Christopher Hitchens

This youtube is pretty representative of Christopher Hitchens – brilliant, belligerent, brutish. Who else would go on cable TV hours after someone’s death to lampoon the dead man so wholly? No doubt Rev Jerry Falwell deserves everything he gets, but is there a time and a place? I don’t know. Can’t quite decide. What I do know is that Hitchens was a one-off who deserves all the obits and flowers today. Personally, I came to him through his book on Henry Kissinger, which is typically thorough and hammering. But I respected him most for his views on Iraq – when he took up a stance in favor of the war when 90 percent of the Left was against it. I still think his argument that invasion was justified to get rid of a homocidal maniac is a good one. And I still think the Left has its reasoning backwards when it thinks it is saving lives by stopping all wars. Read:

“Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!” – The Weekly Standard, May 2005.

I’m not looking to re-start the whole Iraq debate, just to say that Hitchens’ position on the war took guts to stake out, much like the rest of his life. No doubt he enjoyed playing the heretic, as in the clip. But he had guts to appear in the teeth of opposition night after night.