Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008

Falling Hawks

By Jonathan Freedland
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, with an afterword by Christopher Hitchens

New York University Press, 365 pp., $70.00; $22.95 (paper)

The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom
by Martin Amis

Knopf, 211 pp., $24.00

The 'war on terror' inaugurated on September 11, 2001, and its mutation into the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 certainly divided political conservatives, with gung-ho neocons on one side and old-school realists on the other: Paul Wolfowitz versus Brent Scowcroft or, for those who prefer their feuds domestic, George W. Bush versus his father. That argument on the right, however, has been positively mellow in comparison with the debate among liberals and on the left, where the politics of the post–September 11 era, and especially Iraq, has sundered old alliances, forged new ones, and triggered soul-searching defections and recantations on a scale last seen a half-century ago, when progressives were forced to take sides on communism.



Review, 4666 words

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