Christopher Hitchens’ appearance on the Daily Show was a disappointment—largely because Hitchens seemed to be half in the bag, and Stewart kept stepping all over his words trying to make them funny, and the short format was not to the favor of a fellow who tends to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs. So how about a half hour interview with an alert Hitchens, with an interviewer who’s interested in hearing what he has to say, and gives him the opportunity to speak at more length? Here’s Hitchens on the Charlie Rose show.
Much better, even if I disagreed strongly with Hitchens on much of what he said.
More than half of the interview is taken up with discussing the Iraq war. I agree with Hitchens’ assessment that an important nation in the Middle East is on the road to destruction, that it is going to be a failed state, and that by pulling out we diminish the power of the US in the region. I also agree that it is a great tragedy, and that leaving Iraq will mean many of our supporters will die. Where I disagree, though, is that Hitchens thinks the war was inevitable and necessary, and that the US did the right thing by invading. I say we sowed the seeds of defeat when our government decided the appropriate response was to invade with crushing force, and make Iraq a treasure chest to be looted by military contractors. The current ongoing debacle can be blamed directly on the credulous boosters for war as a prerequisite for nation building, of whom Hitchens was one.
The last half is a discussion of his new book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I haven’t read it yet—my copy is supposed to arrive this next week—but I’m looking forward to it, and there’s some hope from this interview that it will be a solid piece of work. This part of the interview was much less contentious than the first half, I thought — I’d be curious to see what a Christian pro-war Republican would say, though.
Richard Dawkin’s web site also has a video of Hitchens being interviewed by Lou Dobbs. It’s a good interview as well.
http://richarddawkins.net:80/article,977,Lou-Dobbs-Interviews-Christopher-Hitchens,Lou-Dobbs-Tonight-CNN
Picked it up in a bookstore yesterday. I’m enjoying it. A lot. That guy can write.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4 in Books.
Availability: Usually ships within 7 to 12 days.
The atheistic onslaught continues! Hooray!
I say we sowed the seeds of defeat when our government decided the appropriate response was to invade with crushing force, and make Iraq a treasure chest to be looted by military contractors.
That, and treating them like animals. I was shocked when I first saw the videos of the Guantanamo prisoners being paraded around with bags over their heads. It didn’t really seem to bother anybody else though for some reason. And then there were the videos of the soldiers teaching the Iraqi people how to build stuff. Awwwww, the nice soldier people with guns are teaching the quaint little Iraqi people how to build stuff. Awwwwww… how quaint.
Hitchens would have still defended the Iraq war as “the right thing to do” even if it had lead to World War III and the obliteration of half the human race. He takes a page from his friends in the Bush administration: never admit a mistake.
As for his new book, I hope it has a strong impact, but I feel no need to contribute to his author royalties.
I dearly hope that Hitchens’s book does wonderfully and it expands the ranks of the godless. That said, I can’t avoid but think that his support for the Iraq disaster, as well as his continued support for his neocon friends and his inability to see how horrible the Bush presidency has been, make him an asshole. He’s obviously not an drooling idiot, so he must have such a self-centered core and vulnerable ego that he can’t admit he could have been totally wrong in his initial support for the Iraq invasion. I have no other explanation.
Pity… Rose spends most of the last half sucking up to his guest and talking meta questions (what a review said, how do you pick your book topics, I always have you on the show…) One wonders is Rose perhaps a bit nervous about getting into the actual substance of Hitchen’s book?
Not at all satisfying and Charlie Rose seems a phony.
I agree with RoySV: they barely discussed the content of the book. Hitchens had to try to wedge in anti-religious statements throughout the discussion of Iraq just to connect it to his book. If I were Hitchens, I’d be disappointed to not have had the chance to get into the content of the book.
The segment was as if the new book was an excuse to have him on to talk about things generally–mainly the war–than to discuss the book. I’ve seen the Daily Show interiew and now this on this book, and other than what is known from the subtitle of the book (“religion poisons everything”) I haven’t learned much more of Hitchens thoughts on the matter. Which is a shame, but I also wonder, is there anything really new to be said in favor of atheism, or is this latest “Atheist Brigade” of books more like musicians playing the blues: it’s the same song over and over, and the interest is just how you style it?
(I apologize for my inability to use the word “it” in that last post instead of each time using the word “book”. what is wrong with my mind today?)
Stewart kept stepping all over his words trying to make them funny
Interviews by Jon Stewart irritate me for this reason–he’s constantly interrupting his guests. Why invite someone on your show if you’re not going to let him or her talk?
Justin – thats because he usually interviews vapid celebrities who couldn’t fill out an interesting discussion without careful prompting, and even then would be boring if the host didn’t make fun of it.
But yeah, when somebody with an interesting idea comes on, it would be nice if he’d cool it and let the guest speak.
But hey, its a 22 minute comedy show, its not the BBC’s “HardTalk”
We went in with enough force to take over the country, but not enough to keep it from falling apart. It’s arguable whether we would have been able to hold it together even with a lot more troops, but in any case we didn’t even make an attempt. It was truly a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.
In any case, it’s brave of Hitchens to title his book with a direct negation of the battle cry of Islam.
Charlie Rose also needs to shut up more of the time. He often butts in and steps on his interviewee’s words, often unnecessarily.
Richard,
I agree with you the execution of the Iraq war has been a mistake. And the lies told by the Bush administration as justification for the war was an even bigger mistake. However, I still can’t find fault with Hitchen’s basic stance that society should take a very aggressive stance with psychopathic regimes who commit major human rights violations. At least more aggressive than pointless UN resolutions and sanctions that lack any real bite or authority we currently use to fight these regimes.
I think it’s important to seperate the mistake the Iraq war has turned out to be from the idea that we should therefore do nothing when we see gross violations of basic human rights because we aren’t sure what the results will be.
It seems more than half of the interview was Rose talking on top of Hitchens. Most of that lost and extremely irritating. Why doesn’t Rose let that guy have his say?
Not bad for a functional alcoholic. Better than I could do after a pint of Dewar’s. However, he seems to be rehashing a bit of Dawkins and framing it with his geo-political background. A different twist perhaps?
May I ask: Everybody is saying what a disaster it’d be if (when) we pull out, but can someone tell me what are we accomplishing by staying in Iraq? {and for how long}
While you’re at it, see if you can find a copy of “The Missionary Position”, Hitchens’s very thorough dissection of the career of Mother Teresa. She comes out looking like a spiritual vampire, not so much interested in actually helping the poor as keeping them around where she could more closely observe their holy suffering. A good read.
That’s the first time I’ve seen Rose (he’s on at incovenient times in my market) and I sure don’t see how he got a rep as a great interviewer. He’s in love with the sound of his own voice.
So how about a half hour interview with an alert Hitchens . . .
I think he’s normally like that. I’m very much looking forward to this book, but do I feel that Hitchens could improve his media presentation no end. There’s a sort of arrogant cutting across the other guy which does him no favours really. And it’s all very well Hitchens saying that we should keep Tony Blair – he doesn’t have to live over here!
Of course not only are we blessed with Blair in the UK, but also with Peter Hitchens (brother) who was still flirting with “Intelligent Design” nearly a year after the Dover trial (see here and here). There’s obviously a real tension between the brothers – might be worth enquiring about it if you ever get the chance.
There are excerpts from his book on Slate.
He’s growing on my as regards his atheism, but I still utterly bemused by his position on the Iraq war. Is it pure intertia? He just can’t change his position on it? It really bugs me, but he is a great speaker.
Like a lethal quick witted combination of Dawkins and Harris, I’ve seen and heard him eviscerate quite a few theists, he rarely fails to deliver.
PZ: “I say we sowed the seeds of defeat when our government decided the appropriate response was to invade with crushing force, …”
The US did not use crushing force, but more like a rapier thrust that could achieve the easy objective of taking Baghdad and ousting Saddam but not the harder one of establishing order in the wake of the invasion. Saddam had recognized that his armed forces couldn’t stand up to the Americans in a conventional fight, so he planned to fight a diffuse battle for the cities and towns with dispersed security troops and weapons and ammo stores throughout the part of the country he controlled (i.e. not including Kurdistan). The US forces actually used could smash any Iraqi resistance that came out into the open, but were not numerous enough for the kind of infantry fight and patrolling they’d have needed to establish continuous control of the urban areas of Iraq against Saddam’s irregulars. The result of the US going in with uncrushing force (to validate Rumsfeld’s theory of ‘the Revolution in Military Affairs’ and against the advice of the military and the US Army War College who had considered the problems involved for years) was that it left large numbers of armed members of the regime running around and huge deposits of weapons available to anyone who wanted to seize them, because the US simply lacked the troops to make any significant effort to locate and round up the irregulars and the weapons. The result of that, plus the failure to assure the Iraqi military, including republican guard, regulars and security forces they still had jobs, was that you have today’s Iraq awash in weapons and explosives with every faction and militia armed to the teeth. Try Cobra II for a military account that, despite not focusing on the political debacle, still paints a devastating portrait of strategic incompetence.
If the US was to invade at all it had to be in the kind of numbers the pros wanted, 250,000 – 400,000 from the start, instead of the 15,000 Rumsfeld wanted and the 140,000 or so they went in with initially. That might, but only might, have given the US the numbers needed to impose real order out of which something better than a failed state or Shia theocracy might have come.
Of course, the real seeds of defeat were found in the US selection of 2000 that put in charge a bunch of chickenhawks bent on becoming the war heroes of their fantasies (i.e. without having to put their own lives or those of their own children, on the line) and a president who prided himself on relying on his gut instinct when he had no experiential basis for any gut instinct for foreign policy or military affairs. With the Bush regime in place, the only way to avoid disaster in Iraq was to not invade in the first place. Unfortunately, with the Bush administration in place, an invasion of Iraq was all but inevitable and 9/11 gave Bush the media sycophancy and the warmongers the confidence to make an invasion of Iraq inevitable.
He’s growing on me as regards his atheism, but I’m still utterly bemused by his position on the Iraq war. Is it pure intertia? He just can’t change his position on it? It really bugs me, but he is a great speaker.
Like a lethal quick witted combination of Dawkins and Harris, I’ve seen and heard him eviscerate quite a few theists, he rarely fails to deliver.
“I think it’s important to seperate the mistake the Iraq war has turned out to be from the idea that we should therefore do nothing when we see gross violations of basic human rights because we aren’t sure what the results will be.”
There are two big problems with using war to attend to human rights abuses: 1) war itself is a human rights abuse that kills and maims people and destroys the material resources needed to keep them alive and healthy; and 2) as a tool, war is like a sledgehammer head mounted on a flexible handle – you might be able to get it going initially, but after it first hits, god knows where it will go next and what it will destroy. As things have gone, the invasion has caused something on the order of 650,000 excess deaths over what was going on under Saddam.
I don’t say that military force ought never to be used against evil regimes or projects (the Rwandan genocide might have been stopped short by relatively small forces for instance) but that the uncertainties of war and its inherent destructiveness mean it should be a last resort. Among the differences between Rwanda and Iraq were that the death rate in Rwanda in 1994 during the genocide was much higher than that of Iraq under Saddam in 2002 – the big death tolls there had been during the Iraq-Iran War (when the US was propping up Iraq) and in the aftermath of the uprisings (encouraged then abandoned by Bush1) following the 1990/91 Gulf War. The horse was gone and using war to close that barn door has been a pretty predictable disaster.
I respect Hitchens in a lot of ways, but he is so confused about Iraq! Hitchens states that the U.S. “cannot coexist with psychopathic, totalitanarianist regimes,” but the U.S. has made yet more deals and partnerships with totalitarianist regimes to wage this war in Iraq! And what about North Korea? China? Are we going to take them out, too?
I agree that we have responsibilities to the Kurds, at least. Honestly, Hitch, you know that a withdrawal is not a true withdrawal, right? The UN has to step in; France and Germany, which have more experience with guerilla wars, must step in. And excuse me, the U.S. didn’t have a “God is Great” rationale for the war? Am I the only one who heard all the “Now we can expose them to Christianity” hosannahs at the beginning of this war and throughout it?
Has anyone read Sidney Blumenthal’s account of Hitchens during the Clinton years?
I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to trust Hitchens ever again.
He’s growing on me as regards his atheism, but I am still utterly bemused by his position on the Iraq war. Is it pure inertia?
There seems to be a great deal of contrariness in both Peter and Christopher Hitchens. They both started out as Trotskyites I believe, with Peter ending up as a slightly quaint conservative Christian, while Christopher who still “resonates to Marxism” has managed to ally himself with the hawks on Iraq. I think that his position is fairly contrived, but he’s obviously not going to let it go. The trouble is that as Iraq becomes increasingly unstable, Hitchens will become ever more entrenched and may not sound like such a voice of reason after all.
His book is obviously a must read, but by far and away my favourite atheist is Sam Harris, once famously described by PZ as a “dingbat”.
Iraq is not being looted, the US treasury is being looted. The money that pays those no-bid contracts comes right out of my pocket and yours, not from Iraq.
-jcr
That’s not it. I don’t speak Arabic, but I’ve read the word in question is a comparative, “greater”. Compare the “proof” of God by Anselm of Canterbury.
That’s not it. I don’t speak Arabic, but I’ve read the word in question is a comparative, “greater”. Compare the “proof” of God by Anselm of Canterbury.
Oh, now.
The fact that Hitchens is willing to jump into bed with this particular administration, against all reason, given their political decision to hand the country over to the worst fringe factions of the religious right, and sees no contradiction in justifying a disastrous war in terms of fighting, um, people who are doing exactly the same things to their governments in the name of different religion, suggests to me that his opposition to religion is merely rote bullshit contrarianism.
There is an honest argument to make against the merger of religion and government. I often make it. Government-sponsored religion makes a mockery of both government and religion.
Hitchens has proven beyond a reasonably doubt that his arguments aren’t honest, and he doesn’t believe them.
I call bullshit.
Hitchens talks about his admiration for Trotsky…the nun killer as Martin Amis calls him…and the ethical glories of Marxism.
Hitchens is a fool.
“Hitchens is a fool.”
I would say that Hitchens is in much the same league as Sam Harris. A smart man and brilliant rhetorician who has a bizarre attachment to some profoundly daffy ideas.
His latest schtick appears to be lionizing the Kurds as an example of what Iraq “could have been” if all went well. That is a talking point being resorted to by the war apologists en masse, and it would be great if the Kurdistan wasn’t already a gangster state engaging in the same ethnic cleansing and thuggery as their counterparts in southern and western Iraq. The recent incident with Dr. Kamal Said Quadir hardly exists in a vacuum, and Arabs and other non-Kurds are being forcibly expropriated from oil rich regions of their territory (e.g., Kirkuk). The only reason Hitchens and the other apologists overlook the dark side of post-war Kurdistan is that these particular gangsters form an offensive front against our regional enemies.
And I don’t get Hitchens logic that the dire and unintended consequences of reckless adventurism and meddling overseas can be remedied by more interventionism and meddling. It appears to be the conceit of every generation of warmongers that their war is going to fix everything.
Hey since this is an interview thread, just to let you guys know, Jonathan Miller was on PBS, on the Bill Moyers show. It was an excellent interview, make sure to catch it on PBS, but it’s also on bit torrent.
This is an excerpt, which I found utterly delightful, coming from such a guy. They’re talking about what awes people, and he says:
Then he goes on to explain that simple everyday things inspire him, and then this gem:
That was awesome. Transcendental cabaret, what a great way to define religion.
And then there were the videos of the soldiers teaching the Iraqi people how to build stuff.
Well you know, the poor things have only around 6000 years of experience of building cities, it’s only proper that they get a little help.
It’s odd to see my fellow Pharyngula readers arguing (albeit gently) about whether we went into Iraq with enough force or not, or what we could have done to hold it together, etc.
The interesting thing about Iraq is that it’s a case in point of the kind of damage that religious woo-woo inflicts. What was holding Iraq together was a tyrant. As soon as he was out of the way (for whatever reason) the sh*theads were able to go back to killing the stupids and vice versa, over whether the prophet’s son in law should have taken over after he ascended to heaven or whether it should have been left to a committe. Remember – these “sectarian debates” have been going on for hundreds of years; the only significant difference is that they now have AK-47s instead of knives.
This was the country where the first thing that its intelligent inhabitants did, once the tyrant was gone, was march en masse to a holy site while slashing their heads open with knives. The rational inhabitants of the country went off to loot the museums because it beat a head-wound and there was stuff there that was worth something.
The obvious point Hitchens failed to make was that Iraq is proof positive of what happens when you try to build a country out of two opposed groups of woo-woo heads.
mjr.
I’m an unabashed fan of Hitch. Not because I agree with him all the time! But because he’s willing to say what he thinks and he doesn’t equivocate. In that sense, I see him as a sort of British Henry Rollins. :) And, as many of you have pointed out, he *can* speak and he *can* write. Like most complex and intelligent people he’s got a full spectrum of opinions and thoughts – the reason to listen to people like Hitch is because they’re interesting. If you want to be a ditto-head and listen to people who you agree with 100% then stick with people who think nothing or who toe a rigid party line.
Why can’t we have a president who can speak as well as Hitch does even with a pint of Dewar’s in him? Wouldn’t that be nice?
mjr.
By the way, Slate has a few extracts from Hitch’s book. If you want a sampler of what it’s all about, check out:
http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165038/
http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165039/
The way he skewers mormonism is delicious…
“…In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being “a disorderly person and an impostor.” That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or “necromantic” powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the “Book of Mormon.” …”
I am a fan of Dawkins but I think he’s too polite and too rational. Someone who’s unafraid to point out that the founders of these cults were conmen and mountebanks gets *MY* $19.95. As I’ve said elsewhere – arguing with the faithful doesn’t make them smarter and probably doesn’t help you, either. Laughing at them is more likely to be effective. Go Hitch!
I think the reason many of us can’t convince ourselves to take Hitchens seriously, and the thing that leads him to some of his ridiculous ideas on Iraq, is that he thinks of religion of someting other than the symptom of a human psychological sickness.
To say that Islam or Christianity or any other religion has the power, on its own, to drive people to such brutality is to give religion too much credit. People will do what they want and will justify it using whatever religious book is close at hand.
He doesn’t seem to understand that if we were to, say, give every Iraqi man a stable job and the promise of safety and relieve them of their desperation, the impulse to extremism would fade and people, whatever their religion, would probably settle down again. Of course, it’s too late for that now.
Attacking the religion of a man with a gun to your head is probably a bad idea, but addressing the underlying circumstances that have led him to extremism might help.
You can see the flipside of this phenomenon in the US today. Plenty of people are religious, but few have extremist tendencies. It’s because they’re well-fed and content, not because American Muslims or Christians or Jews are somehow different than their old-world counterparts. In fact, it seems to me that the wealthier and better-educated a country is, the less religious it is. Scandinavia’s secularism is no accident.
He doesn’t seem to understand that if we were to, say, give every Iraqi man a stable job and the promise of safety and relieve them of their desperation, the impulse to extremism would fade and people, whatever their religion, would probably settle down again.
That’s true, but only up to a point. Religion is inherently divisive and is taking a terrible toll on the Middle East. Of course better economic and social conditions would improve matters, but then they would anywhere. I tend to think that, if anything, it is a failure to appreciate the inherent problems posed by religion which has led to the disastrous outcome we now witness in the region.
Hitchens has just made the wrong call on Iraq, but can’t back down now. We’ll pull out eventually, Iraq will descend into chaos, and he will go on saying that we lost our nerve and could and should have stayed the course, and if only we had all listened to him . . .
If I kept going on TV so obviously sloshed, I hope my friends would pull me aside and talk to me about getting help for my obvious alcohol problem.
I’ve never seen an interview with Mr. Hitchens where I didn’t think he looked like a drunk guy trying really hard to act sober while ordering his 11th drink so the bartender doesn’t cut him off.
That didn’t come off with quite the tone I intended. Oh well.
Does anyone have a link to the google video page for this video? I’d like to sit back and watch it fullscreen, but can’t find it when searching.
It’s here.
Tom, I think that’s about right, even if not intended. I do hope the book tour doesn’t descend into a series of embarrassing incidents.