Hitchens on Iraq

Christopher Hitchens is one of those people who genuinely speaks his mind. Hitchens, is one of the few writers you can count on to give a well reasoned, honest critique of a situation without getting the feeling that he has to defend his "side."

Today Hitchens has a very good article about the reconstruction of Iraq where he asks if we can really afford to take sides on this one instead of focusing on getting the job done:

"How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?"

Timothy Burger