HITCHENS & TARIQ ALI debate the Iraq War

[applegrove]

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS & TARIQ ALI

debate the Iraq War

"Tariq Ali is author of Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq, and editor of the New Left Review. Christopher Hitchens's latest book is called, Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship. This interview is published with the permission of Democracy Now.

http://www.artsandopinion.com/2005_v4_n1/hitchens-ali.htm



AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why don't we start off with Christopher Hitchens. Your assessment, Christopher, right now, of what's happening in Iraq.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I think that the United States and coalition forces are not militarily defeatable in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what you mean?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. I mean, I think it's important to know first what can't happen. I've been mocked for saying this in an earlier report from Iraq, but I'm reprinting it in my upcoming collection. Military superiority is something you have to see to -- to believe. Unless the United States chooses to be defeated in Iraq, it cannot be. Therefore, the insurgency, so-called, will be defeated. And all logical and moral conclusions you want to draw from that, should be drawn.

TARIQ ALI:Well, I think Christopher is right on this, that militarily, it is virtually impossible to defeat the United States. After all, they were not defeated militarily in Vietnam, either. It was a big military offensive by the Vietnamese. But had there not been a growing opposition to the war in the United States, a big anti-war movement which penetrated and percolated into the heart of the American army, that war could have gone on.

....SNIP"

[reprehensor]

1. Tariq is awesome. Take that, Hitchie-poo!

Beautiful. Thanks for posting.

[bemildred]

2. Tactical success is not strategic success.

Nor does mere tactical superiority translate into strategic dominance.
That is why the two categories (tactical and strategic) exist.
All officers learn this and know this, but to succeed in the modern
US defense establishment, you are required to forget.

[applegrove]

3. They call it "rethinking your assumptions" n/t

[The Magistrate]

5. An Excellent Point, Mr. Mildred

One thing that does not seem to be properly taught at all is the essentially political nature of a nationalist insurgency, such as is being witnessed today in Iraq. In the final analysis, these achieve success by their effect on the political life of the occupying power, a thing for which military superiority, or even victory, is not required, and in the theater, can only be checked by political means and developments. Very large elements of Iraqi society are today being held out from engagement in the insurgency, because their leading lights feel the occupation will benefit them by crushing their own local enemies, and so enable them to achieve their own ends. Since some of these ends are incompatible, and the occupying power must inevitably come to favor one such element over the other, some of these elements must come to join the insurgency sooner or later, and greatly increase its scope and intensity.

[Wind Dancer]

4. Thanks for posting.

I am currently reading Tariq Ali's "The Clash of Fundamentalisms", a book I highly recommend.

Hitchens is absolutely nuts.