Under Iraq

Slate is a low-grade metamorphic rock of foliated texture, composed of minute mica flakes and formed at relatively low pressure and temperature. Slate is used for many things including paving stones, which make an ideal hiding place for worms, grubs millipedes and other invertebrates. Slate is also an on-line magazine that publishes people like Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens’ take on last weekend’s anti-war rally in Washington is that the entire movement is composed of "phony peaceniks" because the two sponsoring groups he credits for the entire event are, according to “one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well,” United for Peace and Justice and International Answer.

International Answer, says Hitchens, is: “the group run by the ‘Worker's World’ party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the ‘resistance’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda.”

United for Peace and Justice is likewise impugned through an unspecified connection with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and the Worker’s World Party:

“. . . the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary.”

Of course he managed to connect Michael Moore with these “phony peacenik” groups as though to put another plum in the pudding and of course he relies on the standard practice of telling you what they will say and then condemning them because the words they haven’t actually said come straight from Chairman Mao.

I’ve been through it all before and so have the dwindling generations that were adults during the Viet Nam years and remember the same stupid arguments. The gravamen of Hitchens’ argument is not the false identification by association, but the fact that his rabid diatribes are meant to distract us and hide the significant point that the nation now has turned against Bush’s war, a majority believing that we were deceived about the purpose, lied to about the cost and mislead as to the possibility of any of the goals or the time needed to carry them out. We have been robbed and cheated; we have been tricked into selling our freedom, our sons, our daughters, our wives and husbands and all for the profit of a few. The majority of Americans now believe this and it’s not because they sleep with Jane Fonda, go bowling with Michael Moore or even know who Leon Trotsky was.

Regardless of how many secret motivations and sordid connections anyone there on the street may have had, it was the voice of the majority out in the street in Washington. We did not lose the fight to press an unwanted government on Viet Nam because of Jane Fonda and the hippies and we are not stymied in our efforts to press an unwanted government on the Iraqis because of Michael Moore, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong or anyone else in Christopher Hitchens’ pantheon of demons. This is George W. Bush’s war, based on George W. Bush’s lies and George W. Bush’s propensity to ignore good advice while listening to war profiteers.