I don't know how I contrived to miss this in yesterday's Guardian, but I did - a letter from Salman Rushdie responding to the Terry Eagleton piece I posted about here. Rushdie writes:
[A]llow me... to take issue with Terry Eagleton's description of me as someone who has been "cheering on [the west's] criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan"... As to Afghanistan, it is true that I, in common with many others, not all of them on the right, and many of them in the Muslim world, believed that the hold of al-Qaida and the Taliban over Afghanistan needed to be broken. Eagleton may be the kind of "radical" who would prefer those fascist, terrorist gangsters to have retained their hold over a nation state, but that is his problem, not mine.He goes on to explain how his attitude to the Iraq war was different. But I post this excerpt to highlight that the very reasons Rushdie gives for his support of the invasion of Afghanistan (i.e. not wanting 'gangsters' to retain their hold over a nation state) also applied for many in the case of Iraq - and, as the man says, 'not all of them on the right, and many of them in the Muslim world', including in Iraq itself. I make the point, not to suggest that there were no considerations on the other side of the question, for there were, and not against Rushdie himself, but merely against those on the left, like Eagleton, who have cried apostasy.
(I came to Rushdie's letter via Oliver's post on this, which I urge you to read. As for what Damian has to say here, he is of course perfectly entitled to a different view of Eagleton's work from mine. His suggestion that I haven't been paying attention, however, is gratuitous.)