Radio Free Mike

a berlin blog

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Sinister Piffle

With all his usual sensitivity and none of his usual intelligence, Christopher Hitchens tried to dog-pile Cindy Sheehan last Monday for being -- oh, not a grieving mother per se, but a grieving mom with the wrong point of view. A sin like that can get you, let's see, 1) insulted for your faulty logic, 2) dismissed as a shallow PR sorceress, and 3) linked with David Duke! All in the same op-ed! But wait -- how is Cindy Sheehan like David Duke? By announcing in a letter that her son was "killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel."

Hitchens scolds Sheehan for writing this letter and buying the oversimplified "Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis" wholesale. He says she therefore can't be taken seriously as a pundit, or a public figure, or a "PR-knackish" tool of the left, or whatever she is. Especially since David Duke buys the same ball of wax. My answer to this was going to be that Michael Moore and Ramsey Clark aside, Cindy Sheehan or someone like her was bound to occur, because American kids are getting blown up in an unpopular war. Everyone sees that Bush lied; Americans can't see anymore why we're there. It's really that simple. It was a massive failure of leadership after September 11, when the world was largely with us. I don't like the Michael-Moore school of analysis; I think the Iraq War was just the easiest response in front of Bush after 9/11, since the brave and honest response -- facing down the Saudi family and liberalizing Arabia -- was such an intractable bitch. (And still isn't resolved.) We had a military lock on Iraq, after all, and Saddam was a bad guy, and wouldn't it be good to have a democratic regime and a few bases and some friends there in charge of the oil? Yes, of course. I thought so, too, in theory. I also don't think the troops should come home right now, since Iraq will collapse if they do. But let's not pretend Cindy Sheehan is a surprise. Because Bush went to war not by talking sense; not, as Retired General Anthony Zinni has said, by arguing the strategic merits; but by telling a lie -- the sort of paranoid sinister untruth about bombs that got Jean Charles de Menezes executed in cold blood on the London tube last month.

This is not funny. It's not small. It's not a minor suspension of disposable freedoms or credibilities for the larger good of defeating terrorist thugs. What happened to the Brazilian could happen to you or me.

But Hitchens goes further. He writes:

Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive's ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders.

In a neat bit of legerdemain Hitchens sweeps Cindy Sheehan into the military, along with her dead son, and turns the "question of civilian control" against her, when the whole fucking point of civilian control is to ensure that civilians like Cindy Sheehan don't lose their sons in a frivolous war.

Anyway. That would have been my response, if I hadn't learned that Sheehan may not have written the letter. Either she signed some boilerplate thing, or it's a hoax, or she's backpedaling. In any case, she denies holding the views Hitchens bashes her for. Now that Hitchens has stepped boldly onto the faltering pulpit reserved for those who would associate a soldier's mom with a former Klan Grand Wizard just to score a political point, his line of argument has vanished, which makes him look not just sinister but full of the same rhetorical piffle that seems to possess the rest of the right when it comes to defending this war.

posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:45 AM

Comments:

One of the things that I've read about Sheehan that was particularly compelling is that she's angry at Bush because he was basically rude and heartless when he made his pro forma condolence call to her. Somehow, aside from the politics of who is for and against the war, and aside from Bush lying about reasons for war and being an idiot in general, this seems like a pretty damn fine reason for her to be mad enough to camp out at his ranch and demand some attention. People are going to make it political, and maybe she is trying to be political, but the straight up personal part of it is still there.

# posted by Anonymous : 7:57 PM