A reader who was at the debate last night on leaving tyrants be (or not) emails me:
It was a very good debate, highly intelligent and with very little of the usual ranting. Skidelsky and Luttwak were very good indeed, most impressive, but in the end the vote went against them handsomely. Bottom line - there are times you must intervene.An online poll at the site is showing 76.3% against the motion - that 'Tyrants should be left free to tyrannise their own people' - 21.1% for it, with 2.6% 'don't knows'. (Also there last night, I'm told, were Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan.)
The same reader reports:
I stayed up till 2.30 listening to the Galloway vs Hitch debate. Amazing stuff. Hitch won by a mile. I was afraid he would blow it, but he didn't.See the posts at D-STP and Harry's. In the comments box at the latter, there's this quotation from Hitchens on Galloway:
He turns up in Damascus! The man's search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends! The Soviet Union's let him down! Albania's gone. The Red Army is out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The hunt persists! Saddam has been overthrown and his criminal connections with him have been exposed! But onto the next! [...] To tell the Syrian people they are fortunate to have such a leader. The slobbering Dauphin who they've got, because he was the son of the slobbering tyrant who came before him! How anyone with a tincture of socialist principle can actually speak like this is beyond me and I hope far beyond you and beneath your contempt.Well, quite. Another commenter at Harry's confirms, in almost identical terms, what my own informant said to me:
The debate was framed as being for or against the Iraq war. I can see why there would be many who left there having not changed in their opposition to the war, but I think many must also have had their view of Galloway as the little man who stands up to tyrranical senators badly shaken. Hitchens slaughtered him. GG was pure demagogue.I look forward to catching up with the debate at a more social hour.
