Hitchens - Danner debate at Berkeley --

Has Bush made us safer? Journalists debate U.S. security in the aftermath of the Iraq war



By Bonnie Azab Powell,
NewsCenter |
05 November 2003



BERKELEY – The question of whether President George W. Bush has made Americans safer hinges on whether the United States was justified in going to war with Saddam Hussein in the first place. That was one of the few points on which two respected journalists, Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner, agreed in a heated debate Tuesday night.




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Danner also took issue with Hitchens's somewhat contradictory representation of Saddam's power, in which one scenario was that the dictator was getting ready to pass his oppressive torch to his two sons. The other scenario, suggested by Hitchens, argued that the Iraqi regime was weakening and was about to implode, which would have drawn in Iraq's neighbors Turkey and Iran and resulted in a situation where the U.S. also would have been forced to intervene. "I'll leave it to you to decide whether these two arguments cited in quick succession makes sense next to one another," Danner said. "Seems to me he was either getting stronger or he was getting weaker."

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"The question is whether an embrace of idealism frees us from having to look at the consequences of our actions," Danner said. "The steps between fighting a war for democracy and actually installing a democracy were not thought through. The choice is not between democracy or fascism, it’s between stability and chaos."



That chaos, he argued, will not be contained in Iraq in the foreseeable future. While it rages, it has left the United States in the form of its soldiers as well as its citizens much more vulnerable to the very terrorist threats that the war was ostensibly supposed to quell, said Danner.


http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/11/05_debate.shtml

Has anyone ever heard of this rationale for the war -- "the other scenario, suggested by Hitchens, argued that the Iraqi regime was weakening and was about to implode, which would have drawn in Iraq's neighbors Turkey and Iran and resulted in a situation where the U.S. also would have been forced to intervene." Is Hitchens smoking crack or is his hypocrisy and inconsistency finally making his brain melt. Poor Christopher -- it's hard when beautiful theories get taken down by things so mundane and ordinary as facts.

threats, I think Danner won the argument!