We need a new running plot in this thread. I'll volunteer.
No, Nola, religious critique was not his "wheelhouse".
Sure it was. It's where he actually consistently made reasonable and defensible arguments. His foreign policy was often lacking. Yes he separated himself from Harris in often critiquing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he had the same sort of simple narrative causation analysis problem that allowed an over-emphasis on religion that clouded plenty of their judgement in how they witnessed and assessed the Middle East.
You're so far off base here that, again, I'm questioning whether you're even familiar with his work, which is a prerequisite for this criticism. Constraining this a little, his basis for the invasion of Iraq was fairly straightforward. It goes like this: the UN provides four conditions under which a nation loses its right to sovereignty. Either it infringes the sovereignty of another country, it commits an act of genocide, it violates the UN nuclear non-proliferation agreements, or it becomes a state sponsor of terrorism. Saddam Hussein had violated all four. Regarding Israel and Palestine, I've already linked you to one of his many articles on the subject which, if read, would not give the impression of an ideological dullard turning everything into a nail for his hammer. Accusing him of not having a sophisticated understanding of the development of Middle-Eastern countries is blatantly wrong on its face and would not survive a simple walk through his literature on any of those individual subjects. Are you sure you just haven't seen too much Sam Harris and projected your views of him onto Hitchens?
Of course that was after he wrote columns about how Clinton supposedly bombed the Sudanese to deflect from Lewinsky. An absolutely absurd, and still to this day, unfounded assertion, probably on the heels of another drunken contrarian deadline he had to meet.
This was a rather random insertion into an otherwise coherent paragraph, but I have two things to say about it. The first is that it was very common at the time to suggest that Clinton was "wagging the dog" with that bombing (and anything else Clinton did as president during the trial). This wasn't unique to him, even if it's to his discredit. The second is that in general he was rather convinced that Clinton was a psychopath and hated the man. I like Clinton but I understand why a Jerry Brown supporter and avowed liberal would be such a pioneer in Clinton derangment. If we're going to criticize him for anything, it should be this.
The cocktail of alcoholism and 9/11 on Hitchens only made his foreign policy judgement worse. Where he took 9/11 and Iraq and somehow managed to view that moment in time as some sort of existential battle for the future of humanity, played out through the absolute necessity of removing Saddam, often to the point of just blankly parroting Neoconservative talking points of the moment(probably helped he would regularly host Paul Wolfolwitz and his Office of Special Plans gang at his DC apartment).
You're off on the framing. He viewed Iraq as a moral imperative for civilized society similar to the Cold War, the Balkans, Rwanda, etc, both for world peace and also for justice against arguably once of the worst dictators left in the 20th century. This isn't some heinous position to take. I'm a millennial living in 2018 and I can quite easily say "the risk is too high", but placing yourself in the context of 2003 it's less clear. Certainly no one goes around saying Clinton's intervention in Bosnia was a mistake. Iraq is the ugly child in the family of intervention because it was mismanaged, built on faulty intelligence, and has lasted forever, but none of that is relevant before the war even starts from the public's perspective. Not to mention, according to Gallup, Democrats (and Republicans) are likely to forget what their own position on the war even was.
I just completely disagree that Hitchens was ever parroting neocon talking points, first from my own experience as he's one of maybe three people on planet Earth who have ever made convincing, historical, lucid arguments for invading Iraq at all (the other two being Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein) and second because he's said quite a few times in jest that if someone else made decent arguments for invading Iraq he wouldn't feel so much like it his responsibility to spend so much time on the circuit making his own.
Going on to be one of the most fervent outside supporters of the invasion, the actions, and the Bush rationale for the Iraq war. Including in the midst of and after the fact of Bob Woodward's contemporaneous accounts of the administration's purposefully deceptive rationales to the public, Thomas Rick's accounts of the military failures and Bush deception, and after Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in The Emerald City laid to rest any doubts that the administration's post invasion leadership was at best incompetent and at worse treasonously corrupt. Yet Hitchens still managed to find time to go on forum after forum, from Democracy Now to debating Scott Ritter - who had first hand accounts of Bush's handwaving of the Hans Blix reports that signaled with defining clarity they were about to embark on a historical mistake based on their unfettered findings inspecting the weapons in Iraq - continuing to defend the choices and decisions of the Bush administration. and as Mandark points out, prime the pump to rationalize another adventure of garden theory regime change into Iran the moment Cheney and company started laying the groundwork for the rationale.
This is revisionist although I'm sure we can go back and forth on this for quite a bit. He never gave a blank check to Bush. He criticized the things he thought he did wrong, and defended him for the things he thought he did right (like the decision to invade in the first place). He absolutely condemned what happened at Abu Ghraib, the postwar management of Iraq by Paul Bremer, and especially the allegations of torture by the US government (like I said earlier, undergoing waterboarding himself and saying "if this is not torture, nothing is").
What's the point of this post? I don't think the Iraq War was a good idea, I don't like what the Bush administration did, and I'm a rigidly anti-intervention. But Christopher Hitchens was not some bluthering moron and he wasn't a sock puppet for neconservatives, incapable of his own cogent thoughts. He had an intellectually defensible position and I'm more than willing to defend his name, even if I don't agree with everything he's ever said.
