Posted by Wymark on 7/13/2009, 12:21 pm, in reply to "Helping you add a few inches to your teetering high-horse."
82.23.179.222
Hmm. I don't know many leftists who 'support Al Qaeda', so that's just a strawman argument.
But Hitchens supported the invasion of Iraq, which was widely predicted to increase support for them, as it subsequently did. The British Joint Intelligence Council told Tony Blair in February 2003 that:
'al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq . . .
. . . The JIC assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3101364.stm
And in April 2006, the same body said:
'We judge that the conflict in Iraq has exacerbated the threat from international terrorism and will continue to have an impact in the long term. It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.
Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalisation of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the UK as legitimate'.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article701127.ece
While in January 2003 in the U.S., the National Intelligence Council told the Bush administration that any invasion would:
'be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan' and 'probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups'.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052501380.html
While the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate found that:
'the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html
And yet Hitchen continues to defend the invasion. One might almost think he secretly wants Al Qaeda to become much stronger.
He then references Saddam Hussein's 1988 Anfal campaign as an argument for the invasion of Iraq. A couple of things about that:
1) It was carried while he was an ally of some of the very some people who were condemning him for it in 2003. The Reagan administration had been funelling their sattelite battlefield intelligence to Hussein, and they knew he was using it to launch chemical weapon attacks with. So they had, and have, no moral authority over Hussein at all. And in 1990, the Bush I administration, with Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defence, made clear it's strong opposition to:
'legislation that would have conditioned US assistance to Iraq on a commitment not to use chemical weapons and to stop the genocide against the Kurds'.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/31/the_true_iraq_appeasers/
So what if he was slaughtering kurds? Supporting Iraq is good for business. That was Cheney's position. Hussein only became an enemy when he invaded Kuwait, and demonstrated that he was too much of a 'loose cannon'.
2) As Human Rights Watch pointed out in 2004:
'There were times in the past when the killing was so intense that humanitarian intervention would have been justified, for example, during the 1988 Anfal genocide, in which the Iraqi government slaughtered some 100,000 Kurds. Indeed, Human Rights Watch, though still in its infancy and not yet working in the Middle East in 1988, did advocate a form of military intervention in 1991 after we had begun addressing Iraq. As Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein's brutal repression of the post-Gulf War uprising were stranded and dying in harsh winter weather on Turkey's mountainous border, we advocated the creation of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq so they could return home without facing renewed genocide. There were other moments of intense killing as well, such as the suppression of the uprisings in 1991. But on the eve of the latest Iraq war, no one contends that the Iraqi government was engaged in killing of anywhere near this magnitude, or had been for some time. "Better late than never" is not a justification for humanitarian intervention, which should be countenanced only to stop mass murder, not to punish its perpetrators, desirable as punishment is in such circumstances. But if Saddam Hussein committed mass atrocities in the past, wasn't his overthrow justified to prevent his resumption of such atrocities in the future? No'.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k4/3.htm
There was simply no legal or moral basis for invading Iraq in response to a genocide that had been over for fifteen years, and that the people carrying out the invasion had been strongly complicit in. As it is, the invasion has caused up to one million excess deaths so far, caused an increase in torture, an increase in malnutrition, unemployment, disease, created five million refugees and internally displaced people, and so on. Worse than anything Hussein could have done in the same period.
So Christopher Hitchens quite clearly supports the mass murder, torture and displacement of Iraqis, and the strengthening of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups of that ilk, and so he has a cheek to accuse 'the left' of those very crimes.
Message Thread:
« Back to thread