Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War
Entry 10:
Slate turns 10 this week, and to celebrate the anniversary, we've dug into the archives and resurrected a few favorite pieces. Some of the pieces come from The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology, which was published this month. Others, including this piece, we chose because they highlight what Slatecan do as an online magazine that print magazines, newspapers, television, and radio can't. These pieces mix media, promote interactivity, show off the conversational immediacy of the Web, or otherwise take advantage of the medium. You can see a list of all the republished pieces, as well as everything else related to the anniversary, here. This dialogue was originally posted Jan. 12-16, 2004.
George Packer's dispatch relieves me of the need to deal with Paul Berman's salvo. He makes the same point I would have, plus three or four others, all of them more elegantly. Let me follow up on a point George made with a question, aimed specifically at Paul and Christopher, but that anyone should feel free to pick up: What do you make of Jim Risen's front-page story in today's New York Times, reporting that, before he was captured (but after he went into hiding), Saddam Hussein wrote a directive to his insurgent-followers, urging them to stay away from the foreign jihadists who were coming in to battle the Americans and who, S.H. apparently emphasized, had incompatibly different goals and motives?
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Paul Berman is the author ofTerror and Liberalismand The Passion of Joschka Fischer. Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and most recently the author ofLongitudes and Attitudes. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate and is the author ofThe Wizards of Armageddon. George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where his article about the occupation recently appeared. He is working on a book about America in Iraq. Kenneth M. Pollack is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, ofIn an Uncertain World. Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International and the author ofThe Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.