Informed Speculation

That’s the question on the mind of the great Christopher Hitchens as he ponders the withdrawal from Iraq that is so much requested. But first, a preliminary bit of classic Hitchens snarkery:

…[T]he problem with the Iraq confrontation, as fought “at home,” is not its level of anger but its level of argument. After almost three years of combat, the standard of debate ought to have risen and to have become more serious and acute. Instead, it has slipped into a state of puerility. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, squeals about cowardice and suggests that those who differ are stabbing our boys in the back—and then tries to revise her remarks in the Congressional Record. This is to sink to exactly the same level as those who jeer that sympathizers of the intervention should “send”—as if they could—their own children, if they should happen to have any handy. Or even to the level of those who claim that anti-war criticism demoralizes “our men and women in uniform.” I can’t be absolutely sure of this, but the “men and women in uniform” whom I have met, and who have patrolled edgy slums and nasty borders, are unlikely to burst into tears when they hear that someone even in their home state doesn’t think they can stand it. Let’s try not to be silly.

Well said, and a reminder to both sides of how stupid we sometimes can get…

Now, to the question at hand:

Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.” There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.” But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word “isolationist” at least used to describe something real, even “realistic.” The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.

Christopher, you said it…