(2002-02-06) f

Hitchens vs Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens vs Peter). Christopher says, "I don't regard Islam as the enemy, I regard Religion as the enemy" - but Peter reckons a big problem with the West's war on Terrorism is precisely its lack of a strong religious-based ideology capable of challenging the beliefs of the Taliban... Christopher also has a problem with "terrorism" - the word, that is, not the phenomenon. Peter might relish in his "firm, consistent" opposition to terrorism "in all its guises", but Christopher sometimes can't bring himself even to write the word down - describing the "use and abuse of the word terrorism" as traditionally "a way of criminalising the left and revolution"... Then there's the problem that Christopher doesn't think that everything lumped under the term terrorism is always such a bad thing: "I am so strongly of the opinion that we should have forced a Palestinian state 20 years ago and that many of those who fight for such a state are right... he says that one of the big problems with describing the Taliban and AlQaeda as "terrorists" is that it doesn't go far enough - the word just doesn't capture what he calls "the true horror of that regime". "To call this terrorism is actually to understate it, bizarrely enough. Terrorism used to be an overstatement, used to write off certain groups. Now it's an understatement for what I would call an Islamic version of fascism."... The problem for Peter is that imperialism just ain't what it used to be. "I'm an imperialist", he says, unapologetically. "I think the imperial era, when Western European powers, and to some extent America, seized territory and governed it, was an enlightened period which did a great deal more good than harm. But I think that playing around with countries, intervening in them, setting up temporary Heath Robinson regimes which then allow you to depart and permit a decent interval before they collapse, is dishonest, cheap and shallow - and I'd rather not intervene at all."