Christopher Hitchens Dies

[Zinzan]

Originally Posted by Black_Warrior

There are too many.. His whole take on the Iraq war to start with... his take on Awlaki killings...I have no issues with people supporting the Iraq war, or supporting the way Awlaki was killed..problem with Hitchens was was he tried to intellectually justify them..and that is where he fell flat because you cannot intellectually justify those actions.

You can if there's a greatest cause which for Hitch was a war of ideas. He saw these dangerous theocracies as the enemy, therefore what may appear to be hypocrisy was generally the lesser of two evils.

[Agent Nationaux]

This freedom of Iraqi civilians bull**** that you are citing only came about once the WMD theory fell flat.

More than half a million people dead according to the lancet. Did Saddam actually do worse?

Our close friends are Iraqi. They escaped Iraq because of Saddam, but according to them he was better than what's happening now. Did Hitchen's know more about the ground realities than Iraqis themselves, because that's always how he came across, as if he knew more than the actual people who were there.

[silentstriker]

You are simply disagreeing with him though.

Just because you disagree with those, it does not mean that those positions are intellectually unjustifiable, which is the point.

[Agent Nationaux]

More than half a million dead and that's intellectually justifiable because apparently it's the lesser of two evils.

[silentstriker]

Originally Posted by Agent Nationaux

More than half a million dead and that's intellectually justifiable because apparently it's the lesser of two evils.

Yes. You can disagree with that, and so can I, but that's not intellectually unjustifiable. You are confusing two issues.

[Agent Nationaux]

I don't think I understand you. Is there some theory on justification that I haven't read?

If Hitchens justified it on the basis of the war being the lesser of two evils, why should we take his word for it. Should we not look at empirical evidence to decide whether it was the lesser of two evils or not. Death tolls, GDP, Iraqi opinion polls would give us information to decide whether the Iraq war was justified or not.

[L Trumper]

Yeah, But people try to justify their ideologies,actions with this greater good concept all through the history. Whether it is intellectually honest or dishonest is never the point.

[Uppercut]

Originally Posted by Agent Nationaux

I don't think I understand you. Is there some theory on justification that I haven't read?

If Hitchens justified it on the basis of the war being the lesser of two evils, why should we take his word for it. Should we not look at empirical evidence to decide whether it was the lesser of two evils or not. Death tolls, GDP, Iraqi opinion polls would give us information to decide whether the Iraq war was justified or not.

Hmm, empirical evidence gained after the fact needs to be used pretty carefully when judging whether someone's action was morally justifiable or not. Ideally you shouldn't use any information that they didn't have when they made their decision.

I agree with you on the subject, fwiw. There are plenty of fairly sound theoretical justifications for humanitarian interventions but I'm yet to read one that can really be applied to Iraq. Some level of competence in those carrying out the invasion and occupation is always assumed and the US quite emphatically didn't have that. I'm not really having the argument that the invasion itself was morally fine and the real problem was that the Americans just did it really badly. Not knowing how clueless an inexperienced American administration would be at rebuilding a middle-eastern country basically amounts to criminal negligence.