Hitchens Fisks NY Times– but he’s late
Christopher Hitchens quickly Fisks a NY Times Sunday op-ed. (The link is to Slate.com. ) The subject was Iraq’s “insurgents.” Hitchens asks, “Why call them insurgents?”
I agree– I wrote a column on this very subject last year, and suggested a more appropriate name for the terrorist thugs. Here’s the link to my column (November 2004) which argues that “reactionaries” is the best descriptive handle for Iraq’s vicious mass killers, be they Baathist holdouts or Zarqawi theo-fascists.
Hitchens begins with:
When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair. A doozy classic led the “Week in Review” section on Sunday. Portentously headed “The Mystery of the Insurgency,” the article rubbed its eyes at the sheer lunacy and sadism of the Iraqi car bombers and random murderers. At a time when new mass graves are being filled, and old ones are still being dug up, writer James Bennet practically pleaded with the authors of both to come up with an intelligible (or defensible?) reason for his paper to go on calling them “insurgents.”
Here’s a link to the “doozy” Hitchens finds so foolish. The editorialist is James Bennet. Mr. Bennet is, to be frank, a very myopic analyst. To invoke the quip, he’s another sap trapped in Vietnam amber. The NY Times editorial page wears a blindfold. Fortunately its best field reporters don’t, but that’s another subject.
Hitchens concludes his essay with:
In my ears, “insurgent” is a bit like “rebel” or even “revolutionary.” There’s nothing axiomatically pejorative about it, and some passages of history have made it a term of honor. At a minimum, though, it must mean “rising up.” These fascists and hirelings are not rising up, they are stamping back down. It’s time for respectable outlets to drop the word, to call things by their right names (Baathist or Bin Ladenist or jihadist would all do in this case), and to stop inventing mysteries where none exist.
Hitchens is dead on.
My column from last November began with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch film director:
Amsterdam helps explain the stakes in Fallujah — the Amsterdam of Nov. 2, 2004, where an Islamist radical murdered Dutch libertarian filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Fallujah is Iraq’s murder capital — or more precisely, the outlaw town used as a staging area for murder committed by Iraq’s secular and religious reactionaries.
And “reactionary” is a much more apt description for these thugs than “insurgent.” Words matter, and insistently describing the murderers in Iraq as insurgents distorts the aims and true nature of these enemies. Saddam’s old cronies (the secular reactionaries) and Musab al-Zarqawi’s suicide bombers (the religious reactionaries) don’t hold elections, they don’t dig sewers, and they don’t build hospitals. The secular reactionaries want to return Iraq to a Sunni-dominated dictatorship — the corrupt, murderous hellhole Iraq was in March 2003. The religious reactionaries have a grander target, with their “golden age” a bit deeper in time. They want to run the entire world along the lines of an 11th or 12th century Muslim caliphate.
Tell Hitchens’ to “call’em reactionaries.”
For the record, a quote from Bennet’s “doozy”:
The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.
Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.
The reactionaries kill, Mr. Bennet, because murder, terror, and intimidation are the tools of fascist thugs.
UPDATE: Norm Geras has a different take on Bennet. Norm does understand the stakes in Iraq. He gives Bennet a gentler treatment than Hitchens.
“another sap trapped in Vietnam amber”: Heh. A double funny. It is true that “murder, terror, and intimidation are the tools of fascist thugs.” But most fascist thugs are thuggish for a purpose. They use these tools in order to coerce. The point of coercion is to induce cooperation in some endeavor or compliance with some demand. The Iraqi reactionaries (OK, I buy it, although I think I prefer “rejectionists”) have no obvious endeavor or demand with which the citizenry might cooperate or comply. One is therefore tempted to lump the Iraqi rejectionists with late-stage Nazis and other nihilists who slaughtered for essentially ethnic or tribal reasons — there is certainly a deep strain of ethnic hatred running through the Iraqi reactionary movement. But if that’s the motive, then the Sunni rejectionists — who have killed a great many Sunnis — are incompetent. This explanation does not square well with their apparent effectiveness in the matter of random killing — my understanding is that they have steadly recruited new people, armed them, financed them, and adapted their tactics to respond to the changing tactics of the counterinsurgency. So if incompetence is the explanation, it is limited to the political realm. There is no doubt that there is something of a mystery here. It should not paralyze us, or diminish our ardor for victory, but we do need to understand it.
Comment by TigerHawk — 5/16/2005 @ 8:01 pm
I agree with Tigerhawk that the thugs use coercion in order to get compliance. But the mystery re their incompetence and tactics isn’t deep, just strange to western thinking. Notice that what they want is submission. The word “Islam” means “submission” and it’s their political philosophy. Not liberty, not fraternity. Submission. Better if it’s willingly, but if not, then we’ll beat you into shape. Just another version of applied dhimmitude. They do not value life, they love and trust no one, and they do not mind dying if they can take some of us with them. Islam began with the quest for utopia but has ended with this dystopic hellhole.
Comment by dymphna — 5/17/2005 @ 6:21 am
Ah, but where was Hitchens when Mr. Bennet was spreading his wisdom upon the Palestinian terrorists? Surely, this leopard did not change his spots, just his hunting ground. Oh, that’s right, for the Palestinian terror campaign its the old “your terrorist is my freedom fighter” logic. Better late than never, eh?
Comment by ransom — 5/17/2005 @ 7:46 am
To me, Bennet’s editorial reads more like instructions to the “insurgents” on how to do it the right way. Sort of like saying “hey insurgents, if you keep doing it this way even we here at the NYT editorial page can’t support you, but if you look back at historical insurgencies we loved and make the American soldiers overreact you can not only win our cheering, but also might get more Iraqi’s on your side.” This reads more to me like those “This is what the Democrats should do” stories where they are giving advice they hope will be heeded, not just merely editorializing on events.
Comment by twalsh — 5/17/2005 @ 11:41 am
Evidently the Americans ar not easy targets and do not overreact much. This whole complaint pretty much puts a lie to the Left’s vision of the American soldier. Bennet doesn’t understand two things 1.The American Military 2. The terrorists Other than that he is an excellent pundit.
Comment by M. Simon — 5/19/2005 @ 12:38 pm