RTWT

[phanatic]

Don't die, Hitch. The world will be a dumber place once you're gone.

Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani “capture” of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad. But not even I was cynical enough to believe that

Comments

[perich]

I like this, and I usually can't stand the Hitch when he waxes about the War of Terror.

But:

But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself.

Is "by" the right preposition there?

[achinhibitor]

Ah, but you're forgetting the good odds that someone in the Pakistani government betrayed Osama to us, also. I wonder what the payoff was?

[achinhibitor]

My response to this argument is, "There's no such thing as being TOO cynical."
-- Scott Adams, "The Dilbert Future"

Word

[dantheserene]

Certainly that is true in international relations.

[jordan179]

If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might at least have had some grotesque validity to it.

... and then Pakistan would have committed an unprovoked and extreme act of war against America, and we would have gone to war against Pakistan, and defeated her, and put her leaders on trial for war crimes. But at least Pakistan would have been brave, rather than cowardly. As things are, the Pakistanis are slapped around by both America and Al Qaeda.

The truly honorable and civilized thing for Pakistan to have done would have been to have turned on Al Qaeda from the start.