Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 01:43:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Regarding Hitchens ... In response to our Hitchens discussion I did a small amount of googling on Hitchens on Iraq. First of all, while I have no particular knowledge of the North Korean nuclear situation in the 90s, Hitchens's ad hominem statements about Hans Blix appear to be a canard. Here's an example: http://www.markdanner.com/orations/show/112 (middle of the page) (a Hitchens/Danner debate from Jan 2003, before the invasion) Hitchens says that Blix "certified" that the North Koreans were in compliance with the non-proliferation treaty, when in fact more or less the reverse appears to be true, so far as I can tell: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kim/etc/cron.html It is important to realize that Hitchens was not alone in his attacks on Blix. At the time, though Blix and his work was effectively ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media, in right-wing circles he was repeatedly and viciously vilified, apparently for no reason other than his failure to find what the war's proponents wanted him to find. (William Safire in the NY Times called him "see no evil Blix".) At any rate, in the same debate with Danner, Hitchens also says > There is no ground to assert that were Iraqis or Kurds to rule themselves > there would be chaos; that they might need a permanent occupation." There could be no more straightforward a statement than that, and it is one that has been shown by subsequent events to be resoundingly, catastrophically incorrect. The fact is, Hitchens lacked (and continues to lack) the expertise to opine on these matters, and yet he brayed with the braggadocio of so many neocons. If you read the rest of the debate, you see that Hitchens was possessed of equal prescience on lots of other matters Iraqi: > I havent used the word war all evening. There will be no war, but there > will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention to remove the > Saddam Hussein regime, long overdue. As the disaster unfolded, Hitchens (and, to be sure, other supporters of the invasion) continued their shrill attacks on those who opposed the war. Even those who simply presented data contradicting what he wanted to believe were subject to charges of bias, perfidity, or worse. Thus, in 2004 when a scientific report by Johns Hopkins professor Gilbert Burnham and others was published in the British medical journal The Lancet claiming that there had been 100,000 deaths caused by the war, Hitchens referred to it as a "crazed fabrication" and "politicized hack work of the worst kind". (http://www.ladlass.com/archives/010171.html middle of the page). He is, of course, not a statistician, so his surety that the work was wrong cannot be based on any actual analysis of his own - and his use of these terms to describe the researchers is based on nothing. (At the time, the report was actually dismissed even by organizations such as Human Rights Watch, as you can see in this article from the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html ) And thus, when in 2006, another, larger and more systematic study by Burnham et al (also published in The Lancet) found that as many as 650,000 people may have died since the invasion, Hitchens's response http://www.slate.com/id/2151607/ was filled with half-truths and evasions. First, he claims that "The figure [of 654,965 deaths] is both oddly exact and strangely imprecise", thus proving that though he felt qualified to write on the study and its meaning, he had not read it. This is not surprising, as virtually no one in the blathering class actually reads the scholarly studies they discuss. This is sometimes excusable, as these reports are filled with technical details that require training to assess. Of course, in such a case, a commentator should proceed with caution. Hitchens does not, and his statement is actually quite a howler, as any undergraduate in a science course would know. As one would expect, the report gave a range for the numbers of deaths. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html?ex=1318219200&en=516b1d070ff83c15&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) (I should state for the record that haven't read the report either, as I don't have a subscription to The Lancet and it isn't on their web site. I note that I have no opinion whatsoever about the study's methodology or validity, but knowing just a bit about how these things work, I know that they would have never reported a figure in that way. Moreover, I find it odd that the NY Times stated that the authors "acknowledged" that there was a margin of error, as though they were forced to some sort of grudging admission. But then, the poverty of the science reporting in our media is never surprising.) Then, Hitchens proceeds to make an ad hominem swipe at The Lancet itself ("And it's been noticed that Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the magazine, is a full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition.") revealing that he knows little about the role of an editor of a scholarly journal. (The editor doesn't generally select articles, nor change their wording, but oversees an independent refereeing process.) The title of his article is "The Lancet's Slant" - though he adduces precisely no evidence other than this quip that The Lancet has any role in this at all other than the recipient and publisher of a submitted paper. (To be fair, it's possible that Hitchens didn't choose the headline for this article. Sometimes headlines aren't chosen by columnists.) One should also note that in Hitchens's article, the statements of the study are attributed to The Lancet, rather than following the conventional and correct practice - quoting the study's authors who are actually responsible for them. Presumably this is not because Hitchens doesn't know the names of the latter, but rather because Burnham can't be attacked in these terms. This is a clever propagandist tactic. The core of Hitchens's argument regarding the study is this paragraph: > If the cause of all this death is "the war," does that mean that the > coalition has killed nearly 700,000 Iraqis? Of course it means nothing of > the sort. Indeed, if you look more closely, you will see that less than > one-third of the surplus deaths are attributed, even by this study, to > "Allied" military action. Grant if you wish that this figure is likely to > be more exact, since at least the coalition fights in uniform and issues > regular statistics. That leaves, according to the Lancet, a pile of > corpses nearly half a million high. Here, the cause of death becomes > suddenly less precisely identifiable. We are told that 24 percent of the > violent deaths were caused by "other" actors, and 45 percent of them by > "unknown" ones. If there is any method of distinguishing between the > "other" and the "unknown," we are not told of it. This demonstrates again that he hasn't read the work in question - he makes a claim that is preposterous on its face: that the terms "other" and "unknown" weren't defined by the researchers. If he were in fact truly interested in what the researchers did or didn't report, the Lancet article itself would have been the place to start, and if he didn't understand it he could have lifted the phone and spoken to someone who did. Instead, he hinges his argument on a misunderstanding of the work. (As it turns out, unsurprisingly, "Other"="not the coalition", "unknown"="not determined". For more discussion of this, see this blog posting: http://unspeak.net/some-percentage/) Thus, those who actually know what they're talking about are the "moral idiots" of the subtitle. (By the way, if you are interested in some backstory on these studies, there were two shows on NPR's This American Life on them. You can listen to them here: http://www.thislife.org/Search.aspx?searchFor=lancet) I harp on these studies and Hitchens's response to them because they go to the core of *his* argument about why we should have gone to war in Iraq: that the human rights situation there before the war was atrocious and it was our moral obligation to invade to rectify it; the action would be short and cause few casualties; afterwards the Iraqi people would live in improved circumstances. If the Burnham et al studies show that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct result of the policies he advocated, some sort of straightforward, plain acknowledgment of that outcome is required, correct? Intellectual honesty requires at the very least confronting the world as it is and not how you want it to be, and admitting when you were wrong about something. Then, if you are honest, you can learn and move on. You say the words "Mark, Hans, you know what? You were right and I was wrong". I believe that our discourse in this country is so impoverished because editors persist in giving voice to people who are little more than good writers with opinions. Hitchens is just one example - I could name plenty of others. They write articles on matters they have no understanding of, make categorical statements about issues they don't have the background to discuss, and feel comfortable writing entire pieces about scientific studies they haven't read and can't understand. And, as in Hitchens's case, they cheerlead us into war, while calling those of us who merely ask the right questions "moral idiots". They can be wrong over and over and over and over, and yet (and quite unlike people with a history of conspicuous failure in any other career) they never lose their jobs. Nice work if you can get it for them, too bad for the rest of us. - Mitch