We've seen how awful Christopher Hitchens' logic is before when he wrote about the Downing Street documents. Now he is proving yet again that if he did study any logic as part of his Oxford philosophy degree he forgot it the day afterwards.
Here he is, blethering (Scots word: babbling utter crap) for Slate about recent prominent and tragic accidental shootings of journalists by US friendly-fire in Iraq:
But the truly sobering reflection is that crimes and blunders of this kind are committed, in effect, by popular demand. It is emphasized every day that Americans do not want to read about dead soldiers. So it is arranged that, as far as possible, they will read (or perhaps not bother to read) about dead civilians instead. This is the price that a "body-bag" mentality exacts.
Did you get that? Talking about US casualties is why civilians get killed.
The problem is, he is saying that B follows A therefore B causes A - reversing causality. That horror at the number of US casualties causes the "rules of engagement" to be designed to minimise US soldier's dying and that then causes civilians to be killed in checkpoint misunderstandings.
It is always possible that he makes his error from a lack of research, though. He writes:
I have been very reliably assured that the British commander, Gen. Michael Jackson, has privately told his American counterparts that if they go on in this manner they will risk losing Iraq. I am not one of those Brits who likes to bang on too much about the superiority of English tact and restraint over Yankee brashness. And, though it is true that British-held Basra has got its pulse back much sooner than Baghdad and is displaying other vital signs as well, the task of keeping order in a Shiite majority city is clearly an easier one. Nonetheless, there must be something to Jackson's belief that soldiering also involves a degree of visible fraternization and a willingness to go on the streets with Iraqi police and civilians, rather than gesture at them from inside a space-suit or armored vehicle, and then shoot them dead if they don't get it right the first time.
This is hardly a new development. British military figures and the Iraqis themselves have been sceptical of US tactics of counterinsurgency from the get-go - when US casualties from the insurgency had not yet become a factor in public opinion.
It may be useful at this point to take a look back at archives of reports from the time to see that, in fact, US tactics were already harsh and in fact helped fuel a turnaround from being seen as liberators to oppressors by many Iraqis. Reports of British officer's unease over US heavy-handed actions have been uniform throughout the occupation - they simply do not fit with the successful tactics employed in decades of counter-insurgency operations around the globe. In April of last year, the rightwing British daily, the Telegraph, reported one British officer as saying:
My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.
Which certainly seems to fly in the face of Hitchens' faulty logic.
Maybe Oxford should ask for it's degree back.
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