The left defense of Hitchens gets off an early salvo in Jefferson Morley's kind but soggy "Hitch The Apostate" over at Salon. After some pedestrian reminiscing about the good old days of their friendship, Morley moves in on Iraq: "He made a stupid mistake. He supported a war that was a disaster for the people it was supposed to help." These may excused as the sentimental words of a former friend; Morley does not approach the venal extent of Hitchens's "honest" support of the war: his pep talk to the Bush White House on invasion eve, his slap on the back to Haliburton, his cheers for the torture and show trail of John Walker Lindh, etc. In a desperate effort to shield Bush and Cheney, Hitchens even wrote a memorably stupid piece equivocating the perfectly understandable term "chicken hawk."
Less forgivable is Morley's swallowing whole the passage of "Hitch-22" where Hitchens hid behind the fallen American soldier who had sited him as an influence. "Some might say that Christopher was a warmonger who had helped send this person to a meaningless death. But if the young man's parents did not think so, how could anyone else?"
As I pointed out at Hitchens Watch when "Hitch-22" came out, this rancid passage more than any other signaled Hitchens's moral bankruptcy. Taking a passage the soldier had quoted, Hitch explained how intellectuals could never understand the need for the invasion of Iraq the way the man in the street could, and that was his bond with the dead young man.
Yet Hitchens had no word for the men and women of the street when shock and awe rained down. All he could do was brag that he knew more about the invasion's incompetence of execution then we did. If he even looked at the suffering that incompetence produced, or how that suffering will continue well into our still new century, all he could say was "Yea Haliburton!"
“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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