The last point of Hitchen's "positive accounting... offered without braggartry":

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

I thought things were getting strange when we declared "war" on a tactic of war -- i.e., terrorism -- which always struck me as near to saying "If you don't stop killing people at random to get your way, we'll kill you!" (see also the anti-war slogan from the '60s: "Fighting for peace is like .... for virginity")

Now Hitchens would have us take up arms, literally, against philosophy.

I wonder: How many servicemen and women (outside of a possible few teachers and profs in the National Guard and Reserves) have even heard of nihilism and absolutism, let alone know what they mean? (I have no shame in confessing my own need to look up "nihilism".)

Yes, I do understand that US foreign policy during and since WWII has always professed to be anti-absolutist -- on a selective basis, with full regard to expediency and the axiom that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as long as I keep paying him to be so..." I might even be tempted to consider the Cold War as a war against the poltical/economic philosophy of communism, if I had not grown up during it and had not been indoctrinated in the idea that it, too, was a continuation of America's role to fight tyranny in all forms (except those friendly to us; see above).

How many servicemen and women, I wonder, are aware that they're being trained to fight ideas with bullets? If they were told, how many might pause to reflect upon the non-American nature of that mission?

How many of them, when they come home, might find absolutism encroaching from within their own country?