Anti-Climacus

LINK: Via Gene at Harry's Place:

"Christopher Hitchens's support for Bush administration policy in Afghanistan and Iraq has earned him a lot of links and cyber high-fives from the Right side of the blogosphere. At the same time, former fans of Hitchens on Left mutter about him having gone over to the neocon Dark Side.

But just when you think you've got Hitchens sussed, he stubbornly refuses to meet your expectations. He has never stopped believing that the US lent aid and comfort to brutal fascist regimes in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, and he continues to demand that a chief architect of this policy-- one Henry Kissinger-- be held to account...

I expect Hitchens's rightwing cheering section will be more subdued about this piece than they have been about his attacks on the antiwar Left. If they acknowledge it at all, that is.

And I hope the antiwar Left will concede that Hitchens is still capable of thinking clearly and independently about US foreign policy, past and present-- even when they don't like what he says about it."

Being neither rightish (entirely) nor leftish anti-war, it should come as no surprise that I despise everything Henry Kissinger stands for and I'd be happy to waive my normal objection to the ICC for the sole purposes of handing him over. Indeed, as Hitchens has argued in the past, you can't really have the moral imperative of pro-democracy and pro-human rights now without an open acknowledgement that it's the victory of realpolitik (and, earlier, containment) as doctrines which led to virtually every misstep made in US foreign policy since WWII. It's not so much that you can't have Paul Wolfowitz without H.K., but rather that the impact of Kissinger requires someone like Wolfowitz, if this country is ever to have hope of regaining moral leadership in anything.