Christopher Hitchens on Iraq and the Petraeus Report part 1

[pppaaaooo13]

Hitchens supported Iraq war and suddenly atheists supported iraq war.Without thinking. Just because Hitchens said it.Sorry you are wrong

[MrTexasArcane]

The global town drunk/zionist neocon ass puppet has gone room temperature and I noticed the birds were singing, the sky was bluer and the air smelled better. Poor old faggot sucked one too many cocks in his life and got throat cancer. A perfect ending for a man who spent 62 years talking crap. Hitchens is moving into worm farming in his retirement and will soon be driving demons up the wall in hell complaining about his conditions. He's a good quisling now.

[blueshade26]

lol +1 for "fatuous babble"

[blueshade26]

Hitchen's view that we should proactively destroy the middle east in order to somehow eliminate its religion is hypocritcal as it's coming from a guy who would rather kick back at his mansion watching reports on his hdtv of the deaths of american soliders in iraq rather than go fight himself.

i don't know what pathology courses through hitchen's veins that makes him believe a negative one factor explanation (get rid of religion) can fix everything, but it doesn't convince me.

[disdanic]

@blueshade26 Your fatuous babble fails entirely based on one false assumption: "Hitchen's view that we should proactively destroy the middle east in order to somehow eliminate its religion." It is like Tea Partyers who start off their discourse with, "Obama's plan to turn America into a socialist state modelled roughly on a combination of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich". Neither you know Tea Party fanatics have any grounding in reality.

[Moh5Itachi1]

@blueshade26 so your potin is ''you cant support a war unless your out there fighting'' sounds a little silly.

[zygotepeyote]

hitchens is a drunk...period

[xn117]

@zygotepeyote hes not a stereotypical drunk. He's the only man who can debate and win against a tough topic that requires a lot of thinking and logic. Some people have it (like hitchens) and some don't (most ppl w/ are drunk).

[apresesco]

Who cares? The important thing is that now they have control over another OPEC country and political control over those wonderful oil reserves in the Middle East.

Next target: Iran and Venezuela.

[nr900]

to quote the great band Genesis - "you gotta get in to get out".

[12345643]

dostoevsky was a christian, was he not? TBK and crime and punishment seem to have a common theme of atheist existentialism getting owned.

[fomastephanovitch]

Or systems of atheistic existentialist systems as a universal picture of human experience surely?

I read existentialism in the context of it being a reaction to traditional thought systems: those traditional systems all sharing a claim to present a universal prescription or worldview.

A property of existentialism is that it's precepts are neither rational nor empirical, so what logically seems to be systemic thought is itself non-existential.

You might agree with me if you read Zarathustra ;)

[12345643]

"systems of atheistic existentialism as a universal picture of human experience," as a defining characteristic of dostoyevsky's novels? i was getting the impression that it was more like one-who-thinks-he-is-an-uberme­nsch turning mad. that is not to say that religion is the answer, but .....once again, the supercilious atheists, who consider them somewhat above the common person, do not fare well.

haven't read TSZ but im sure as hell eager to.

[fomastephanovitch]

Sorry the way I answered you wasn't clear. Existentialism as I understand it is a reaction to idealistic rationalism as well as empiricism.

These ways of thinking generate systems which existentialism is against.

It's not a defining characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels, but it's a recurring theme.

Walter Kaufmann wrote a book called Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre which explains the movement as a whole although I haven't found a single book which does this adequately.

[12345643]

ill check it out.  im reading kierkegaard right now, finding it a bit confusing :P (but maybe all philosophy is like that, eh?)

[fomastephanovitch]

It shouldn't be though..! It's better to read it in the context of philosophy being footnotes to Plato.

It's the greatest deviation from this both intellectually (eugh) and culturally.

John Douglas Mullen's book called Kierkegaard's Philosophy is a good way to grasp the shared methodology of these thinkers too.

Of all philosophers the hardest to read (I've found) are Heidegger, Hegel and Kant.

If you get these guys, you'll get absolutely everything anyone throws at you.

[infokemp]

I have long wanted to read Geothe can you let me know any titles by the Great Geothe.

[seraph101]

The invasion of iraq was an act of terrorism.

[erik24077]

the murder of a million of ones own citizens is terrorism. the comparison of tyrants like saddam and the taliban to the nation which liberated the respective peoples of these oppressive governments is lunacy.

[Oronare]

Doesn't take away from the fact that illegal invasions of a sovereign nation is terrorism.

[erik24077]

Well thats not what the word means and I'm not exactly sure what illegal invasion your speaking of. The US led liberation of Iraq was a result of Saddam's non-compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441. Therefore this was in fact a legal invasion in accordance with international law. I'm sure the Iraqi people, whom we have liberated, would prefer a different term than invasion. Maybe you should read a little more about this war before you start making such absurd statements.

[Oronare]

Oh, I have probably studied the Iraq war in far more detail than you, don't worry.

"It is claimed that the invasion was fully legal because authorization was implied by the United Nations Security Council.[72][73] International legal experts, including the International Commission of Jurists, a group of 31 leading Canadian law professors, and the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy have denounced both of these rationales."

You are arguing with international lawyers? Must be a fool.

[erik24077]

your argument smacks of trivialities. the fact remains that our decision to move on iraq was the right one. far from being the unilateral movement that members of your political persuasion claim it to be, OIF had a great deal of support from the international community. it seems that US adherence to the international laws of the UN is pointless anyways. we tried this, after the uproar over the iraq invasion, in darfur and what exactly has your beloved multi-national body done?

[Questfortruth86]

define "right"

[erik24077]

in addition your quote which is so obviously taken directly from wikipedia cannot be corroborated by any credible source. but then again i guess it is i who am the fool for even debating someone as sophomoric and naive as you.

[MattyJames25]

Look, you don't have to agree with the war, but you need to understand that Iraq had more legal grounding than: France's strike on the air force of the Ivory Coast in 2004, Russia's incursion into Georgia in 2008, and even more legal grounding than NATO's Kosovo campaign. Yet where is the "illegal war" chants for these?

Perspective kid.

[Questfortruth86]

maybe next time we wont arm these horrific dictators and give them permission to use biological weapons on innocent non-combatants.

[infokemp]

I like Hitchens but I believe he has fooled himself that Bush was entirely idealistic in going into Iraq, certainly GWBush was more idealist than HW Bush senior, the lies and corruption show that the war also had other motives aside from liberal Democratic values. If they had been open just saying, Yes we want to get rid of sadam because he is a war criminal gangster terrorist, the war would have more support.

[BRtankbuster]

True.

A good cause has been completely corrupted because the government chose to scare people, instead of educating them.

[R0undAboutMidnight]

@erik24077 And what about the nation that funded Saddam, even after he started killing his own people? Oh, they're the "liberators" now.

Hitchens was so wrong on Iraq, probably why he felt the need to redirect his attentions against religion. I admire the man, I do, but he was wrong, and I dare say he knows it, even though he wouldn't admit it.

[CBALLEN]

I believe Chris just needs a hug.

[SamFreedom]

I like Hitchens but he was a bit off because they didn't give him a scotch to sip on.

[AbdulAW]

hitchens looks like he's on drugs

[SamFreedom]

Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. That doesn't mean that atheists are without opiates. ;-)

[kat1989]

lol love the huge gaps he leaves that confuse questioners

[zaenzaen]

Right on

[rkeppler3633]

Hitchens, his entire life, has promoted the export of armed revolution. He previously advocated it from a Marxist perspective, as that was who was behind it then, but now he wants it from Washington.

Appropriate - we have become the Soviet Union. Secret torture gulags, all our phones are tapped, prosecutions are undertaken for political reasons, etc.

[Robertoroboto]

Time to defeat the leftists in the USA. Believe me, vets and military personel despise the Left.

[Scrapheap71]

What would you say to me... a military vet who IS a Leftist??

[SamFreedom]

thanks for your service and may your politics never come to light.

[Scrapheap71]

Typical conservative response. Censor and oppress opposing viewpoints, then call that 'freedom of speech'.

[SamFreedom]

Typical liberal truth-twister... respecting freedom of speech, even being willing to die in its defense doesn't mean you have to want every viewpoint to come to light. Shall I also want fascism and Holocaust denial to come to light, too, based on your silly, stupid and ridiculous misunderstanding of freedom of speech? Go ahead, speak like a moron a-hole but that doesn't mean this INDEPENDENT has to want it to come to light. Your lying and misrepresentation makes me disdain you even more.

[tensider1]

Chris, baby, I still love ya, but I think that's the only time I've seen you get knocked off your game. When the letter from the soldiers was quoted you gave a measely non-answer to an important question. But then again, as a writer and pundit you are now working in theory and speculation, and speculation has little leverage against first hand anecdotal testimony. It sounds like a little on-the-ground reporting from Iraq could do your position good.

[EvilGoblin]

Look at the fat drink soaked popinjay squirm.

[nyomythus]

Poor lil' evil gobbiwin, tis, tis, tis.

[TheInnerCynic]

Unless you are Galloway you should let him keep that call, and you forgot ex-trotskyite.

[pylgrym]

Would you buy a used car from Christopher Hitchens?

[bollockowithalob]

Thanks for uploading.

Long live Da Hitch.

[yyuryyub]

Tony Jones is a great interviewer!

[OmegaRage]

Although terribly biased.

[detectivesyme]

I think our boy is a bit soused.

[raggedclown]

Not even Hitch would be drunk at that hour of the morning. He has what sounds like a nasty chest infection, an occupational hazard for smokers.

[slicedalone2]

everybody yell for Palestine to have them country but no one care about Kurdistan. except for christopher hitchens.

[rhyslings]

Did he call Tony 'my dear'?

[nyomythus]

No need to judge the messenger; the perspective fact by fact is on the mark.

[DaveyH123]

Whey, hitchens looks a bit half cut.