of geopolitical considerations it is demonstrably a more secular state than the latter. And lets not confuse secular with humanist. None of these regimes are in any fashion humanist. Secular regimes can be as brutal as they come (Pol Pot anyone). What I'm getting at is that this monolithic conception of the so-called Muslim world is ridiculous. Historically there have been "secular" alternatives to the modern day fanatical Islamists. As far as I'm concerned it matters little how you die, whether butchered by Sudanese thugs or decimated by cluster bombs. 4 million refugees are 4 million refugees, whether as a result of the medieval barbarism of Sudanese tribes or the misbegotten policies of enlightened Neocons. So Veratyr82 I find your cynicism as reprehensible as you find my naiveté and I have no regrets or anxiety in comparing the "coalition's" actions in Iraq with that of Sudanese thugs in Darfur. The mess in Iraq is a direct result of the duplicity and mendacious policies of the "coalition" you seem to so highly esteem. And as you state it takes "an intense session of mental calisthenics to rationalize" otherwise and I suspect an equal "lack of cerebral effort" on your part to do so.

4. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70510 by dae on September 15, 2007 at 8:12 pm

Keith,

Many of your points are well taken but you jump to a host of unwarranted conclusions regarding my own thinking. This of course is due to the fact that my comments were of necessity brief and not fully articulated, so I will elaborate a bit here. First, I am not British so I cannot speak to the domestic situation in the UK or other countries with a sizable Muslim community. Here in the States I'm not in the least concerned about the threat of local "Jihardists," if they exist it's a problem for law enforcement. I am in favor of restrictions on fundamentalists of any sort to preach their hatred and if I was in your situation I would certainly be in favor of deporting offending clerics and not allowing known Jihardists or sympathizers from entering the country. The mass of Muslims, like the mass of Christians, need to be galvanized into action (hence the term rabble-rouser) by religious demagogues. I for one would therefore restrict free speech in this regard. I'm sure a litmus test for demagoguery can be established. Eliminate the demagogues and most Muslims would be "as meek and mild as followers of Anglicanism" As regards the "invasion of Iraq versus its destruction," there were many prescient voices who predicted exactly what transpired (Dick Cheney in 1994 being one of them), so don't give me the nonsense that there was anything noble about overthrowing Saddam. The real motive for invading Iraq was not to save Iraqis from the depredations of Saddam, but to serve as a cat's paw for extending American influence in the region as has been clearly articulated recently by Bush himself. Shia and Sunni did not annihilate each other for centuries, they intermingled and intermarried. So why the devastating internecine conflict we're now witnessing? The invasion by creating anarchy enabled the very forces we are against to rise up and metastasize. You state that "being in favour of the continued torture and suppression of the Iraqi people, the continued tolerance of a dictator who it has been proved was trying to procure nuclear weapons, the continuance of sanctions that were apparently responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqi children, basically, the state of affairs that you would probably call 'peace', doesn't give you much more right to call yourself a Humanist". First, no one in their right mind favored the "continued torture and suppression of the Iraqi people". But history has proved that only the people themselves can shake off their oppression. It is not our duty to intervene in such situations as the results of our so doing demonstrate. I also was always against the sanction regime as totally counter-productive. The best plan of action probably would have been to co-opt Saddam as his secular regime could have served as a bulwark against radical Islamism. Our support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets was a mistake of historic proportions. What a better world it would be today if the Soviets had succeeded in secularizing Afghanistan! So I would dare say that my positions better reflect a secular humanist perspective than does yours, Hitchens' or Harris'.

5. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70471 by dae on September 15, 2007 at 4:29 pm

I am no friend of Islam and appreciate Hitchens' and Harris' critiques of all three Abrahamic traditions. The fanatical rendition of Islam is obviously the most reactionary of the lot, with fundamentalist Christianity and Zionist Judaism close behind. I do not consider either Hitchens or Harris however to be true humanists. The vast majority of Muslims like the vast majority of Christians and Jews are deluded by their god-fearing ideology but they are also not a monolithic entity as they are so often stereotyped. How to explain the popularity of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the enduring secular regime in Turkey and other progressive movements within countries that are nominally Islamist. The Baath party in both its Iraqi and Syrian manifestations was decidedly non-Islamist and secular in nature. Hitchens' and Harris' use their anti-Islamist stance to tar and feather any and all opposition to the joint American-British destruction of Iraq, which is undeniably a human tragedy of the highest order. While the genocide in Darfur with 200,000 dead and two million refugees is decried throughout the media no equivalence is made with the greater numbers of dead and the greater number of refugees generated by the Bush/Blair fiasco. As far as I'm concerned no one who supports aggressive preemptive wars of choice such as we're waging in Iraq can be considered to be in the humanist fold.