Looking at Rumsfeld quotes on wikipedia, I was struck by how he and
Christopher Hitchens seem to echo one another. Take this, for example:
Rumsfeld: "(Cluster bombs are) being used on frontline al Qaeda and
Taliban troops to try to kill them is why we're using them, to be
perfectly blunt."
Hitchens: "If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a
concentration of enemy troops . . . then it's pretty good because
those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the
other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran
over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't
be able to say, "Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess
what, the missile stopped halfway through." No way, 'cause it'll go
straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words."
The latter is something more than "perfectly blunt", of course.
Hitchens' rather revoltingly misapplied enthusiasm for the power and
effectiveness of high-tech weaponry is reminiscent of a schoolboy
talking about who would win in a scrap between Batman and Optimus
Prime.
What struck me about "By golly the people who've been denigrating the
Iraqi security forces are flat wrong" is that it's a distinctly
Hitchensian rhetorical move, although the register and tone are
different. Here's what I wrote about it before I wrote the poem:
> But what a classic example of "framing", right there. Actually quite Hitchensian in its use
> of the language of boyish admiration to make criticism of the effectiveness of something
> sound snarky and noxious, an act of denigration rather than of evaluation.
> As if to say: I was so *blown away* by this that it's quite beyond me how anyone could
> even *contemplate* a nuanced assessment of the situation - I mean come *on*, aren't
> you just *feeling* it?
Hitchens will tell you something like, "if you've seen at first hand,
as I have, the tremendous courage and dignity of the Kurdish
Peshmurgas, then you will no longer be impressed by the insinuations
of those who would have us believe that [insert straw man argument
here]". And, well, there's no arguing with that, is there?
Dominic
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