It takes him a few paragraphs to get rolling, but Hitchens lights up the cliché and shallowness of Francis Fukuyama's article in last week's NYT magazine. (I thought that article to be important reading, btw.) A key graf, which is true even outside this context:
The first requirement of anyone engaging in an intellectual or academic debate is that he or she be able to give a proper account of the opposing position(s)...
In other words, one needs to demonstrate a sincere understanding of the opponent's position before pretending to argue against it. Seems obvious, but it's actually fairly rare on both left and right. You will see this sort of slight in the form of the straw-man: arguing against a point (or a person) which does not in fact exist.
Perhaps of interest to Jeff Goldstein, Hitchens uses Fukuyama's choice of words to demonstrate a dependence on historic clichés that he hopes his reader will not investigate. Hitchens, like a political pornographer, zooms in for a close up.
Not everyone will appreciate the unironic beauty of those last two formulations [...]
The opening words, "It is no accident, comrades," used to be the dead giveaway of a wooden Stalinist hack [...]
The term "root causes" was always employed ironically (as the term "political correctness" used to be) as a weapon against those whose naive opinions about the sources of discontent were summarized in that phrase.
More to the point, he accuses Fukuyama of convenient 20/20 hindsight, saying that his argument boils down to little more than, 'failure is bad':
[I]s it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations [...]
The charge that used to be leveled against the neoconservatives was that they had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein (pause for significant lowering of voice) even before Sept. 11, 2001. And that "accusation," as Fukuyama well knows, was essentially true—and to their credit.
In other words, to be on the right side of the argument is as important now as it was then. Hitchens is essentially saying to Fukuyama, you were right, no need to run for the hills.
Because the neocons are going through a period of discredit (in some people's eyes), this does not mean the opposite of their argument is true. Be on the right side of the argument, even if your team is losing.
To me, those that argue that Iraq was/is a mistake lack both imagination and memory. Had we removed Saddam in '91, would we be better off today? Most would say yes. One should then argue that our current war is not a mistake, but long overdue.
Had we not gone into Iraq in 2003, how would the current day look? Would Saddam be standing idly by as his Islamist neighbor pursues nuclear weapons? Imagine.
Hindsight is easy. It's the present and the future that are really hard.
Comments