The Nation recently posted (buried, I’m told) an essay by their apostate son Christopher Hitchens – “Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush“. I don’t think this is one of Hitch’s more interesting articles (perhaps it’s venue-fatigue), nor one of his more rhetorically spectacular (his tropes do entertain), and I was surprised to read Christopher echoing the tired patter about Bush’s stupidity (obviously he hadn’t seen today’s NYT report discussed below), but the piece does contain one simple extraordinary bit. It comes in response to one of the magazine’s editors asking him to explain his own political migration, which is not wildly dissimilar to mine:
In Kabul recently, I interviewed Dr. Masuda Jalal, a brave Afghan physician who was now able to run for the presidency. I asked her about her support for the intervention in Iraq. “For us,” she said, “the battle against terrorism and against dictatorship are the same thing.” I dare you to snicker at simple-mindedness like that.
Works for me.
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