Visitors to Christopher Hitchens Watch may speculate why the contributors have not created a David Horowitz Watch or a Dick Cheney Watch instead. The answer is that the former has never possessed talent and the latter has never demonstrated virtue. I sense that the contempt that the contributors have for Hitchens has arisen from their spectacular disappointment in him. Indeed, the journalist’s career since 9/11 has been nothing but contemptible. The best way to challenge the Hitchens we all despise is to examine the man we all once loved.
In order to understand Hitchens’s support for the invasion of Iraq, we must comprehend his opposition to the previous Gulf War. His early pieces in The Nation magazine are truly a treasure to read, and they contradict all the positions that he has assumed since his ideological surrender to the right wing. On September 17, 1990, Hitchens ridiculed the justifications made by the United States for its occupation of Saudi Arabia: “The young men and women who find themselves pitchforked into a prelethal standoff in the Saudi desert had been given little by way of instruction, aside from the usual ahistorical stupidities about Hitler and Munich.” Incredibly, the author of this witty and penetrative line has now popularized the destructive and ahistorical expression “Islamic fascism.”
In the days leading to the Gulf War, Hitchens understood that Saddam Hussein actually had a case against the emirate of Kuwait. As with the rest of the Middle East, Iraq had fallen victim to European colonialism decades before. “When the British drew the borders, they did so with the specific intention of denying Iraq access to the sea, and thus of making it more dependent on Britain,” Hitchens pointed out in an article dated October 1, 1990. Even a former advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could acknowledge this, and Hitchens helpfully quoted him:
"In the Iraqi subconscious, Kuwait is part of Basra province, and the bloody British took it away from them. We protected our strategic interests rather successfully, but in doing so we didn’t worry too much about the people there. We created a situation where people felt they had been wronged."
Despite the strain of the situation, Hitchens recognized that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait did not make American military intervention inevitable. In fact, diplomacy among the Arabs could have prevented the war entirely. After the war, Hitchens mournfully noted the rejection of Algerian peace initiatives. “At an early stage Algiers had sent its Foreign Minister to Baghdad and arranged terms of mutuality – an Iraqi commitment to leave Kuwait if the army was not attacked from the air or the land after doing so – that have formed the basis of all subsequent proposals,” Hitchens wrote on March 11, 1991. A pledge from Washington to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict could have further resolved matters. After all, the Israeli expansion into the Palestinian territories was also a process of aggression. Unfortunately, as Hitchens reported, the Algerian president “was denied the chance to land his plane in Saudi Arabia and was cold-shouldered in all his efforts to visit Washington.”
Since his conversion to neoconservatism, Hitchens claims to have undergone a moral epiphany. In the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war, Hitchens said later on BBC Radio, he found himself a passenger in a jeep driven by two Kurds. He asked to them remove a photograph of Bush the First that had been taped to the windshield.
The Kurds responded that “without his intervention, without the umbrella in Northern Iraq, that we, and all our families, would be dead.” Hitchens suddenly “realized that co-existence with the Saddam Hussein regime was not longer possible. And that was in 1991.”
Interestingly, Hitchens presents a different version in his vastly overrated memoir, Hitch-22, which leaves one to wonder if either is true. “Without your Mr. Bush,” the Kurds responded somewhat less articulately, “we think we and all our families would be dead.” Hitchens writes that he “it seemed increasingly obvious to me that Saddam was not a rational actor, did not understand the elementary business of deterrence and self-preservation, and for that reason remained a danger, as psychiatrists phrase it, both to himself and to others.” The blogger Dennis Perrin has provided his own perspective on Hitchens’s alleged encounter with the alleged gratitude of the Kurds: "He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the…quote is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush’s “mad contest” with Saddam, much less opined that “co-existence was no longer possible.”
Perrin was a personal friend, so Hitchens had no reason to misrepresent himself in these private, presumably alcohol-drenched moments.
I have listened to this program, most of which is boringly dated, but the relevant comments begin at 01:24:00. A caller asked Hitchens to place himself in the position of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Would Hitchens have overthrown Saddam Hussein? Hitchens’s reply indicated his belief that Hussein was neither psychotic nor a threat:
"…If you wanted to make a stand against Saddam Hussein, the time to do it would have been in ’87 when he began his campaign of genocide in Kurdistan. And those of us who did try to raise that subject at the time found that to the contrary, Iraq was flavor-of-the-month in Washington. Saddam was our great ally Iran, and the build-up that led to the invasion of Kuwait began then. These are things that a Schwarzkopf can do nothing about. In other words, by the time you’ve got to that stage, you’re basically having a war between former business partners, and that means they are not going to finish each other off, because they may need each other again."
If Washington had the best interests of the Kurdish people at heart, it would have cut off all aid to Iraq in rapid response to the chemical attacks. Principled pressure would have saved lives Kurdish lives. Moreover, Hitchens did believe that co-existence with Saddam Hussein was possible, contrary to present claims. Otherwise, he would not have envisioned future collaboration back in 1993. The international community essentially disarmed the Iraqi dictator after the 1991 war. Since Hitchens knew that Hussein’s actions before his disarmament did not warrant military intervention by the United States, he certainly knew that it was unjustified afterward. In fact, Hitchens still privately expressed doubts in 2002 that Hussein was a threat, telling Perrin that “W. could have to convince him on ‘about a zillion fronts’ before he could sign on” to another war. By this point, Hussein presented a far weaker strategic challenge to the international order. Therefore, Hitchens’s decision to endorse the second Iraq War was calculated and insincere. He has betrayed his own moral code to advance himself, but ironically, the courage and defiance of the peoples of the Middle East have now rendered his amorality irrelevant.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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