Thoughts on Hitchens

I first became familiar with Christopher Hitchens around 10 years ago or so. I watched him and read his material when he was more known because his support for the invasion of Iraq. While I was always against the invasion (and still think it was a monstrous mistake), I have always respected Hitchen's support to some extent because of his encounters with Kurds and others who were brutalized by the Sadaam Hussein regime. 

But it has been over the past year where I have become a big fan of his writings and thoughts.  Hitchens is one of the most famous atheists in the world.  He is, in fact, considered one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. I finally decided I was an atheist when I read The God Delusion by Professor Dawkins.  However, it has been the the words of Christopher Hitchens that has strengthen my convictions in non-belief just as much as any theorist, philosopher or writer has to this point. A wonderful sample of Hitchens debating the religious can be seen in this video appropriately titled "Christopher Hitchens-The Best of Hitchslapped":



I recently had the pleasure of listening to Hitch-22, Hitchen's memoir, on audio book.  It was the first book by him I have actually got the chance to read (well, listen to), and I can't wait to delve into more of his literary works in the future.

It was, of course, extremely disheartening when Hitchens announced his illness this past year.  One would think that being so close to death might make him become recluse, reconsider his non belief, and perhaps feel the need to seek out comfort in a spiritual manner.  But not Hitch.  In fact, rather than hide away from the world or turn to Jesus, he has continued to write, speak, and debate about the religious on the side of secularism and rationalism.  And he is still as good at it as anyone that is out there. 

Below is an interview that aired Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A with Brian Lamb.  It is the first TV or public appearance from Hitchens that has taken place in several weeks.  It is very difficult to watch because it is clear how much his condition has deteriorated recently.  While Lamb asks Hitchens about the memoir, religion, and geo-politics, most of the conversation is about Hitchen's cancer, as well as life and death.  It is worth the watch if you have an hour to spare: 



Here is hoping that Mr. Hitchens is able to recover from his illness. He is an important voice that the world needs!

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

 Photo fro The Guardian

I just woke up and found out about the news.  I am very sad, but not surprised.  His health had been rapidly deteriorating since he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last year.  In more recent years, as I have come to embrace my atheism, Hitchens became a personal hero of mine.  No one spoke more about the evils of belief and theism quite like Hitch.  No one was as witty and well-written as Hitch on this subject, or most other subjects for that matter.  While I didn't always agree with him on other issues, I have always respected the passion and fearlessness he carried for his words and convictions.  Here is an excerpt from a post I wrote earlier in the year on Hitchens:

It was, of course, extremely disheartening when Hitchens announced his illness this past year.  One would think that being so close to death might make him become recluse, reconsider his non belief, and perhaps feel the need to seek out comfort in a spiritual manner.  But not Hitch.  In fact, rather than hide away from the world or turn to Jesus, he has continued to write, speak, and debate about the religious on the side of secularism and rationalism.  And he is still as good at it as anyone that is out there. 

I imagine that fans of his all over the world will be having a glass in memory of this wonderful man. I will include myself in this category.  Rest In Peace, Christopher.  We will miss you!

Videos for Suday: Hitchens Edition

Since the passing of Christopher Hitchens Friday, I have engulfed myself in his writings and words via YouTube, Vanity Fair, Slate, and other websites.  It is entirely way too easy to start looking up his material, and spend several hours getting lost.  Whether it is reading one of his columns or listening to him in a debate, one can feel simultaneously smarter and dumber.  Smarter, because the level of elegance and erudition he brings to the conversation.  Dumber, because of the awe-inspiring nature with which he uses his words and attacks against opponents.  One get's the feeling they could never be a match for the great Hitchens.  As a writer, I don't think I could ever match the wit, sophistication or learned-spirit that Hitchens does in his writing.  But the benchmark that he set, while ridiculously high, seems like a challengingly fun one to reach (although I will be using a thesaurus quite frequently).

I knew I wanted to use material from Hitchens for this week's video, because there is plenty of good material to use.  There is just one problem: there is too much good material out there to use.  So, I have picked a few of my favorites.  Sit back with your Sunday morning coffee (or cocktail if you prefer in the spirit of Hitch), and enjoy.

History in Egypt, Part II

Photo from Huffington Post

It is now a matter of not if, but when Hosni Mubarak will step down as President of Egypt.  Everyone knows it, including the United States.  This is what he get's for three decades of economic neglect, torture (NSFW Video), suppressing democracy, and corruption.  Frankly, this says it all:

Photo from The Daily Dish

With this fact essentially established, the next obvious question is "What's next?"  We know there are numerous possibilities.  Some, including myself, worry that Muslim Brotherhood or another Islamic fundamentalist organization will try and establish a theocratic regime like in Iran.  

Others wonder if Mubarak's new, Vice President Omar Suleiman, will take the reign and essentially rule as Mubarak: Part II.  But given his well-known allegiance to Mubarak, this seems highly unlikely at this time:  

"Mubarak and Suleiman are the same person," said Emile Nakhleh, a former top Middle East analyst for the CIA. "They are not two different people in terms of ideology and reform." 

And for the sake of human rights, let's hope Suleiman is not a serious option.  As head of Egypt's intelligence agency, he helped oversee the torture of suspected Al Qaeda to help the Bush Administration justify the invasion of Iraq.  He also assisted with the the CIA's international "interrogation" policy known as rendition.

Another option that has been mentioned is a surprising leader of the opposition movement: Mohamed ElBaradei.  He is certainly a capable and distinguished enough of an individual, and may end up being the best option there is.  But the fact that he has spent most of his career outside of Egypt may not settle well with some of his countrymen who consider this a nationalist Egyptian uprising. 

Whatever happens, there is a lot at steak in who takes over in Egypt.  Not just for Egypt itself, but for the Middle East as a whole.  The one major upside to the Mubarak regime has been the continued peace between Egypt and Israel.  At this time, Israel is very nervous about what is going to happen, and rightly so:

If Hosni Mubarak’s regime is replaced by a new anti-Israel, anti-western government, the Jewish state’s only remaining strategic allies in the Middle East will be the Palestinian Authority and Jordan.

That’s enough to give any Israeli government nightmares.

Many progressives in America, including myself, have always felt the United States should do a better job of putting pressure on Israel to treat the Palestinians in a more humane manner.  At the same time, the United States should continue to look out for the interests and security of Israel so they are not an open target for hostile enemies in the region.  Finally, the United States needs to take a a proactive and positive relationship with the Egyptian opposition for the sake of peace and stability in the region.  Senator John Kerry (D-MA) has it spot on in a New York Times Op-Ed piece:

Given the events of the past week, some are criticizing America’s past tolerance of the Egyptian regime. It is true that our public rhetoric did not always match our private concerns. But there also was a pragmatic understanding that our relationship benefited American foreign policy and promoted peace in the region. And make no mistake, a productive relationship with Egypt remains crucial for both us and the Middle East. 

To that end, the United States must accompany our rhetoric with real assistance to the Egyptian people. For too long, financing Egypt’s military has dominated our alliance. The proof was seen over the weekend: tear gas canisters marked “Made in America” fired at protesters, United States-supplied F-16 jet fighters streaking over central Cairo. Congress and the Obama administration need to consider providing civilian assistance that would generate jobs and improve social conditions in Egypt, as well as guarantee that American military assistance is accomplishing its goals — just as we are trying to do with Pakistan through a five-year nonmilitary assistance package.

Allow me to recommend three other good sources of information on the situation in Egypt:

• In his newest column in Slate, Christopher Hitchens gives his take.  As only Hitch can do, he writes eloquently about the plight of the people's desire for change in Egypt.
• Sharif Abdel Kouddous continues his outstanding coverage of Egypt on yesterday's Democracy Now.  As I said before, follow him on Twitter if you are on there and care at all about this situation (especially if you are interested in hearing an Egyptian perspective).
• Finally, I would like to show the video I showed to my Social Studies class yesterday to inform them on the situation in Egypt.  While my students generally have little or no interest in international affairs, they were stunned  and intrigued at this footage.  After the video, I heard one of my students refer to Mubarak with not so nice language.  While I had to jump on him for use of profanity in my classroom, I enjoyed the passion with which he felt (that is partially why I became a teacher).  If you teach a Social Studies class, and have the technology in your room, I highly recommend playing this for your students, and having a classroom discussion afterwords:

UPDATE NOTE: As I was completing this post, Mubarak has announced he will not run for election. But we already knew this would happen. Let's see what happens next.

A Video for Sunday

This Sunday's video come from Christopher Hitchens at a debate on religion.  He has been battling cancer for the past year and a half.  Here, he discuses how Christians go around to hospital rooms of sick and dying patients and convert so their souls can be saved.

Iraq War, 2003-2011

Photo from Here and Now

After 8 long and difficult years, U.S. Troops (most of them, anyways) are coming home from Iraq, and the war in Iraq is now officially over.  The events that have lead up to the war, and what has happened since then are numerous, disheartening, and outright sick.  From the amount of patriotic browbeating and full-out lying that took place in the lead up to the war, to the arrogance and mismanagement (to put it mildly) of the initial invasion; from the bloodshed and chaos of proceeding years of our occupation, to the relatively quiet, but marginally better (to put it kindly) final years of the occupation.  America's departure from Iraq is something that is long-overdue.

My initial reaction as someone who has always opposed this war is to say "good riddance" and try to push it as far into the distance past as possible.  However, it is also important that one revisits it's relatively short, but nonetheless eventful history.  We must do this in order to pay respect to the dead on all sides, and to show the brutal reality of what war is really like.  But we must also do this so that America (for all the good we stand for and for all the wonderful things we've ever done for people around the world) can realize the horrendous mistakes that it made, and try to never repeat them again.

I have decided that the best way to share write this post is to share a number of videos about the from individuals who could as good of a job of telling the story of the Iraq War, if not better, than I could have.  I will provide some of my own text, but I want to give credit to those who made these videos, and as well as those who did an outstanding job of reporting on this war when it was taking place(oftentimes, risking their own lives in doing so).

First, there is how we actually got into the war.  We all know now about the fact that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, almost no link to Al Qaeda, and absolutely no role in the September 11 attacks (as the Bush Administration had claimed).  But how many people actually remember the time and energy taken by the Administration (along with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain) to really sell the war?  It was immense, and it lasted for almost the entire year of 2002 and the beginning of 2003 leading up to the war.

The Administration was not alone in helping to push for this war.  One new word to enter the American mainstream lexicon as a result of this war was "neoconservative", and they were prevalent through the media and the Bush Administration foreign policy team leading up to the Iraq War.  They believed it was America's duty to push for democratic reform throughout the world, using military action if necessary.



The goal of promoting democracy in undemocratic countries is good enough in itself, and I'm sure many of those who were neoconservatives felt as if they had good intentions.  For instance, it is a shame that the late Christopher Hitchens (one of my heroes) so staunchly supported the invasion of Iraq, and was still one of the war's strongest supporters long after it was clear that the invasion was a disaster.  He originally supported it because he was friends with Iraqi Kurds who were being oppressed and slaughtered by Saddam Hussein.  The idea of what such an ambitious goal would look like, and the hard truth of what it really means to invade another country are two different things.

We were supposed to have an independent media that would ask questions about the legitimacy and acumen about what the Bush Administration was trying to do.  This isn't to say that members of the media shouldn't have lost all sense of objectivity, and come out staunchy against the war as say, a Democracy Now or The Nation would have.  But it seems like liberal outlets such as DN, The Nation, and the like were the only ones in the media who were truly doing their job in questioning the motives of the administration leading up to the war, and have done about as good a job as any media outlet on reporting on the war objectively in the first year or so of the war.  The same cannot be said about the mainstream media

While things have gotten a little better since then in regards to bringing truth to power, it wasn't that long ago that "liberal" MSNBC made Phil Donahue have two conservative, pro-war guests on the show for every one liberal, anti-war guest on his short-lived, prime-time show (Donahue was supposed to count as the second liberal, and thus, the debate was equal).

So, the United States went war in Iraq, bombed the hell out of Baghdad through the campaign of Shock and Awe, and within a matter of weeks, Saddam Hussein was thrown from power.  The war had just started, and it was already over.  At least, that's how it seemed at the time.  For a while, it seemed that the anti-war protesters and those damn hippies were wrong, and the neoconservatives and the Bush Administration were right.  In the months to come, the world realize just how far away from over this war really was.



What America soon found out was that "liberating" another country not as easy as it sounds, but it helps to listen to those who know the most about combat and military occupation.  This is one thing that the Bush Administration did not do.  Rather, they relied more on the opinions of those (primarily neoconservatives) who were most loyal to the administration and the Republican Party.  This ended up with disastoruos decisions being made that would cost vast numbers of lives, and greatly soil the reputation of the United States around the world.  This includes not sending nearly enough troops to Iraq to begin with; sending them with scare amounts of necessary equipment (often times, that was shoddy anyways); breaking international laws through the use of torture; dismantling the Iraqi Army; and basically not having anything resembling a realistic, long-term occupation plan.











Is it possible that America could have succeeded with the occupation aspect of this war, and not just the initial invasion?  Is it possible that, today, Iraq could be a truly safe and functioning democracy if  different decisions had been made, and the Bush Administration had actually listened to those who knew what they were talking about?  Perhaps, but of course, we will never know this for sure.

What started off as a half-assed, invasion and occupation quickly turned into chaos, and eventually turned into civil war.  One of the things the Bush Administration, and many of the supporters of the Iraq war did not realize before the invasion was the complexity of the country they were invading.  Specifically, they did not consider the different tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts that existed within Iraq , well before Saddam Hussein ever took power (if they even realized such conflicts existed to begin with). 



All of these decisions would lead to years of violence and blood shed for both American Soldiers and Iraqi civilians.  Baghdad would become the most violent and deadly city in he world. At least  one hundred thousand Iraqi lives would be lost, and so many more would be injured and displaced from their homes.  Nearly 4,500 American soldiers would parish, and many thousands more would be seriously injured.  This is not what so many American soldiers asked for, but it is what they got.









In more recent years, the situation on the ground in Iraq has ended up getting better, relatively speaking of course.  The arrogant and incompetent Donald Rumsfeld was replaced with Robert Gates as the Secretary of Defense, American commanders in Iraq started reaching out to different sects within Iraq to try and minimize the violence that was taking place, and more of the country were given over to Iraqi authorities.  In addition, violence and casualty levels on both sides have decreased, and deadlines for withdraw (which the Bush Administration had so stubbornly fought against for the first few years of the war) were finally being put into place.  In addition to changes in leadership and changes in policies, these successes must be given immense credit to our American soldiers, as well as Iraqi civilians, who have risked their lives to make Iraq a much more stable nation for the years to come.



This is not to say Iraq has turned out to be a successful, Jeffersonian democracy, or even safe and stable nation.  And it probably won't be one for many years, if ever.  For instance, Baghdad is still ranked as the most dangerous major city in the world, as it has been since the war started.  Gunfire, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and suicide bombs are still a daily reality in the country of Iraq.   And despite the improvements that have been made, many experts are questioning whether Iraqi security forces will be able to keep the country as stable as it is.

Then there are the costs of the Iraq War: not just in money and resources, but in lives and limbs.  There are those who would argue that all of the bloodshed and sacrifices that have gone into this war will be worth it in the years to come.  While I do wish that the Iraqi people will continue to progress and make successful strides in the stability of their country, I cannot say at this time that the war was worth it, nor am I sure I will ever be able to.  







So, to recap in a more lighthearted, but still thought-provoking manner:

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May those that have perished in the war (whether American, Iraqi, or elsewhere) Rest in Peace.

Photo from The Public Record

 May we never forget the lessons this unfortunate conflict has taught us, so that we can never repeat them again.

 

Photo from Impeach For Peace