Christopher Hitchens and Newt Gingrich: What kind of war are we fighting?

Taped July 18, 2002
What kind of war is the war on terrorism? Ordinarily wars are fought against proper nouns—against Germany during the Second World War or against the Soviet Union during the cold war, for example. Now we're being asked to fight a war against a common noun, terrorism. Just how accurate and useful is the phrase "war on terrorism"? Is this a war? And who exactly is the enemy—Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda plus all other terrorists around the world? Al Qaeda plus all other terrorists plus all the countries in which the terrorists operate? In other words, just how good a job are the president and the administration doing, not just in prosecuting the war but in defining the objectives?

• Category

  News & Politics

[William Patrick]

Who is the host?

[HooverInstitution]

Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics. Robinson spent six years in the White House, serving from 1982 to 1983 as chief speechwriter to Vice President George Bush and from 1983 to 1988 as special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan. He wrote the historic Berlin Wall address in which President Reagan called on General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

[IAm ExTexan]

Conkal9 - you are a goddamn liar! He never did anything like that, as reported by his wife! Stick your bible up your ass.

[Unlocktube]

One of Hitchens's blind spot it seems, pity because he is hitting many issues on the head. It proves the point I suppose that there are no infallible thinkers.

[Dag-andré Gulliksen]

Get a grip, WWII was about so much more than fascism.. how about national sosialism, racism and darwinian sosialism?

Dont simplify actions of the past as though it was all stupid. Respect the past and learn from it. Nothing that is thought through is stupid, might be wrong, but clearly not stupid. Now please next time you want to simplify a complicatied matter with a single word, make sure you know what that single word means.

[SpellboundSolution]

Secular religion: everybody's favourite oxymoron.

[Scurvey Bird]

He was actually so smart that he predicted immoral theists would try and do this. What gives me the giggles is that once Christians made up this lie there was a video put forward of Hitchens saying that all this is bullshit and don't believe it. Christians always put out cowardly lies about how people had death bed conversions and it makes me sick someone would try to peddle that bs.

[jsilence418]

Not a fact yopu can't prove it so don't call it a fact !

[tomj54]

The initial comments seem wrong to start with. WW2 was a war against fascism, and the cold war was against communism.

[scentability01]

What kind of insincere phony witholds comments for approval for a video like this? OH.... I think I know the answer to that.

[Jared Stevens]

I think that you are bringing up an interesting point here. Would you mind expanding on this a bit?

[Marcus Clements]

As admirable as Mr Hitchens interminable adventures in polemic are, it does seem as though living ‘high on the hog’ in the US has left him with a slightly lob - sided view of not only modern history, but also of American foreign policy post 1945. Admittedly, the convolutions that have arisen over the past 68 years do make this a fairly tangled web and require an unusually high attention to not only fact, but context.

[Sam Squires]

The US are too smart to be as bumbling as all that. Thousands of American dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's and Afghans dead in reply (plus the soldiers). And what is the result? The East is destabilized, in some places, such as Pakistan, it's chaos. In Syria, civil war, where the US supports and funds (arms) an opposition fighting with some of the same terrorists they apparently went to war over. You have to understand the base elements. Debt oil division along racial lines and endless war