Taking Sides

I suppose I can just about bear to watch the “inspections” pantomime a second time.

Christopher Hitchens

Appointment in Samarra?

How would people be discussing the issue of "regime change" in Iraq if the question were not being forced upon them by the Administration?

Christopher Hitchens

Hijackers I Have Known

I have met three hijackers in my life, and I hope I do not sound crabby and disillusioned if I add that the standard of hijacking is not what it used to be.

Christopher Hitchens

Macbeth in Mesopotamia

Concerning the impending or perhaps imminent intervention in Iraq, we now inhabit a peculiar limbo, where the military options are known while the political and moral options are not.

Christopher Hitchens

Tinkering With the Death Machine

The essential case for the abolition of capital punishment has long been complete, whether it is argued as an overdue penal reform, as a shield against the arbitrary and the irreparable or as part of the case against "big government."

Christopher Hitchens

A Second Gilded Age

Would it be too early to sense a sudden, uncovenanted shift against the corporate ethic, if ethic is the word? I can barely turn the page of a newspaper or magazine without striking across either some damaging admission, or at least some damage-control statement, from the boardroom classes.

Christopher Hitchens

Oslo or Helsinki?

The pervasive assumption among nearly all of Oslo’s proponents was that the undemocratic nature of Yasser Arafat’s regime, far from being an obstacle to peace, was actually a strategic asset.

Christopher Hitchens

Knowledge (and Power)

Christopher Hitchens

The Real David Brock

When incurable liberals like Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman begin using the name Whittaker Chambers as a term of approbation, we are entitled to say that there has been what the Germans call a Tendenzwende, or shift in the zeitgeist. The odd thing is that they have both chosen to compare Chambers’s Witness, a serious and dramatic memoir by any standards, to a flimsy and self-worshiping book titled Blinded by the Right, by David Brock.

Christopher Hitchens

Single Standards

Nothing is more to be despised, in a time of crisis, than the affectation of "evenhandedness." But there are two very nasty delusions and euphemisms gaining ground at present. The first of these is that suicide bombing is a response to despair, and the second is that Sharon’s policy is a riposte to suicide bombing.

Christopher Hitchens