Hitchens is answered

Writing about Fallujah, Christopher Hitchens raises some pertinent questions in the Wall Street Journal (unfortunately link requires subscription):

I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. [Richard] Clarke's word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf War"? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?

Astonishingly enough, some of those questions that require a one-word answer have in fact been answered with an implicit – never an overt – ‘yes’ by the opponents of Iraq’s liberation. In his new blog, Noam Chomsky offers this, in a post entitled The Invasion of Iraq:

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue's gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out -- and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

The forum is new but the style is venerable: I am constantly surprised that an MIT Professor of Linguistics should produce such consistently execrable English prose. Redundant phrases, clichés and solecisms pile up, one damn thing on top of another. Witness the embarrassing attempt at dramatic elision with the single-word sentence. Embarrassing. So is the construction of sentences without verbs. Most extraordinary is his complaint about a ‘truism’ that is ‘systematically ignored’. Chomsky is plainly unaware that a truism by definition ought to be ignored: rather than being a posh synonym for ‘truth’, it in fact denotes something that is trivially true - not an axiom, but a banality. (Those whose reading matter is indiscriminate in quality will be unsurprised periodically to stumble across the same clueless and pretentious use of 'truism' in the writings of Chomsky's disciple John Pilger.)

Much has been made in the past couple of years about the divergence of political views between Hitchens and Chomsky, who were formerly (and perhaps still are) friends, but also significant is the difference – which is longstanding – in the quality of their writing. Chomsky is didactic, tedious, pretentious, hyperbolic and absurd; Hitchens is often regarded as hyperbolic also, but he is in reality deliberately understated and effectively ironic, owing in part at least to his deep appreciation of English literature.

But I meander around an issue of moral import. Look at that enervating prose of Chomsky’s again, and see if you can make sense of the assertion that Iraq’s population should have been ‘given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant’. It makes you wonder if they ever receive modern communications media in Massachusetts. What does Chomsky suppose the Iraqi Kurds and Shi’ah Muslims were given the opportunity and encouragement to do after the supposed cease-fire agreement that concluded the first Gulf War? Saddam thoroughly bamboozled Coalition forces and the Bush administration, which was far too solicitous of the letter of UN Security Council Resolutions that authorised only the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, and put down rebellions both north and south with a brutality that defies the imagination. In a single month (March 1991) he killed an estimated 20,000 Kurds and 30-60,000 Shi’ah. Without the courage and skill of British and American pilots patrolling the no-fly zones for a dozen years he would have slaughtered far more.

Shortly after 9/11, when Chomsky’s sophistry outdid itself, Hitchens referred to such apologetics as being ‘soft on fascism’. As I said, he often understates.

Comments

[Kieron McNulty]

Oliver

Thanks for your definition of the word truism. Most enlightening. Thanks also for your captivating disquistion on the deficiencies in Chomsky's prose style.

As to the actual meat of your argument..Oh sorry I missed it. Something along the lines that clever Saddam bamboozled the law abiding and innocent west.
The west that aided this guy up until 1990 and stood by while he put these rebellions down - denying rebelling soldiers access to weapons and allowing attack helicopters to fly - the west that then punished the Iraqi people for the next 14 years through sanctions that also killed vast numbers of people.

Kieron

[Mark]

Kieron, by your words then, it looks like the West did follow Chomsky's recommendation that we at least give the native population a chance to overthrow Saddam themselves: "The west that aided this guy up until 1990 and stood by while he put these rebellions down - denying rebelling soldiers access to weapons and allowing attack helicopters to fly -"

Good thing we played by Chomsky's rules. I'm sure the Iraqi people are thankful for that.

And what exactly would you have recommended as our course of action?

[Patrick B]

Kieron wrote:

". . .the west that then punished the Iraqi people for the next 14 years through sanctions that also killed vast numbers of people."

Excuse me? Oil for Food program? Remember that? Remember the lists of oil bribes? The UN Inquiry now taking place? Remember that Saddam's people and the UN were running this money pipeline? Remember all the oil going out, money going into the special funds, the empty hospital pharmacies in Iraq?

The "effect of sanctions" is a cast-iron tenet of the Left and the anti-US cabal. Evidence to the contrary is immaterial. It really is tiresome to have to listen to such adolescent prattle time and again.Then again, "repeat a lie enought times and it will be the truth" seems to be the left's substitute for reason and facts.

[Rich]

In 1979 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman speculated that the Vietnamese removal of Pol Pot would "prove disastrous for Cambodia," averring that the "Vietnamese invasion can be explained, but it cannot be justified." [1]

Ergo we at least know Chomsky is consistent in opposing the removal of genocidal dictators by way of foreign invasion. However, I doubt most people would consider this kind of consistency an admirable trait.

[1] Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 2, pg. 294; ibid., pg. xix.

[Matty]

Patrick, I have to object to your referring to the anti-war crowd as "left". Their arguments are mostly classic old-right isolationist ideas and their main motivation is more a trenchant opposition to the United States than any sort of ideology.

As for Chomsky, he (like Pilger) has haemorraged any remaining credibility he had in his constant scaremongering and twisting and turning over the issues of the war. Although Hitchens has been (largely) correct over the war (in notable contrast to his rightwing brother Peter, who sided with the anti-war crowd over what he snottily referred to as "this leftwing war") I would argue that he has resorted to hyperbole often and I still remain deeply unconvinced by the claims he made before the war that Saddam, bin Laden and Milosevich had been some sort of secret triangle of anti-Western fascism (as far as I know, Islamic extremists were turning up in Bosnia to fight against Milosevich's Serbian militas who were conducting the notorious butchery of that country's Muslim population).

[Timbeaux]

Oliver,

The only thing suprising is that you were suprised. Hacks don't put together rational arguments when they are wrong, since it is not possible and not something they care to admit (or even recognize themselves). Therefore they almost always revert to the manipulation of semantics. Doesn't take a degree in linguistics, or a PhD for that matter, to see that.

[Timbeaux]

it continually amazes me that anyone can so tirelessly pound the WMD issue, which was almost totally irrelevant to the basis for the war. The WMD accusationswere a song and dance for the UN, because that is what the UN is about. They are certainly not about truth or the dignity of human life, just ask the Tutsis (if any remain). Powell and Blair wanted Bush to go to the UN for reasons of image, a pointless operation since the UN would neer approve of the solution of a problem dictator in any event, as he was either a brother-in-arms or a stupendous arms-trade customer, depeding on your seat. This constant pounding of "their weren't any WMD's!!!!!" just exposes the naivete or those expounding it.

[Lee]

It's worth noting the revelations in the May issue of Vanity Fair (previewed in today's Observer) that the French offered the Americans a compromise in Winter 2002: don't seek a second resolution because you will make us oppose you; you "arguably" have legal legitimacy from 1441 for intervention in Iraq already.

Translation: do what you will, legality's a blurry issue here, but don't put us into the firing line because we have future elections to contest.

Now that's what I call principle.

[Davi]

Lee,

I don't want to appear defending the honour of the French here, but how did you render this summary from the story in the Observer/ Vanity Fair???

<<>>

The French knew an anti-war stance would be if anything an electoral asset - Chirac's approval ratings soared as he became a global anti-war figure.

[Lee]

Er, I extrapolate it from the quotation below, taken from today's Observer, which I paraphrased accurately above:

From today's Observer:

Vanity Fair also discloses that on 13 January, at a lunch around the mahogany table in Rice's White House office, President Chirac's top adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and his Washington ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, made the US an offer it should have accepted. In the hope of avoiding an open breach between the two countries, they said that, if America was determined to go to war, it should not seek a second resolution, that the previous autumn's Resolution 1441 arguably provided sufficient legal cover, and that France would keep quiet if the administration went ahead.

[Canadian Headhunter]

Why, then, did the French government oppose the war? Because it wouldn't have been popular with the French public? It wasn't popular in England either but Blair went ahead. Is it that Chirac was not convinced that it was necessary but was not strongly opposed. And, feigned opposition to please his electorate? Is that what's being said?

[Heather Hoare]

Hmm no answer to Lee from Davl. I've just stumbled on this discussion but see a whole lot of rationalising going on. It just cracks me up how people can avoid the issue - come on we all know how things work, why are we (sic) justifying the actions of an international oil baron on the prowl? Its a joke.
Just saw Bush on Al-Jazeera today - real diplomatic. The guy has no heart whatsoever.

[Heather Hoare]

No reply to Canadian Headhunter from Lee, I meant.

[janus]

Just for the record, 'truism' has a strict logical sense, meaning something that is necesarily true' (e.g. 'all bald men are bald'), and a more general sense - roughly, an undoubted/ self-evident truth. It is of course perfectly possible for the latter to be something widely ignored, perhaps because of its very blinding obviousness.

The pedantic application of rhetorical terminology to admittedly choppy and occasionally careless prose, however, is less than interesting.

[janus]

Oh yes, i understand that some of chomsky's blog posts are dictated to his secretary, so the above nitpicking may be even less than minimally relevant.