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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:37
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I'd say it's not worth reading again (having read it three times now). It seems like Hitchens watched a different movie from what I watched.
Last edited by chegitz guevara on 27-06-2004 at 00:26
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Verto
So, his article has no valid points? |
Actually, no.
The first three paragraphs are mere rhetoric.
quote:
In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. |
OK - so this is Hitchens' view of that debate.
quote:
In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. |
Ya know what, I agree with Moore.
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This was, he said, the American way. |
It is.
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The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. |
Notice that Moore does not say it was completely unjustified. All he's saying is that there should be some proof before you invade a country – sounds good to me.
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Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. |
Wha?!? We know a lot more now than we did then. I certainly do.
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Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion. |
Not quite what Moore has been saying.
quote:
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:
1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group. |
Yep – they had business ties with the Saudis and Bin Ladens. )Whatever these ties were, they are much more credible than ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq).
quote:
2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States. |
No ****.
quote:
3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests. |
I don't think anyone disputes this.
quote:
4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape. |
That's true. I thought they went about it the wrong way.
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5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American. |
That's just funny.
quote:
6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.) |
That's true. The Iraq fiasco has effectively wiped out any gains that were made against Al Qaeda.
quote:
It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. |
Then why didn't the US attack Saudi Arabia, the chief funders of Al Qaeda and a regime that made Saddam look good?
This misses Moore's point. He is out to show that Bush tried to hide or suppress his ties to the Saudis and was not frank with the American public about the Saudi role in financing terrorism. After all, everyone knows that the censored material from the commission's report was all to do with the Saudis.
I don't think anyone disputes that it has become much more difficult for Bush to accommodate the Saudis, but Moore doesn't make the strong claim Hitchens has him make.
quote:
As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) |
So.... notice that this doesn't seem to jibe with the "points" listed above.
quote:
Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. |
There are two different claims here. One is about the justice of the Afghan war, the other is about the effectiveness of that war. One might retort – if you were going to kill a lot of people for little or no gain against the terrorists, what was the point of the war?
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If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. |
No – you would have had to send more troops and fight a real war instead of taking a few cities and leaving rampant anarchy everywhere else.
quote:
And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. |
Did they have a functioning army at the time of the Iraq invasion? Is their new army independent of the US? I think not.
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I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal. |
So he admits that Moore is possibly right about the pipeline. The other point is beneath contempt. Surely many Iraqis and Afghans didn't like Saddam or the Taliban. I'd imagine their support is highly conditional towards their own goals. For god's sake Osama Bin Laden supported American sponsored regime change in Afghanistan in the 80s.
[qupte]He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights.[/quote]
Of course, no one else might have a problem with this. As Moore says, the American public would have had a problem with it if it was reported at the time.
Imagine the Sept 14th headlines "Bin Laden's family on special flights out of the US: thousands of Americans still stranded at airports".
quote:
And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies." |
Moore doesn't dispute this. But the fact is that Clarke is not the President. Moore says that the administration Oked the flights. Clarke was part of the administration. If you don't think that it was right for the Bin Ladens to be allowed special flights out of the country, then you care about this matter irrespective of who organized it. And Bush was Clarke's boss – the buck stops with him, irrespective of what Clarke says.
Hitchens also complains about Moore accusing Bush of taking too many holidays before 911. Well I remember that there were rumblings throughout the press about this. But hey, when you can pillory Moore, who cares about the rest?
He goes on about how Moore's claim that Iraq never attacked any Americans is false. But you show me where Saddam's government deliberately attacked Americans. Some Americans may have been in Kuwait during the invasion, and Saddam may have had dealings with anti-Israeli fanatics who may have killed Americans in their anti-Israel jihad, but none of this is deliberate targeting of Americans. That's what Moore is talking about, as is plain from the context of the film.
The one point he does have is that Iraq targeted US warplanes flying above Iraq. But hey, they were flying above Iraq and conducting illegal attacks on Iraq.
He accuses Moore of citing ridiculous intrusions due to the patriot act and then citing the lack of police protection against terrorists as if this was a contradiction. It isn't. In the one case he is complaining about a bad law which allows violations of civil liberties and in the other case he is complaining about lack of personnel to enforce the laws which don't.
Moore also jokes that big tobacco might be responsible for the fact that people are allowed to take a large number of matches and butane lighters onto aircraft. I don't know whether he is right, but the scandal is that anyone is allowed to take these things on at all – particularly when a woman wasn't allowed to take breast milk onto a plane.
The rest of the article basically repeats this trash, posing either/or questions where there are none.
A hatchet job...
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Jon Miller
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I qon't see it
because it is over 2 ****ign hours
and I dont' like movie theaters that much
on the plus side, one of my southern frinds (who always votes republican (wellt he few times he has voted) is now thinking that he won't vote at all
Jon Miller
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26-06-2004 23:21
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