The Blair Hitch Project
Since leaving 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair has faced continuing public condemnation for leading the U.K. into Iraq, converted to Catholicism, and plunged into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Debating Blair in Toronto, the author finds the former prime minister battered but unapologetic.
By Christopher Hitchens – February 2011
Say “Toronto” or “Ontario” and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency. But this part of Canada also has its quixotic and romantic dimension. It was to here that the Tory loyalists fled the American Revolution. In the village of Deptford, Ontario, on the banks of the local river Thames, the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies cast and situated a trilogy variously composed of the elements of magic and exile. One of his chief characters, Percy “Boy” Staunton, gives up much of his life and energy to the cause of the Prince of Wales, a once dashing and promising young blade who shatters and demoralizes his admirers by falling under the thrall of a designing woman and abdicating the throne without a fight.
Mere HER i Vanity Fair.
Latest Nixon tape buries Kissinger’s reputation
Christopher Hitchens – December 14, 2010
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” — Henry Kissinger
Over the last few weeks, this modest little column of mine has been acquiring an almost eerie prescience and potency. I called for the death sentence on Tariq Aziz to be commuted, and it was only a matter of days before the president of Iraq announced that he would not sign Aziz’s death warrant. I called for Julian Assange to turn himself in, and he appeared at a London police station within hours of my words being published. Small stuff, you say. Show us something with a bit more heft and handle to it. All right, how’s this? In a November column, I denounced the shameful offer made by the Obama administration to the Netanyahu Cabinet in Israel and called for it to be withdrawn. And last week, in a wretched and furtive manner that befitted its original taint of bribery and corruption, withdrawn it was. How do you like that?
Mere HER i National Post. Kan også læses her i Slate. Christopher Hitchens har skrevet mere om lydoptagelserne:
Mr. Kissinger, Have You No Shame?
Ignore the recent excuses. Henry Kissinger’s entire career was a series of massacres and outrages.
By Christopher Hitchens – Monday, Dec. 27, 2010
Until the most recent release of the Nixon/Kissinger tapes, what were the permitted justifications for saying in advance that the slaughter of Jews in gas chambers by a hostile foreign dictatorship would not be “an American concern”? Let’s agree that we do not know. It didn’t seem all that probable that the question would come up. Or, at least, not all that likely that the statement would turn out to have been made, and calmly received, in the Oval Office. I was present at Madison Square Garden in 1985 when Louis Farrakhan warned the Jews to remember that “when [God] puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever,” but condemnation was swift and universal, and, in any case, Farrakhan’s tenure in the demented fringe was already a given.
Under artiklen følger der en længere disput mellem The American Jewish Committee og Christopher Hitchens – læs mere HER i Slate. Kan også læses i National Post her.
The Pak-Af Problem
Are we committed to Afghanistan or to Hamid Karzai’s government?
By Christopher Hitchens – Dec. 20, 2010
Friends of his would enjoy disputing whether his heart or his ego was the larger, but it was sad to know, as Richard Holbrooke’s heart eventually burst, that he had strained a good deal of it in upholding a policy in which much of his best advice had been, or was being, ignored. He was frequently left off the Obama plane when sensitive talks with Pakistani officials were in prospect. He was publicly rebuked by the administration when he stated that almost every Pashtun family contained at least one Taliban sympathizer. His early warning about the stupidity of incinerating the Afghan poppy crop was often ignored. And his death coincided with the latest confused review of a policy—known as “Af-Pak”—whose very abbreviation contains the seeds of its own negation.
Mere HER i Slate.
Andre kilder: New York Times,
The Cold War between the economic empire of the West and the socialist tyrannies of the East made it seem as if the future would belong to the coalition with the best industrial machine and largest military. In the 21st century though the industrial machine has been traded off to China, and ICBM’s and armies haven’t managed to settle the brewing low tech conflicts of both empires with the Muslim world.
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