If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened.
The most heartening single image of the past month—eclipsing even the bravery and dignity of the civilian fighters against despotism in Syria and Libya—was the sight of Hoshyar Zebari arriving in Paris to call for strong action against the depraved regime of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. Here was the foreign minister of Iraq, and the new head of the Arab League, helping to tilt the whole axis of local diplomacy against one-man rule. In May, Iraq will act as host to the Arab League summit, and it will be distinctly amusing and highly instructive to see which Arab leaders have the courage, or even the ability, to leave their own capitals and attend. The whole scene is especially gratifying for those of us who remember Zebari as the dedicated exile militant that he was 10 years ago, striving to defend his dispossessed people from the effects of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons.
Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family? As it is, to have had Iraq on the other scale from the outset has been an unnoticed and unacknowledged benefit whose extent is impossible to compute. And the influence of Iraq on the Libyan equation has also been uniformly positive in ways that are likewise often overlooked.
Recently, Christopher Hitchens has cancelled speaking engagements at SUNY-Stony Brook and Colorado State University. When Slate magazine announced that Hitchens would go on leave in order receive radiation treatment, I decided to interview an oncologist who is a friend of mine.
I must make it absolutely clear that the oncologist has never treated Hitchens. In fact, he has never even heard of the writer. Of course, I have never met Hitchens, either. Based on my limited knowledge, I simply described Hitchens’s illness and treatment to the physician. In June of 2010, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The doctor explained that esophageal cancer comes in two forms. The first type is adenocarcinoma, which is mostly related to acid reflex. A condition known as Barrett’s esophagus can be a precursor to this cancer. When I told the doctor that Hitchens has the second form of esophageal cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, he said: “That is clearly linked to alcohol and smoking.” Although smoking alone is linked to esophageal cancer, “the combination of smoking and alcohol increases the risk further.” Hitchens Watch readers who would like to learn more about esophageal cancer should consult Dr. Sugar Singleton’s educational videos, which were helpfully posted by Greywolf in September of 2010.
Anyway, I explained to the oncologist that Hitchens remained relatively active during his chemotherapy. Now that the journalist has embarked on a course of radiation treatment, he has withdrawn from public life. “It is not a good sign,” the oncologist said.
When Hitchens received his diagnosis, he was already at Stage 4. As he pointed out in his famously blunt manner on C-Span: “There is no Stage 5.” In January of 2011, FGFM posted this latest C-Span appearance on Hitchens Watch. Hitchens’s discussion with Brian Lamb covered his health extensively.
Let us turn back to my own brief interview with the oncologist. He explained that when a patient receives a diagnosis of Stage 4 esophageal cancer, chemotherapy is administered for palliative rather than curative purposes. In fact, there is no cure at this stage. The median survival rate is less than a year. By shrinking the tumor, chemotherapy can control pain and relieve difficulty in swallowing. Thirty percent of patients, or slightly more, respond well to chemotherapy. In rare cases, patients can even live as long as two years, but even they cannot be cured. “The tumor starts growing again several months after chemotherapy is completed,” the oncologist said.
Since Hitchens has now resorted to radiation therapy, I asked the doctor if the journalist’s condition has worsened. “That is a likely scenario,” he said. Like chemotherapy, radiation therapy is a palliative procedure. Chemotherapy has likely proven ineffective for Hitchens, so his physicians have turned to radiation therapy for the same reasons: to control pain and ease swallowing. “There is also a possibility that the disease has spread,” he said, adding that in some cases, the cancer spreads to the bone. Of course, Hitchens acknowledged to Lamb that the cancer has already metastasized to his lymph nodes, and perhaps even to one lung.
I asked the physician to estimate how long Hitchens has to live: “Less than six months.”
Mark, since I respect your contributions to Hitchens Watch so much, I would like to respond to your contention that the old work of Christopher Hitchens was shallow and unoriginal. I would also like to thank you for Edward Herman’s article, “Toward a Homeland ‘Favorable Climate of Investment.”
I agree that the deep analysis furnished by thinkers such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky contrasts sharply with the superficiality of Christopher Hitchens’s 1990 book, “Blood, Class and Nostalgia,” which I had coincidentally been reading when you recommended it to me (I have no interest in reading the revised 2004 version, “Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship). Hitchens is a journalist rather than a historian, so he would have done better to focus on the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, supporting his conclusions with original reporting. He wasted too many pages on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as you argue, relied too much on the historical scholarship of others.
Nevertheless, I insist Hitchens did some brilliant reporting in the past. His journalistic collections, “Prepared for the Worst” and For the Sake of Argument” are sparkling gems. Unlike “Blood, Class, and Nostalgia,” Hitchens’s book on Henry Kissinger is based on considerable primary research. His two chapters on Chile rest on his analysis of recently declassified documents, which proved extremely helpful in my own research on the assassination of Chilean General René Schneider. Moreover, I do not believe that any scholarship reliant on the new Chile documents had been published at the time. You cannot tell me that “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” did not help my own research if I know that it did.
Since his conversion to neoconservatism, as you point out, Hitchens has attacked Herman and Chomsky for their systemic criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Before his betrayal of his leftist colleagues, however, Hitchens did engage in systemic criticism himself. As a Socialist, he had the ability to see patterns, a comprehension that he has now lost. His criticism did not stop with Henry Kissinger. He condemned the Gulf War as well as the Vietnam War as imperialist ventures. He also made clear his disapproval of Reagan’s Central American interventions. Hitchens devoted special attention to Henry Kissinger because he believed that the newly declassified documents made the war criminal potentially vulnerable to international prosecution. When British journalist William Shawcross asked Hitchens why Kissinger should be singled out from other ruthless practitioners of realpolitik, Hitchens responded:
“Why do most school productions of Henry V leave out the bit where Shakespeare puts in King Henry’s massacre of the French prisoners at Agincourt, and should this case not be reopened, and should we not now rather view King Henry V in the light of a war criminal? I’m all for that…but I also have a maxim permanently in my head in these matters: ‘Don’t make the best the enemy of the good.’ In the case of Kissinger, we have someone who is still around, very much in our midst, and we have all the evidence about the crimes that he committed in a series of countries, making it look as if aberrations couldn’t form a defense, say, in the matter of Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Chile, or Laos, or Bangladesh, or Cyprus, or East Timor, because after a bit, it stops looking like coincidence…”
Hitchens also despises Kissinger, as I do, for his inflated reputation. A family friend recently said to me, “But I thought Kissinger was a nice man!” I overheard no one at my local shopping mall say: “Robert McNamara! Ooh, I like him.!”
Admittedly, Hitchens’s radical deconstruction of international capitalism did have its weaknesses. He actually defended NAFTA in 1993:
(relevant section begins at 7:33)
In spite of their imperfections, Chomsky great admired Hitchens’s contributions to journalism before 9/11. In response to old friend’s about-face afterward, the linguist wrote that he would “await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past.” You may think that Hitchens’s radical journalism was shallow and unoriginal, but Chomsky did not.
Additionally, Chomsky has also been wrong. In 2008, the linguist urged people in swing states to support Obama, which entailed acceptance and tacit of the policies which he now actively opposes.
These are the same policies that Herman criticizes in his essay:
“Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union address promises a five-year freeze in federal domestic spending, which is incompatible with his promises to improve education and the sagging infrastructure. His support of the huge military budget and permanent war system has kept massive resources from availability to the crisis-ridden civil society, at the same time contributing to a dangerously irrational spiritual environment that bodes ill for the future.”
Would Herman have written differently about President John McCain?
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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