Christopher Hitchens: flickering firebrand.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Malone, Gary
• Date: 22 March 2005

His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal. His disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore intellectually and politically barren ... He advances bravely in the front rank of every witch-hunt. His blind hatred of his former ideal is leaven to contemporary conservatism. Isaac Deutscher on apostates, quoted in 'Third Thoughts' by Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, November 1987. (1)

In an offhand remark tucked away in a book review in The Nation many years ago, journalist Christopher Hitchens once averred: 'The real test of a radical or a revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies'. (2) Years later he was to famously leave The Nation over just such differences of opinion with the Left concerning every major political development that has flowed from the September 11 attacks. (3) In the immediate aftermath of the multi-storey immolations in New York and Washington, Hitchens unsheathed his pen and with it gored such sacred oxen as Noam Chomksy, Sam Husseini and, later, Tariq Ali. (4) Whether it is acknowledged or not, the seed of an apostate had been slowly germinating in him for some time. (He has dated--or backdated--his first rethinking of the morality of intervention in Iraq to the end of the Gulf War. (5)) The 9/11 cataclysm provided him with the necessary Grenzsituation in which to reveal his true credentials as a contrarian--specifically, that he would tolerate no nonsense even from fellow-travellers. Hitchens' apparent disgust that the Left had the nerve to continue to critique the 'larger issues' of US policy in the Middle East throughout this period provided him with what might, in the world of David Horowitz, be called his Betty Van Patter epiphany: in short, a moment of disenchantment (with the response to a violent attack) that quickly grew into a full-blown political apostasy.

If he is now, as the above citation seems to indicate, being true to himself, he is certainly not being false to no man. For in the years since, Hitchens, in attempting to excoriate the anti-war Left as essentially hypocritical, has himself contributed in no small measure to the bloated corpus of hypocrisy surrounding the 'war on terror'. In giving practical expression to his own definition of radicalism, he has done so only in the most lopsided way, abandoning serious scrutiny of the rulers with the worst possible timing and stigmatizing as 'soft on fascism' (6) friends and allies who critique them. When illusions and falsehoods (with very real geopolitical consequences) about WMDs and (now thoroughly discredited) Al-Qaeda links to Iraq were being promulgated with breathtaking arrogance by Washington, Hitchens chose to go along with them against all evidence to the contrary, and was characteristically nettled by people who did not see matters his way. Is the Horowitz comparison deserved? Has Hitchens become, as he once described Paul Johnson (who also made a 'much-advertised stagger from left to right' (7)), a man who, having lost his faith, believes he has found his reason? It is time to examine the apostate's progress.

Christopher Hitchens once possessed near-iconic status in the print media world. An Oxford-educated journalist who moved to the United States more than twenty years ago, he quickly became the darling of the Left, exhibiting a prodigious ability to skewer double standards and abuses of high office. Indeed, his pieces in The Nation and Harper's often exemplified Amira Hass' definition of the purpose of journalism: to 'monitor the centres of power'. Whether writing on the deliquescence of communism in eastern Europe, the tragic fate of Cyprus, or the machinations of Washington power-mongers, he was an insightful, learned and thoroughly entertaining literary pugilist. (He memorably described Norman Podhoretz as 'a moral and intellectual hooligan' (8); and a reading of Nixon's memoirs gleaned the lesson that 'the unlived life is not worth examining'. (9)) For me, two works stand out: No One Left to Lie To, his superbly reasoned polemic on Bill Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which, in one slim volume, he compiled a devastating indictment of a war-crimes celebrity and geopolitical gangster. So the question arises: why now defend George W. Bush personally and his Iraq invasion politically?

From a goulash of wobbly rationales and flat assertions, three main arguments, roughly overlapping, can be distilled from Hitchens' post-9/11 writings. One: the US confrontation with Saddam Hussein was a welcome development, long-postponed and unavoidable. Two: the intervention in Iraq is an important humanitarian one that at least partially redeems the previous depredations of US realpolitik, especially with regard to the Kurdish population. Three: Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

As with even the most disingenuous apologias, a slender thread of veracity runs through at least Hitchens' first two reasons for supporting the dauphin's campaign in Mesopotamia. But this thread strains to support the weighty baubles of contradiction which he dangles from it. Moreover, the vitriol that Hitchens pours upon critics of the Iraq war seems somewhat out of court for someone who openly agrees with them on the irrefutable history of Western interference in Iraq. Note too that the anti-war faction agrees with Hitchens on the turpitude of Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'ath regime. For them, it literally goes without saying. But because the obvious remained unsaid at the expense of broadcasting the rather more urgent message of putting a halt to the new imperialism, Hitchens has been able to score easy points by turning their silence against them, pretending that it is symptomatic of callous indifference to the fate of Iraqis (which the movement presumably signalled by turning out in unprecedented numbers to insist that Iraqis not be bombed).

During the course of this essay I will examine each of these arguments in turn, and their immanent contradictions. Firstly, however, it is necessary to briefly examine the contradictions that suffuse Hitchens' support for George W. Bush's administration.

Faith in Bush

One will note that this is not merely support but uncritical support. The conspicuous controversies which envelop the President and his cohorts constitute the elephant in the room which Hitchens has to squeeze past virtually every time he defends the war hawks in Washington. Anyone familiar with Hitchens' previous incarnation as an arch-muckraker will know that his full-throated support for George W. Bush (and coziness with Paul Wolfowitz et al) is a true metamorphosis, and nothing beautiful has emerged from the chrysalis. The current occupant of the oval office, freshly placed back in power by the ballots of biblical literalists, is just the kind of incurious dullard and venal right-wing warmonger whom Hitchens has spent much of his career railing against. One might imagine that Bush and the kakistocracy that enthroned its philosopher-king would be an intolerable offence both to Hitchens' intellect and politics, but this is not so. In an election-year interview on C-Span, Hitchens freely admitted that he would vote for Bush if he had a vote. (10) In an earlier C-Span interview he also admitted that the President exhibited 'that apparent lack of curiosity, that apparent inability to read for pleasure, that apparent want of intellectual weight' but then added that 'maybe that would be a positive thing ... maybe that would prove that anyone really can be president. Never let us forget ... it's supposed to be possible in this Republic for anyone to be the president'. (11) As everyone knows, the true nature of the American Dream, which Hitchens here mangles, is that a highly capable person ought never to be impeded by limitations of class from achieving greatness, the hackneyed example being Abraham Lincoln's journey from log cabin to White House. Bush's ascendancy, on the other hand--whereby a moneyed dolt was hustled into high office by his father's cronies and a fortuitously positioned brother--represents a kind of Presidential primogeniture, the triumph of class privilege over all strata of meritocracy, as well as over grammar. (12) But even if all of what Hitchens said were true, that still would not stop an educated fellow like him from at least hoping that the world's finest democracy could produce a leader who did not think that people from Greece were called Grecians and could name at least one President from a list of two of the world's nuclear-armed nations. (13)

Is it bravery or just embarrassment that induces Hitchens to defend George W. Bush on the weakest of issues and attack his detractors when the President is at his worst? Consider his apologia for a faux pas:

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. (14) Note that this passage accidentally admits to Bush's lack of statesmanship and charm. Note also the author's betrayal of his own writings on Bill Clinton. Having devoted an entire book to pillorying the former President as a war criminal and rapist, Clinton now apparently has 'charm', and all this in defence of an even worse president.

Moreover, Hitchens attempts to portray his support for the Republican oligarchy as some sort of conscience-driven ideological sacrifice. 'I decided some time ago that I was, brain and heart, on the side of the "regime change" position', he wrote in March 2003. (15) Noting in the same paragraph that New York Times writer Thomas Friedman had 'finally...