Letters From a Young Contrarian

by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, November 8 2010.

The decision of the Iraqi war crimes tribunal tosentence Tariq Aziz to death is one that needs to be vigorously opposed for several reasons. Although it is true that, as Saddam Hussein’s longtime henchman and deputy, he is morally tainted with some of the most appalling crimes in modern history, Aziz was not, in fact, condemned to execution for his part in the annexation of Kuwait, the destruction of the Marsh Arabs, or the attempted genocide against Iraq’s Kurdish minority. (Indeed, there is some evidence that he advised his boss against the insane attack on Kuwait in 1990.) For his relatively minor role in those and other events, he has in any case already been sentenced to terms of imprisonment that would keep him in jail until he died—old and infirm as he now is—of natural causes. No, Aziz has been ordered to hang because of his long-ago role in repressing the Dawa movement, a Shiite religious faction with ties to Iran, which under the Baathist dictatorship conducted armed resistance and which is now a political party. Its leader, Nuri al-Maliki, is currently—or should one say nominally?—the prime minister of Iraq.

The decision to put Tariq Aziz to death is almost the only sign of “life” to have emerged from Iraqi official circles since the elections of March 7 this year. It seems only to confirm that Maliki looks at politics through the cold eyes of a habitual religious sectarian.

by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, October 25 2010.

For anybody of my generation, the term body count possesses a reek of association that will never quite be dispelled. The hideous photographs of Vietnamese corpses laid out as if after a shooting party, the brilliant reporting by men like Kevin Buckley on bloody campaigns like Operation Speedy Express (in which the announced toll unsettlingly exceeded the number of Vietcong who were even supposed to have been alive in the first place)—all this putbody count on a moral level with collateral damage to mean slaughtered civilians, a euphemistic name for a filthy business.

The Pentagon learned almost too well from that disgrace, keeping figures but not releasing them, a practice that continued until very recently. But this led to an outcome that was grotesque in a different way. Since the first engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have been fed a morbid two-tone diet, consisting either of the full names of our own casualties, printed every day, or reports of actual or possible civilians who have fallen victim to our own firepower. (Variants of this menu were a) very exhaustive coverage of those episodes when psychopaths wearing our own uniform slipped their leashes; b) an impressive amount of space given to those in our ranks who became afflicted with war-related mental illnesses of a different kind; and c) acts of violence carried out by privatized forces who were employed by us and sported guns but not uniforms.)

by David Greenberg, Slate, October 22 2010.

Of all the eccentricities of today’s resurgent right, one of the strangest has to be the virulent, obsessive hatred of Woodrow Wilson. For a long time, conservatives have talked about turning back the clock to a period before America veered off course. Typically, though, they have wanted to repudiate the 1960s—politically, to repeal the Great Society; culturally, to beat back the sexual, civil, and women’s rights revolutions. Occasionally, as when policymakers debated a New Deal-style response to the 2008 recession, conservative polemicists have reached back further, blaming our woes on FDR and Keynesian economics.

by William Saleton, Slate, October 13 2010.

Carl Paladino is right.

Monday on Good Morning America, the Republican nominee for governor of New York said of his Democratic opponent: “Andrew Cuomo said he took his children to a gay pride parade. I was at one in Toronto one time. … It was a bunch of very extreme-type people in bikini-type outfits grinding at each other and doing these gyrations, and I certainly wouldn’t let my young children see that.” On the Today show, Paladino told the same story: “They wear these little Speedos, and they grind against each other, and it’s just a terrible thing. Why would you bring your children to that?”

Cuomo’s kids are 16, 16, and 13. I’m sure they’ve seen plenty of bikinis and grinding already. But Paladino is right about the gyrating Speedos. Gay pride parades aren’t the best thing to take little kids to, especially if you want them to think of homosexuals as normal people. You’d be better off taking them to a picnic where boring gay couples chat about one another’s kids and gardens. You’d be better off, in short, if gay people were married.

by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, August 23 2010.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the arguments against the construction of the Cordoba Initiative center in lower Manhattan were sostupid and demagogic as to be beneath notice. Things have only gone further south since then, with Newt Gingrich’s comparison to a Nazi sign outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or (take your pick from the grab bag of hysteria) a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor. The first of those pseudo-analogies is wrong in every possible way, in that the Holocaust museum already contains one of the most coolly comprehensive guides to the theory and practice of the Nazi regime in existence, including special exhibits on race theory and party ideology and objective studies of the conditions that brought the party to power. As for the second, there has long been a significant Japanese-American population in Hawaii, and I can’t see any reason why it should not place a cultural center anywhere on the islands that it chooses.

by Jacob Weisberg, Slate, July 23 2010.

If you follow the news closely enough, you might have caught a small item recently about Meg Ryan canceling a scheduled appearance at a film festival in Jerusalem to protest Israeli policy. This was significant not because anyone should care what the nose-crinkling movie star thinks about the Mideast but precisely because no one does. Ryan, a conventional Hollywood Democrat, is a barometer of celebrity politics. That sort of sheeplike, liberal opinion once reflexively favored Israel. Now it’s dabbling in the repellant idea of shunning the entire country.