Meet Hitch and Sully

I caught Tim Russert's CNBC show last weekend. He appears to have stolen the set and the demeanor from Charlie Rose, with guests chatting quietly against a black limbo background. Much like Russert's idea of "balance" on Meet the Press (which usually consists of William Safire against a "liberal" parrot with a 70-word vocabulary), Russert had on a couple of "politically independent" guests, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens. It's really sad to see Hitchens have to twist himself into intellectual knots to defend the bungled imperialism of the Bush Administration. At heart, his notion is that this is a clash of civilization, and that radical Islam should be crushed (whether or not it's at the service of radical Christianity). But even I was stunned by his assertion that "even if the current Administration doesn't believe so, this is a war of secularism." In other words, despite the fact that this is the most fundamentalist Christian Presidency, perhaps, in history, despite the fact that the wall between church and state has never been shakier, despite the fact that this President has said on numerous occasions that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to everyone," despite the fact that the President has described this as a Crusade, despite the lack of all evidence for his assertion, Hitchens calls this a war of secularism, and then buttons it up by basically saying "it is so, even if those fighting it believe it is not so."

Hard to argue with that kind of logic. Maybe because the logic doesn't exist.

Anyone that doesn't think this War on Terra is a war of competing religions, of the Judeo-Christian system of beliefs against the Islamic system of beliefs, is deluding themselves. Our Constitution has far too many links to Judeo-Christian law for us to act independently of it. In a way, that's the whole problem. To change course in Iraq would be to deny one's own faith, at least to this President. Faith is all that's keeping it going: faith in democracy, faith in freedom, faith in the essential character of man. And never has faith been more blind. Same with Christopher Hitchens.