IN OUR YOUTH OUR HEADS WERE FILLED WITH MUSH (via Tom Morin):

Cause and Effect: It's time to stop blaming the good guys for problems in Iraq (Christopher Hitchens, July 5, 2006, Slate)

The other night in New York, I was approached by someone who is very well-known (and justly renowned) as a novelist and a critic. He mentioned to me the recent kidnapping and hideous mutilation of two young soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. I was beginning to concur with his horror and disgust when he said abruptly: "How can you support a war like that?" For a moment, I truly did not understand what he meant. But in fact I knew well enough. It was just that the transition was so swift. In a sense, the subliminal message of every bombing and torture and beheading is—"now how do you like your precious regime-change?"

In this week's National Review, John J. Miller contrasts the current situation in Nicaragua with the Sandinista period and writes that Daniel Ortega "nationalized Nicaragua's economy, lifted its rate of inflation to roughly 30,000 percent, cracked down on dissent, inspired the Contra resistance movement …" Just hold it right there. I didn't much like Ortega then, and I like him even less now, but the contras were being organized by the CIA in camps run by the sadistic Argentine junta long before Ortega's Nicaragua had its first election. They were also led by elements of the previous dictatorship. I gave up my campaign to have the Iraqi thugs called contras some time ago, but I still wish it had caught on. Of course, as well as drawing on former Gauleiters, their ranks also contain the elements of a future religious dictatorship. But that doesn't much alter the case. (I was amused to find, reading a history of the period recently, that Gen. Francisco Franco's Catholic fascist and Islamist Moroccan forces in Spain were blandly called "insurgents" by the New York Times.)

Lest we be too hard on those today who would appease the Islamicists, it's nice of Mr. Hitchens to remind ius that in the last war he was on the side of the murderous deology and against the West.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2006 9:01 PM