prescience re: Hitchens
[Came across this post in the lbo-talk archives from 9/20/01 when
searching for that full Cockburn quote about Afghanistan deserving to
be raped. Rather prescient, eh? And speaking of Reiff, I met him at a
party last Sunday and he’s quite the anti-interventionist now.]
Dennis Perrin:
What “liberal masochism” is Hitch talking about? I’ve seen precious
little of it in the corp press; and those (like the fine sturdy folk
of LBO-Talk) who have made the obvious link between US policy and the
bloody reaction to it are not blind to the pre-modern nature of the
perps, nor have they excused the terrorist attack or tried to play it
down.
I think Hitch is having a political (personal?) identity crisis. He’s
not sure how to approach this, and I wager that he doesn’t want to be
caught on the “wrong side” of history again, as I’m sure he felt he
was when he first opposed NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, then, after
conferring with Gens. Sontag and Reiff, came out fully for it. Will
he do the same if the US starts pounding the Muslim world? Will he
frame it in faux-radical terms (the Cockburn, “if ever a country
deserved rape, it’s Afghanistan,” stance)? Or will he just toss it
all aside and become our Peregrine Worsthorne?
Tick, tock. Tick, tock . . . .