Bin Laden Free - via Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens might be ill but he has lost none of his expertise with words.

Only today I was muttering to people at work that we British tax payers (and the same applies to residents of other 'fortunate' nations) are facing cutbacks in our own country but we are funding the governments that harbour terrorists at the usual rate.  Or perhaps, innocently, they accidentally failed to notice notorious terrorists who were hiding like cowards in pleasant towns in Pakistan while sending their foot soldiers out to die for the cause.  (OK the Bin Laden free wall is beginning to crumble.)  And at the same time they are innocently developing nuclear weapons to fire at another country that deserves little support from the west - namely India.

Two people assured me today that I didn't understand international politics and that we need allies around the world.  Apparently the way to get allies is to pay them obscene amounts of money.  Do you get friends that way?  Or do you get friends by doing things that they respect and by expecting equality?

In his latest article in Slate, Hitchens expresses many of the views that I was just beginning to form in my own mind.  Read it, and if you disagree with his views I would love to see your comments.  Just one extract is presented here as a taster.

"There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state."