Hitchens Slams Zimbabwe and Mugabe

Christopher Hitchens, a person who I admire greatly, has some out with a new article slamming the government of Zimbabwe, run by dictator Robert Mugabe. Mugabe recently lost an election, but used fraud to force his opponent from taking over the Presidency. And Hitchens surely makes a strong case. Hitchens has been one of the forefront leaders for human rights and democracy. He took a bold stand siding with President Bush against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens shows that he hasn't given up his ideals:

The dialectic between "rogue" and "failed" is not always easy to measure. Iraq (which under Saddam Hussein was the only state to have met all four of the criteria I mentioned above) became a failed state as a consequence of becoming a rogue one and thereby brought ruinous sanctions, isolation, and corruption on itself. Afghanistan became a rogue state as a consequence of being a failed one—often through no fault of its own—in which international political gangsters could find a base. It was internal "rogue" behavior that almost destroyed Rwanda as a country, that sent vast numbers of refugees across its borders, and that helped trigger the heartbreaking civil war in Congo that may well by now have taken millions of lives. The disease that was carried in that case was the plague of ethno-fascist tribalism of which we now see the full harvest.

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Hitchens: Bush is Still the Man

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece in Slate-- not decrying the Christian conservative 43rd President of the United States, but explaining....

We might have avoided the Iraq war, even though both Bill Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions, unavoidably in our future. And the inconvenient downside to avoiding the Iraq intervention is that a choke point of the world economy would still be controlled by a psychopathic crime family that kept a staff of WMD experts on hand and that paid for jihadist suicide bombers around the region. In his farewell interviews, President Bush hasn't been able to find much to say for himself on this point, but I think it's a certainty that historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein was something that the international community ought to have postponed any further. (Indeed, if there is a disgrace, it is that previous administrations left the responsibility undischarged.)

The obvious failures—in particular the increasing arrogance and insanity of the dictatorships of Iran and North Korea—are at least failures in their own terms: failure to live up to the original rhetoric and failure to mesh human rights imperatives with geo-strategic and security ones. Again, it's not clear to me how any alternative administration would have behaved. And the collapse of our financial system has its roots in a long-ago attempt, not disgraceful in and of itself, to put home ownership within reach even of the least affluent. So the old question "compared to what?" does not allow too much glibness.

Inescapable as it is, "compared to what?" isn't much of a defense. And nor has this column been intended exactly as a defense, either. It's just that there's an element of hubris in all this current hope-mongering and that I am beginning to be a little bit afraid to think of what Wednesday morning will feel like.

I really like Hitchens and he shows his intelligence and his stability. If only more people were like him... (and I like him even though he voted for Obama.) His level-headedness shows how we need to proceed: bold but humble.