Rating: 
Summary: The least obnoxious argument for war that I've seen
Review: Hitchens is surely is aware that the "generous" offers made to Palestinian leaders, including the current post-war "roadmap" have been for a "state" consisting of a couple of isolated cantons, like the Bantustans given to the blacks by apartheid South Africa. He does allow that though he loathes Arab suicide bombers, the number of victims of their terror is quite small compared to the number of victims accumulated by the Hon. Mr. Sharon. He writes that U.S. support for Saddam in the 80's was "about oil" but the first Gulf war was launched on moral grounds. That's impossible. He avoids that 200,000 Iraqi civilians died initially because the U.S. destroyed vital civilian infrastructure like electrical plants to power sanitation and water facilities and hospitals. He merely states that smart bombs didn't work too well in that war. He avoids that as late as May 2002 the Bush administraion was blocking billions in dollars of contracts to repair vital infrastructure in Iraq at the UN sanctions committee.
Saddam was being supported during far worse crimes of his than his invasion of Kuwait. At the same time the U.S. was giving weapons and training to the Indonesian military in its much worse occupation of East Timor and (continuing today) to Morroco to loot oil and brutalize the Western Sahara. Apartheid South Africa secured a free port in Namibia with U.S. help in return for its withdraw from its decades of murderous occupation there. The United States was engineering the slaughter throughout the 80's and beyond the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in Central America. In 1986, the World court called on the U.S. to stop its "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua and the U.S. responded by having its terrorist contras accelerate their attacks on farms and hospitals until the Nicaraguan people were terrorized into voting the Sandanistas out. Currently the United States is negotiating with Colombian right wing death squads who are heavily involved in the drug trade and whom are on its official terrorist list. The death sqauds are indirectly funded by the U.S. through the Colombian military which has combined with the death squads to commit a significant majority of the atrocities in th at country.. The U.S. has been spraying chemicals all over the place in Colombia on the pretext of destroying drugs but is destroying most other crops and livestock and making peasants deathly sick and driving them off the land. It is giving military equipment to Indonesia to commit terrible atrocities in Aceh. It is supporting the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in Turkey....Hitchens admits this latter but is quite sure that a few non-discrimination laws passed by Turkish politicians in order to placate the European Union will make things better. He points out that Turkey could not have maintained its occupation and ethnic cleansing in Cyprus since 1974 without U.S. military aid. He solemnly calls on the U.S. to withdraw this aid as if he really thinks they will do so. Paul Wolfowits has had a role in all of these atrocities, past and present, so why does Mr. Hitchens twice quote him so glowingly in this book about the menace of Saddam? In a chapter which centers on the Bali bombing of Indonesia, he conccots a straw argument to the effect that leftists say we should not "upset Al Qaida." No,leftists say that we should stop supporting dictatorships and killing Iraqis and so on for Al Qaida exploits these issues very heavily, which Hitchens seems to deny, and it helps grudging tolerance from ordinary people in the region. He describes a visit to Safwan in Southern Iraq with a Red Crescent convoy after "liberation." He found some friendly children, some of whom tried pick pocketing the foreign photographers, but several adults expressed undying devotion to Saddam.One man claimed to Hitchens that British soldiers had recently gunned down a couple of children with m-16's. Hitchens immediately sensed the story was fishy for the British don't use m-16's and the man was evasive as to the deeper details of the story. The man "was certainly a liar" as well as "a mean and low one.' Hitchen's "companion and interpreter," "a vast bear shaped Palestinian whom I shall call Omar" led him away from the mob. "Come along Mr. Christopher," he said , "These people are all liars." Hitchens allows that the situation was probably more complex than that. He argues that Saddam will fall inevitably with or without U.S. military intervention and U.S. troops need to be there to minimise the inevitable post-regime chaos.Well, many U.S. backed dictators, many Saddam clones-Jean Claude Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu, Ceacescu-were overthrown by their people without U.S. aid. The U.S. did not bomb water and sanitation facilities, and soak civilian cetners with depleted uranium in those countries to cause vast oubreaks of cancer and epidemics. He admits that the sanctions greatly weakened the Iraqi people and strengthened Saddam. Like every other tender hearted viewer of 'embedded' media coverage, Hitchens writes that he was quite overcome by the cheering throngs, greeting the U.S. as Saddam's statue was torn down in Baghdad. The number in that throng was only about several dozen; the rest of the town was looting as our boys and girls gallantly guarded the oil ministry building. Hitchens admits that he was quite "numb" when he saw the destruction of some ancient artifacts from the looting. U.S. corporations are coming in and buying up Iraqi public industries at cheap prices while U.S. corporations are preparing to flood into the country and overpower and destroy indiginous industry. Hitchens avoids these factors and instead goes into a discourse about how only American companies can properly reconstruct the country. Though of course, no effort is being made to restore civilian infrastrucure, except for sleazy photo ops like Tony Blair in Basra. In any case, The Iraq Body count group suggests that as many as ten thousand civilians may have been directly killed by U.S. bombs. Hitchens manages to avoid a lot of salient arguments about the WMD situation....
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent work
Review: Hitchens tells it like it is. A must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Mea Culpa: A Neo-Con Audition Sell Out
Review: Hitchens writes that recent anti-war demonstrations "were actually organized by people who do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all. They were in fact organized by groups who either openly like Saddam, and Milosevic, and Mugabe, and Kim Jong-Il, or by those who think that Osama bin Laden represents a Muslim cry for help." Hitchens also declares "that many of the Pentagon's intellectuals hope for a domino effect from the collapse of Saddam Hussein, extending through Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia and perhaps Egypt. The worst thing I can say about this is that I devoutly hope it's true." That propaganda could have been written by the American Enterprise Institute, or any other neo-conservative slush fund masquerading as a think-tank. Hitchens even speaks of his Trotskyist past, aligning himself in code with the neo-cons who followed old man Kristol and somehow shifted ideologically to Leo Strauss. I guess everyone has their price, and now Hitchens has taken a neo-con apologia dive. Hitchens defends the White House's transparent conflicts of interest with corporate contractors, and states a Halliburton firm "contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames, or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras--windy as they are." How can he reconcile this when the genocide of Hitchens' once beloved East Timor was done in large part for Henry Kissinger's corporate client Freeport McMoRan? Hitchens proclaims, "But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource." He apparently attended the Enron school of accounting. The Iraqi people will never see a dime from the privatization of their resource extraction, and there remains a world full of countries victimized by globalization to prove it. Hitchens contradicts himself with (page 8) "who seriously believes oil isn't worth fighting about?" and (page 55) "Do you mean that oil isn't worth fighting for" compared to (page 88) "It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made." Hitchens confronts the "ugly idea that non-soldiers have less right to argue for war", and connotes that all non-soldiers are the same. There remains a massive difference between (a) people who are non-soldiers because of disability or lucky timing and (b) the draft dodgers who comprise most of the White House who did everything they could to keep themselves out of combat but send other people's kids into harm's way while "patriotically" stripping them of most of their GI Bill benefits. Though Hitchens claims that Bush and others did not rush to war--although every time U.N. weapons inspectors made progress it was met with White House consternation--the book already calls for the next war...with North Korea. Hitchens chimes, "the leering Kim Jong-Il had been starving his people and forcing them to prostate themselves before a plutonium god", though in truth the plutonium god is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose former company ABB built North Korea's nuclear facilities and remain culpable for their nuclear threat. More troubling remains Hitchens' flippant attitude toward collateral damage. Hitchens, once the defender of human rights, now fails to see that collateral damage equals people who got in the way when ends supposedly justify the means. If capital punishment without trial isn't a human rights violation, what is? Bordering on pathological, Hitchens preaches, "The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights might be something that could be gradually policed, if not enforced," despite the fact the U.S. has repeatedly violated that Declaration. During the first Gulf War the bulk of U.S. military targets were civilian, including hospitals and water treatment centers. The U.S. use of Depleted Uranium munitions, itself a war crime, has caused the cancer rate in Iraq to increase 1200%, and the radical increase of cancer and congenital malformations mirror the effects of Hiroshima. Besides, the combat never really ended; for example, in "non-war" year 1999, American/British aircraft dropped more than 1800 bombs on 450 (civilian) targets in Iraq. U.S. post-war sanctions have prevented Iraq from receiving medical equipment, medicine and especially vaccines. With continued bombing, radiation poisoning, water contamination and no medicine, between 1991-1998 over 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of U.S. sanctions. Including adults, over one million people have died, making this of Holocaust proportions. Regarding the "no fly zones" actually deemed illegal under U.N. policy, Hitchens lies, "For twelve years, a no fly zone has protected the Kurdish and Shi'a populations from extermination." Turkey, terrified of Kurdish refugees AND a Kurdish free state, since 1992 has used the northern no fly zone as cover for repeated invasions of Kurdish Iraq. In 1995 and 1997, as many as 50,000 Turkish troops attacked Kurdish Iraq, and U.S./British military suspended operations to allow Turkish fighter-bombers and gun-helicopters to take part in the killing of over 30,000 Kurds, six times the number of Kurds that Saddam Hussein gassed in Halabja. When the Shi'as rebelled in March 1991 and almost overthrew Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military allowed Saddam's forces into no fly zones, and provided support cover as Iraqi helicopters poured kerosene on Shi'as and ignited them with tracer fire. Hitchens bleats, "In a way, I regret having to argue at this ad hominem level." Not only has he dismissed logic, he's smug about it. His political devolution reeks of John Dos Passos, and Hitchens suggests "the government and the people of these United States are now at war with the forces of reaction", though he has adopted the reactionary position. The pity remains that not only is Hitchens living in logical fallacies, they are not even his own logical fallacies. Let's hope the book is actually a work of satire.
Rating: 
Summary: A wholly different case
Review: Hitchens' tidy little book makes several different cases to support going (or now, our having gone) to war against Iraq. His arguments have merit and reveal a lot of information about the situation there that is new to me. It is clear that Mr. Hitchens has a lot of personal connections to people in Iraq and Kurdistan, and it is for those people that I believe he sought the end of the Saddam regime. BUT (and it's a mighty big but) the case he makes here is clearly not the same one the Bush administration made. That's pretty well supported by now, so I won't get into that. I do want to know why we weren't given a better, clearer view of the situation in Iraq by Rumsfeld, Cheney and Co. If it was a good cause, why did we need to be manipulated by phony WMD evidence? I hope Mr. Hitchens can address these questions in future writings of his. I may not be on his side, but I enjoyed his book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good rhetorical argument, but sketchy on detail.
Review: I am one who has always been critical of our reasons for going into Iraq and, further, how we've conducted the Iraq 'war.' But I am equally uncomfortable when around my anti-war friends who, to me, always seem to oversimplify the issue by suggesting absuridities like (a) we should have given Iraq more time (as the UN has for 10 years, to no appreciable avail); (b) Saddam Hussein posed little threat to the international community (ignoring that even Clinton knew this wasn't true); or worst of all (c) that the war in Iraq will encourage Islamic anti-americanism even more (as if this wouldn't have happened anyway). So as an opposer of the Iraq war, I appreciate reading books like Hitchens' that at very least gives some meaty considerations of the 'pro-Iraq-war' type. I agree with other reviewers that as the book is a short collection of short essays, Hitchens does more by way of rhetoric than analysis. I also agree that the lack of citations was a problem. But I vehemently disagree with those who feel that Hitchens does not know what he is talking about, that he simply has a 'neo-con' bias (Hitchens has always been and continues to be on the far left), or that his arguments are not eye-opening or persuasive. Hitchens focuses on two things in particular: rebutting those overly simplistic slogans of what he calls (yes, a bit unfairly) the 'peaceniks'; and ruminating on Hussein's human rights violations and the overly-bravado way he openly (arrogantly) defies UN stipulations. He even goes so far as to point out (what we all kind of thought, but tried to suppress) that an international clash with Saddam was something of an inevitability. Was it best now or later? Since Hitchens doesn't put much faith in the UN, whose known Hussein was a problem, but dragged its feat for ten years, Hitchens answers that now is better than later in dealing with Saddam. The 'peaceniks' bear much of the brunt of Hitchens' wrath. Slogans like "no war for oil" and "But Hussein wasn't the worst of the bad guys," really get Hitchens' juice flowing. On the first, Hitchens asks us whether or not what the peaceniks are suggesting is to leave Iraq's oil resources in the hands of the self-same man who showed no hesitation in burning Kuwait's oil fields in the process of 'surrendering' them back to Kuwait? Is such a man not a huge danger to Iraq's oil fields as well? AS to whether we should treat Hussein with kids gloves simply because he is not the 'worst of the bad guys' here is Hitchens himself: "Did the people who said this have any idea what they were saying? How many bad guys could they name who had violated the Genocide Convention on their own territory, invaded two neighboring states, openly financed suicide bombing, sought and nearly acquired numclear capacity and were within easy reach of 9 percent of the world's energy reserves...A man that not only murdered his mildest critics but has also murdered members of his own government...[?]" [p.9] This should at very least whet people's appetite to learn more. And despite the lack of citations or extended essays, a book like this should at very least be read by the war's critics (myself included, of course) to remind them that, if anything, arguments - good arguments - can be made on all sides. Reading this book confirmed much of what I've long suspected. Yes, I am still a critic of the war, but despite what all too many people say, neither 'side' on this issue seems to have a so desperately wanted monopoly on the truth.
Rating:
Summary: Short but Potent
Review: I became a Christopher Hitchens fan after reading his take on Bill & Hillary Clinton, NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO. This short but potent book traces his impressions and experiences in America and the Middle East as the Iraqi conflict comes to a head. For anyone open-minded enough to weigh the various opinions to reach their own conclusion on this conflict, I'd definitely recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Selective Moral Outrage Breeds Selective Inclusion of Facts
Review: I bought this book after having read Christopher Hitchens' "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" and after having seen him interviewed on television. Hitchens has generally struck me as an intelligent and interesting person in the world of ideas up until the moment I read this book. Now I'm simply asking myself, "What went wrong"? To my great dismay, I found "The Long Short War" to be bombastic and rather embarrassing to read. The book contains no factual documentation or references and amounts to little more than shrilly insulting anyone opposed to the American invasion of Iraq. Even this would not be such a bad thing if Hitchens' arguments had any style or substance, but unfortunately very little of this book is intelligent or compelling. Where does one even begin to pick this [book] apart? One could start with Hitchens' belief that the whole problem with Iraq started with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990-an action that Hitchens correctly condemns for its aggression and brutality. But Hitchens [doesn't seem to] consider that until the end of the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein implemented practically no foreign policy decision without first checking with the United States and that prior to the invasion of Kuwait, he was essentially given the green light by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie .... More appalling is Hitchens' statement that the anti-war demonstrations were organized and carried out by people who liked Saddam Hussein and who sympathized with Usama bin Laden. Having photographed and interviewed many protestors in these marches, I can safely state that they were concerned about their nation launching an illegal war of aggression based on falsified or exaggerated evidence and not the preservation of some thug in Baghdad. Slipping deeper into the Neo Conservative ideological vortex, Hitchens makes even wilder and less substantiated claims. Afghanistan was a success. America will liberate Iraq. This will bring peace to the entire Middle East. If a nuclear or chemical bomb whose footprint is traced to Iraq is ever detonated in American city, we will kick ourselves for not having prevented this with preemptive military action. In rattling off these slogans, Hitchens ignores some glaring contradictions. Afghanistan is actually in shambles with no functioning infrastructure, open fighting among rival warlords and the Taliban having regrouped in brigade-level strength. Iraqis-both Shiites and Sunis alike-have demonstrated since day one that they do not want any foreign army in their country whether it removed their tyrant from power or not. The "peace" that was supposed to spread across the Middle East has so far been characterized by terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, by daily insurgencies against the Anglo/British forces in Iraq, and sporadic violence in the Israeli occupied territories. And finally if, God forbid, a weapon of mass destruction is ever detonated in a U.S. city, what makes Hitchens think that its footprint will be traceable to Iraq's feeble if at all existent nuclear arms program? A more likely candidate would be Pakistan, an American ally that already possesses nuclear weapons (and therefore the spent material needed for a "dirty" bomb), that has a large fundamentalist population, and whose intelligence services maintained deep ties to al Quaeda for years. While it might be understandable for most of us to make such errors, one has to wonder why Hitchens, an intelligent person and veteran journalist, either failed to comprehend the facts or simply ignored them. The answer probably lies with Hitchens' tremendous and entirely understandable sympathy for the Kurds and others who were brutalized by Saddam Hussein. But in feeling for the victims and in hating their oppressor, Hitchens appears to have blinded himself to equally troubling realities. The United States sanctioned and supported Saddam Hussein's oppressive behavior for decades. And as Scott Ridder pointed out, Iraq's fragmented religious and ethnic demographics virtually guarantee that the United States cannot and will not implement an actual representative government in that country. I recommend this book if for no other reason because it demonstrates some of the disastrous consequences of moral outrage. In abhorring one set of wrongs, we should not find ourselves to be the unwitting apologists for another.
Rating:
Summary: Long On Rhetoric Short On Insight
Review: I have heard Hitchens speak in a public forum and his anti-anything religious venom leaves him unable to understand anyone religiously motivated. He thinks of them as children incapable of rational thought and thus discounts them out of hand. Hence he will never understand Islam and what motivates the people in Iraq. He needs a healthy piece of humble pie before he goes anywhere or says anything about anybody. He comes off as extremely arrogant which turns many people off. This book reflects that mind set.
Rating:
Summary: my opinion
Review: i think they got distracted from the original purpose of finding WMD's. I'm not saying Heussein was a good ruler (a great and common attack from conservatives to liberals), rather, I am saying I think they could have spent less money on the war. Just because I am partially liberal, doesn't mean I initially think a certain idea (What Ann Coulter seems to hypothosize). Over 6,000 Iraqi's have died (according to an estimate count from www.iraqbodycount.net) and no one has said anything in the media. Did you know they were not allowed to show any dead bodies? The celebration at Baghdad was a minor Celebration to the country as a whole. Not everyone was pleased. If the US didn't spend so much money conducting the war, they might have had more money to re-build it. That's just my opinion. As I said earlier I am more of a moderate. I am not pleased with the current conditions and the amount of lives lost. Because I disagree with the financial aspects and human lives lost, I give this book only 3 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Right, left, right, left.............
Review: I wasn't extremely familiar with Christopher Hitchens prior to the debate over Iraq. After hearing his defense of regime change, I went back and read as much of his work as I could and watched a number of his debates. Not being a party-line Republican myself, I found him to be all the more credible for shunning standard left/right affiliations and taking a stance based on reason and compassion. This book will be hated by the Left, regardless of the fact that time has thus far proven him almost incredibly correct.....so prepare to read typical one-star "he's irrational" reviews from those with predictable agendas. When I saw video of those American soldiers rolling into Baghdad to the cheers of Iraqi civilians, I couldn't help but wonder if Hitchens was smiling as broadly as myself. I'll bet he was. Buy this book and support columnists who have the fortitude to think for themselves.
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