…but over the last few years this has become less and less true.
I’m a pretty rabid atheist, but when someone makes Dawkins look like a moderate on religion, they might have gone a bit too far, you know?
And ever since he went pro-war on Iraq, his writings on foreign policy have taken on a continually more defensive and intellectually dishonest slant that I am beginning to find completely intolerable. The same contrary arrogance that I used to find so amusing, suddenly just seems pathetic. The clever rhetoric which once challenged received wisdom is now being used to attempt to gloss over gigantic logic holes that must be apparent even to someone with a phenomenal capacity for self-delusion.
Just look at his recent Slate piece, charmingly entitled “How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn’t.”
His argument seems to go like this:
1) all this chaos has nothing to do with the American invasion or continued occupying force–it’s all because Iraq was a ticking bomb of chaos waiting to go off when Saddam was gone. He works in a nice bit of public school snobbery there with a very “if you knew your history you would obviously agree with me” twist.
2) Having the US military in place actually tempered this chaos, and it would have been even worse if Saddam had just choked on a corn chip or something.
3) Look at all the good that’s come out of it.
4) The “costs” of this are our fault, but they would be just as much our fault if we let Iraq explode without invading.
Every one of those points is so deeply steeped in intellectual dishonesty that just looking at them disgusts me.
I had started with every intention of refuting them one at a time, in the kind of scathing piece that last century’s Hitchens would have written. But I can’t–the idea that someone as smart as Hitchens is reduced to this kind of apologetics
Here–my counter argument in one graphic:
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