The Hollow Man

"So it's tears now, is it? I've never known a man cry as easily as you do, father. What's my role now, to feel pity for you? Well bravo! Congratulations! You still have tears to shed. "
- Posthumous Agrippa to Emperor Augustus, I Claudius

"It's a bunch of goddamn shit if you ask me!"
- Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July

Christopher Hitchens has recently suffered a dark night of the soul.

21-year old Mark Daily from Irvine, California (literally born on the Fourth of July) joined the army to fight in Iraq. He was compelled by the moral arguments, specifically those penned by Mr. Hitchens, to fight for the freedoms of others. He died by IED on the 15th of January.

Having just returned from Iraq himself and in a "deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war," Mr. Hitchens wonders if he had "helped persuade someone [he] had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D."

On Daily's MySpace page, Mr. Hitchens found links to articles of his heaping scorn on all those who were neutral or opposed to the war in Iraq. It is impossible to avoid the thought that it was the scorn more than the principled argument that persuaded Lt. Daily.

The 400 lb gorilla in the room, of course, is the question of the role of propaganda in moral persuasion. War supporters and war opponents alike invoke strong, almost undeniable, moral arguments in favor of their position: democracy is good for the world, Saddam was a bad guy, bring the troops home, no blood for oil, etc.

Unfortunately, these overly simplistic equations fail to capture the reality of the situation.

Democracy is good, but it has to be nurtured not imposed. Saddam was a bad guy, but he's not the only bad guy in the area. The troops should be home, but being sent overseas is part of being a troop.

And no blood for oil? Please. Where, dear friends, do you think blood comes from? Turn off the spigot today and you'll see billions of gallons of blood spilled. Now, no blood for Haliburton, that I buy.

The question, therefore, is not whether there's a moral imperative to the US helping the Iraqis extricate themselves from tyranny and (now) civil war. Clearly there is. Not only do we owe them a historical debt, but they happen to occupy a part of the global chessboard that we simply cannot allow to fall, especially if we're interested in reducing global suffering.

But, the righteousness of our cause does not excuse the ineptness of our execution or the arrogance of our unilateralism. What is worth doing is worth doing right, and war was the wrong hammer to use on this screw, plain and simple. Opposition to the war is founded on this concept and not, as Mr. Hitchens' scornful diatribes would have us believe, on some perverse desire to see al Qaeda butcher the people of Iraq and impose Sharia law on the worldwide Muslim community.

To address the gorilla, Mr. Hitchens invokes the concept of "ultimate causation." Paraphrasing, suppose a drunk driver gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, takes a dangerous turn too fast and hits a jaywalker who was crossing the street to buy cigarettes. Who's at fault?

In a fit of self-pitying rationalization, Mr. Hitchens spreads the blame for the hypothetical accident and the real war. Is it the car manufacturer's fault? The drunk driver's? The jaywalker's? Should he have stopped smoking? Is it the city council's fault for leaving a dangerous road in place? How about the war? Is it the fault of the Ba'ath party? The UN? The first Bush Administration? The Rumsfeld Doctrine?

And then, in what pains me to say is the weakest tea Mr. Hitchens has ever served his readership, he dismisses all such hand-wringing to supposedly focus on what really matters here, Daily's life story.

Naturally. It is heartbreaking and well worth reading and I encourage everyone to do so, but frankly we cannot let Mr. Hitchens off the hook quite so easily.

The "grand, overarching questions," as he calls them do, I'm afraid, matter. This is the case Mr. Hitchens himself has been making for years and, on that score, he has been right. The why of war is at least as important as the what and the who.

Indeed, the choice of analogy here is quite telling. Mr. Hitchens has a reputation for enjoying alcohol and tobacco. In analogizing the Iraq war to a cigarette smoker being run down by a drunk driver, he has given us a peek behind the curtain of his moral case.

First of all, in the analogy as presented, the responsibility for the accident is indeed shared. The legal principle in question is contributory negligence. I congratulate Mr. Hitchens on finally hitting on the central dynamic of this conflict.

One should not jaywalk, but the fact of the matter is that cigarettes are legal and it matters little whether you're jaywalking for a pack of smokes or jaywalking to pick up insulin for your diabetic mother, one has the right to proceed in this world free from the fear that you're going to be run over by an alcoholic yahoo.

Moral righteousness straightens no roads, fixes no brakes and sobers no motorists. We are all responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. The moral tunnel vision that Mr. Hitchens and others have used in this argument has so misled us that we are now in a position where there are no good foreseeable consequences to any action we take.

But one thing we can do is admit and overcome our addiction to scorn. We must stop attacking each other's morality, motives, intelligence and patriotism, even if strong cases can be made.

From Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" to MoveOn's "Betrayus" (which in no way clouded the issue) to this moment, we must all learn now that words have power and moral commitment must be backed up by moral authority.

For better or worse, we are in Iraq and we cannot simply walk away. But the fact of the matter is that we must now earn the right to help the people of Iraq, so egregiously have we failed them.

Only in unison can we do this. Otherwise our house, divided upon itself, will inherit only windbags.

Jason says "hi, my name is Jason and I'm addicted to scornography."