Christopher Hitchens There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan. As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. An article on his book, written by the excellent James Risen for the news pages of the New York Times, has not run. This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan. 2008-06-04T00:27:25Z http://www.slate.com/id/2192696/ indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens It was for the sake of real oil and for the grim-faced Saudis that Saddam Hussein was kept as a favorite by Washington during the 1980s and saved from overthrow in 1991. It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque. 2008-06-02T03:38:52Z http://www.slate.com/id/2081707/ indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam's fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras. 2008-06-02T03:31:40Z http://www.slate.com/id/2081707/ indiemaps indiemaps Eric Rodenbeck A typical project, he says, takes one to three months to build. "A month to figure out what to do, a month to build it, and a month to make it good." 2008-05-14T23:08:33Z http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/07/rodenbeck-speakers-corner indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens (on Palestine) “Their cause has been compromised and cheapened,” he says. “I’m still with them. But the Palestinians used to produce democrats and campaigning journalists, people in the Bahrain parliament calling for women’s rights. No more. They’ve lent themselves to Hamas and Syria and Hizbullah, and identified themselves with the most rotten dictatorships in the region.” 2008-05-13T02:45:47Z http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10157 indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. 2008-05-12T18:50:13Z http://www.slate.com/id/2191193/ indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens But I did notice that those who do think they've got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they're pre-capitalists. Marxism at least has a theory of development and innovation. And global capitalism now seems to be the only thing that is revolutionary. That's my Marxist way of looking at it. 2008-04-25T23:37:40Z http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10157 indiemaps indiemaps Sean Gorman In a GeoWeb where self publication is a key innovation the model of having a full time metadata guru is antiquated. A specification with 335 elements is antiquated. The mantra that “certainly if there is no pain, there will likely be no gain” when it comes to metadata is antiquated. The end result of these draconian approaches to metadata is about a zero likelihood the GeoWeb will adopt them. 2008-04-02T00:31:50Z http://blog.fortiusone.com/ indiemaps indiemaps Jerry Seinfeld [ He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day ] After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. 2008-03-22T12:21:49Z http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php indiemaps indiemaps William Saletan Everything Bush wrongly attributed to Iraq turns out to be true of Iran. But we can't confront Iran with the force it probably requires, because we wasted our resources in Iraq. Americans, having been suckered in Iraq, won't accept evidence of Iran's nuclear program. Countries that might have supported us in a strike on Iran won't do so now, since we led them astray. Our coffers have been emptied to pay for the Iraq occupation. Our troops are physically and spiritually exhausted. In the name of strength, Bush has made us weak. 2008-03-20T17:50:52Z http://www.slate.com/id/2186955/ indiemaps indiemaps Christopher Hitchens The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say "attempt" rather than "do," which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice." But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something. 2008-03-19T00:40:11Z http://www.slate.com/id/2186740/pagenum/2/ indiemaps indiemaps Kanan Makiya I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. 2008-03-17T23:11:40Z http://www.slate.com/id/2186763/ indiemaps mikeashley indiemaps