We weren't planning to say much about Christopher Hitchens' latest gloatfest in Slate, and then decided to confine our comments to Slate's own electronic discussion forum, The Fray(TM). But with neo-nonblogger Andrew Sullivan having provided an approving nod to Hitch's piece, we'll revise and extend our comments here. The article notes the lack of recent references to the notion of the "Arab street" as something that might act as a constraint on Dubya's Greater Middle East Co-Prosperity Sphere (we know we're lifting that appellation from someone but we can't remember who).
But with his trademark laziness, Hitch never supplies any actual instances of someone ever using the term "Arab street," let alone someone who has since dropped it. Not that he's likely to have even tried, but one possibility is that a Google search only provided a bunch of Fouad Ajami articles, and of course Ajami was always insightfully cynical about the concept. As opposed to Hitch's brand of neo-colonial cynical.
Anyway, we're already distracted --- Hitch concludes with a call for "clarity of language" and yet provides two weird usages in the article:
... the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future ...
Where Hamas has done well in local elections in Gaza, it has been due to grass-roots welfare and social policy as much as to intransigent anti-Zionism ...
Note the first implication that the Kurds aren't Iraqi, so Hitch should tell us if breaking up Iraq was always part of the plan. And then that strangely qualified description of Hamas as anti-Zionist, and not the more obvious anti-Israel. So good Hamas provides public services and even bad Hamas is against something easily cast as an expansionist philosophy, Israel only for the Jews, but not specifically against Israel. In fact, Hitch's nods and winks to a dismembered Iraq and a non-Zionist chunk of land between the Jordan river and the coast reminds us of something.
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