First we should note that Christopher Hitchens's New York Times Review of David Mamet's The Secret History ("David Mamet's Right Wing Conversion" New York Times, 6/17/11) will do in a pinch, and he adequately conveys that we are dealing with, first and foremost, a rotten book. Hitchens's has the integrity to cite the book at its embarrassing worst; a comparison of the leaks in the BP disaster and the matter of Julian Assange.
One could quibble that Hitchens does not mention that the book is fairly ugly, racist swill (Mamet, in the now familiar tradition of the right, craps on the philosophy and accomplishments of MLK and then hypocritically praises him at book's end), though this might have been tricky, since the book draws a blurb from Shellby Steel, who is also Hitchens's go-to guy for reverse discrimination blather. Since Mamet and Hitchens are both, more or less, amazing grace babies of Bush II, the seasoned Htich watcher might take a moment to examine Hitch's equivocations.
After the now obligatory spanking of Chomsky, Hitchens writes approvingly, "Once or twice, when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton's sleazy sex life." Well, sleazy being a relative term, I am rather thankful for the feminists of the 90s being basically a lone, mostly ignored voice on the issues of human rights in Afghanistan, while the likes of Hitchens ignored them. Yet let's examine what Mamet actually puts down on page 140: "And where was the Left, and where were the Feminists, during President Clinton's savaging of Janita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky?"
Well, I could take this apart at length, but to be generous to Mamet, he has probably mixed up Susan McDougal with Kathleen Willey, who's name I had forgotten myself. If Mamet has an editor, he or she has yet to discover the magic of Google. One wonders if Hitch took note, however, of what a considerable blunder it was to insert McDougal's name here. The woman in question was put in jail by Ken Starr for refusing to manufacture evidence against Clinton, whom she claims she never met. Though she had essentially won her case through Jury nullification, Clinton later savagely awarded her a Presidential Pardon. Her story is ignored in Hitchens's stupid book on the subject, No One Left To Lie To.
A modestly imaginative biographer is likely to conclude that the impetus for Htichens big swing to the right was hardly 9-11, but rather the Bluementhal affair. After all, he had tired to get a personal friend arrested (one who had, by all accounts, had been generous and supportive to him) on false grounds in a political case. Once the nature of Monica Lewinsky became apparent (or the fact that she would be of no use in getting Clinton), Hitchens threw her under the bus himself. In terms that harked back to his his social climbing schooldays, he told Dennis Miller, "he diddles the help."
Yet after lying and bulling his way though all this (See Cockburn, the only one who called him out) the left took him back, and all was forgiven. Knowing in his heart what he had done, how could he ever again respect the left? Liberals, always possessing a healthy dose of battered wife syndrome, made Hitchens the man of the house for a few years before he left for the younger, sexier woman that was 9-11. That fun couple would of course go on to debauchery that made Hitchens's 90s shenanigans look pretty small time in comparison.
When I wrote my first essay on Christopher Hitchens and the former Yugoslavia, I wondered if I would ever find any neoconservatives who had committed themselves to the Bosnian cause. Then, I discovered a 2004 article by British journalist Johann Hari. In his interview with Hari, Hitchens indicated that the neoconservative position on the Bosnian War had impressed him:
“I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That war in the early 1990’s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy…That’s when I first began to find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favor of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there’s Richard Perle. There’s Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act.”
At the time of the interview, Paul Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense, and Richard Perle was an important member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. Hitchens, who was friendly with the deputy defense secretary, had particularly kind words for him: “The thing that would surprise most people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he’s a real bleeding heart.” http://johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens/
Was the moral stature of Perle and Wolfowitz profound enough to have inspired Hitchens’s conversion to neoconservatism?
Richard Perle had served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. By the time of the Bosnian War, Richard Perle had left government service to work as a lobbyist and consultant for the defense industry. A frequent lecturer on foreign policy, he had strong views on the Bosnian War:
“We have become a party, in a very real sense, to attacks on civilians that approach genocidal proportions because we are enforcing an embargo that prevents Bosnians from defending themselves…We simply do not want to be a party to limiting the ability of people to defend themselves against these vicious attacks on civilians, and if things are worse, they will be worse in a different way, then if we can be said to have contributed to that genocide.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
In spite of this bold opinion, Perle spoke with far more enthusiasm about the necessity of weapons development and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Whenever he spoke about Bosnia, he used the conflict to promote a neoconservative agenda, which rests on unilateralism. In 1996, he had nothing good to say about cooperation with Europe:
“The West got into a great deal of trouble in Bosnia after the Bush administration, wrongly in my view, decided that this was an issue for the Europeans. And without appearing in any way condescending, the fact is that the Europeans, perhaps because they became accustomed to it during nearly half a century of Cold War, find it very difficult to act in concert and sensibly without American leadership.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol
He also made plain his disdain for the United Nations:
“As I indicated, I am afraid that Bosnia is one example of what we can expect from international peacekeeping operations. If the administration has its way, it will begin to institutionalize peacekeeping within the United Nations, building it up in the name of efficiency, reducing American influence over peacekeeping operations, and we will see more in future of what we are seeing, sad as it is, in Bosnia today.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
Above all, Perle feared that unchecked Serbian aggression against a weakly armed Bosnia would draw the United States more deeply into the conflict:
“Our interest, it seems to me, lies in achieving an outcome that can be defended the Bosnians themselves, and that is not dependent on an American presence, an American peacekeeping presence, to try to hold together what is bound to be an indefensible situation…the U.S. will go in as peacekeepers, and we will find ourselves involved in a chain of mini Lebanons, there without a clear purpose or a clear mission, without any realistic prospect of defending territory against warring factions on all sides.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
At the same time, something beyond neoconservative principles seemed to propel Perle. Several months after the signing of the Dayton Accords, he indicated some anxiety about the Bosnians:
“They were promised that in exchange for the conclusion of an agreement at Dayton, they would be equipped and trained by the United States, so that the remaining half of their territory could be defended by the Bosnians themselves, so that they could end the situation of dependency in which they found themselves during the war. I’ve been very much involved in trying to help in a variety of ways to see that this promise is kept, but as a private individual it’s not very easy to do that. The responsibility lies with the government, which made the promise in the first place.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol
Time magazine reported that Perle was closely involved with the Dayton negotiations: “The Bosnians have even hired Richard Perle, a top Reagan administration official, to be in Dayton as a consultant.” As a consultant to the Bosnians, Perle arranged for Military Professional Resources, Inc. to train the Bosnians. Employees at MPRI tend to be former U.S. military officers. According to Alan Weisman’s biography of Perle, which was ironically but fittingly titled Prince of Darkness, MPRI directly benefited from Washington’s financial largesse to the Bosnians. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983728,00.html
I have not come across any evidence that Perle personally profited from the policies that he advocated for the Bosnians, but it is certain that they benefited the defense industry to which he belonged. If Perle’s interest in the Bosnians was solely humanitarian, it is difficult to explain his inconsistent defense of continued military aid to the Turks, despite their atrocities against the Kurds. At a panel, an audience member brought up the destruction of 1500 villages, which left two million Kurds without homes. He also called attention to the Turkish aerial bombardment of the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq. In response, Perle had this to say:
“I wonder if I might just add that it seems to me there’s a very important distinction to be drawn between the Kurds of Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq because I believe that the Turkish democracy, the Turkish parliamentary democracy, is robust enough to solve whatever Kurdish problem exists in Turkey if there is no terrorist component to it. And the unhappy spiral of violence in which terrorism elicits military action could be dealt with easily if the terrorism didn’t exist and the democratic process could work in Turkey.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb (1:20:20)
Thanks to Perle, I now understand that women and children who were left homeless deserved their plight because they were terrorists.
At the panel, Perle neglected to mention that he was a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government through his own company, International Advisors, Inc. Weisman found that International Advisors collected approximately $600,000 to $800,000 from the Turkish government on an annual basis between 1989 and 1994. Perle’s own take was a yearly consultancy fee of about $48,000.
Moreover, Perle probably played a role in discouraging Congress from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which took place during the First World War. To Weisman, he denied lobbying Congress directly on Turkish interests. I find this denial incredible, given his past experience as a Senate staffer. Evidently, his connection to Turkey has affected his judgment. When speaking to his biographer, Perle committed his own version of Holocaust denial: “As for the Armenian issue, I don’t believe that what happened is akin to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. It was not a final solution and to the best of my knowledge there was never an occasion in which the Turkish government sat down and said, ‘Here’s a plan for the destruction of the Armenians’.” While Perle willingly classified the murder of 200,000 Bosnians as genocide, he could not do the same for one and one-half million Armenian victims. http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030327Koop.html
Even when Perle has held a government position, he seems to have mistaken public service for the opportunity to make a buck. Shortly before the Iraq War began, Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, where he endorsed the supposed advantages of regime change. At the same time, Perle was a managing partner at Trireme Partners, a venture-capital company with key investments in companies that supported homeland security and defense. In February of 2003, Perle met with Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. In the March 17, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Trireme had enticed the Saudi industrialist with a letter advertising Perle’s political influence. Hersh quoted directly from the letter: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of the Board.”
Perle and his colleagues hoped that Zuhair and the notorious arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a fellow Saudi who had set up the meeting, would invest in their enterprise. The approaching war with Iraq created an ideal investment climate. “If there is no war,” Khashoggi rhetorically questioned Hersh, “why is there need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent. You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.”
Additionally, Perle and his cronies anticipated that Zuhair and Khashoggi would persuade the Saudi government to grant homeland-security contracts to companies in which Trireme had investments. Perle’s business agenda directly contradicted his public criticism of former colleagues who had relationships with Saudi-financed foundations and think tanks: “I think it’s a disgrace. They’re the people who appear on television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people if it weren’t for this community of former diplomats effectively working for this foreign government.”
Out of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11, fifteen came from Saudi Arabia. Of course, so did Osama bin Laden. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi ambassador in Washington at the time, analyzed Perle’s motives for Hersh: “There is a split personality to Perle. Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail – ‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’ – as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”
Perle’s dealings with Global Crossings, a communications company, further compromised his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. The Defense Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarded the potential sale of Global Crossings to Chinese investors as a security risk. Perle promised Global Crossings that he would try to persuade the federal government to drop its opposition to the sale. If he got results, Global Crossings would supplement his $125,000 fee with an extra $600,000. The exposure of Perle’s arrangements with Global Crossings and the Chinese ultimately led to his resignation from the chairmanship. He left the board completely in 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/business/technology-after-disclosures-pentagon-adviser-quits-a-post.html
Wolfowitz was not as deviously interesting as Perle, but he also had extensive government experience. During his tenure as ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980’s, the neoconservative displayed little concern about the human rights violations there. Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, an Indonesian human rights activist, noted Wolfowitz’s warm relationship with the dictator Suharto, “but he never showed interest in issues regarding democratization or respect for human rights. Wolfowitz never once visited our offices.” At the time, Indonesia was continuing its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Bunny Buchori, the director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development, recalled: “He went to East Timor and saw the abuses going on, but then kept quiet.” http://www.asiademocracy.org/content_view.php?section_id=1&content_id=430
I was curious to see if Wolfowitz had experienced a change of heart after his departure from Indonesia. Did the Bosinian War awaken his conscience? I have watched Wolfowitz’s appearances on two panels in 1994 that reviewed Clinton’s foreign policy, where one would have expected him to discuss matters of pressing importance to him. Although he addressed Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and trade issues, he never brought up Bosnia.http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/PolicyMi
Later that year, Wolfowitz finally commented on Bosnia while serving on a panel on foreign aid:
“In fact, as I look at the world today, and I look at Bosnia, it seems to me that there is a case where, in fact, we ought to be making much use of military assistance. But I think the Bosnian case is not only important in its own right, it’s important as a kind of generalization that in facing a number of the potentially messy conflicts that the world is likely to be beset with at the end of the Cold War, I think it’s a far better instrument of policy to help people defend themselves that to think about sending in foreign peacekeepers to fight both sides and to preserve some futile attempt to impose peace”
Although his comments were perfectly sensible, they came rather late in the war. Furthermore, contradictions in his arguments made his humanitarianism extremely suspect. In his advocacy of military aid to Turkey, for example, he expressed the same indifference to the Turkish Kurds as Perle did:
“I didn’t say necessarily that aid to Turkey should increase, but I think that aid to Turkey remains important, and I think when the United States is involved, we have some ability to influence how that military assistance is used, and how the military performs.”
Blah, blah, blah. Of course, the Turkish military used U.S. military assistance directly in its persecution of the Kurds, and Wolfowitz surely comprehended that. As readers of Hitchens Watch already know, Hitchens exploited the suffering of the Kurds to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Yet, Perle and Wolfowitz have suddenly become his personal heroes. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb (01:16:45)
I truly question the depth of Wolfowitz’s commitment to the Bosnian cause. When he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1995, he was just an academic dean, but endorsed Washington policy as eagerly as any public official. He differed with his government only on the issue of the arms embargo:
“I have been opposed to the arms embargo since its inception, not simply because I believe that it is wrong for the United States to deny the victims of aggression the means to defend themselves. Equally important, I believe that if we refuse to allow the Bosnians the means to defend themselves, the international community would assume the responsibility for their protection, and increasingly that protection would depend on American participation.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (26:03)
In short, Wolfowitz favored arming the Bosnians so that Washington could dispense with them as quickly as possible. He dreaded the prospect of American intervention on the ground in Bosnia, which contrasts sharply with his eagerness to invade Iraq a few years later. These contradictory positions indicate that international rescue work was not his primarily objective. An additional comment about Bosnia further exposes the cynicism behind the idealistic pose:
“I think the reason that we’re concerned about this conflict in a way, let’s say, that we’re not concerned about Rwanda is because the moral dimension when it is in a place like Europe, where there are huge armies engaged, where there are nuclear weapons potentially involved, has a strategic dimension as well…If the plague of ethnic cleansing and ethnic warfare spreads in Europe, what we’ve seen in the Balkans could be really very, very small compared to the kinds of major problems we would have elsewhere.”
To Wolfowitz, it was irrelevant that nearly one millions Rwandans had perished in an African holocaust. The deaths of 200,000 Bosnians only mattered for reasons of strategy. He did not even bother to raise objections to the Dayton Accords, which left Bosnia extremely vulnerable to Serbia in terms of arms and territory:
“First of all, the goal is not parity, certainly not with the Serbs…it would be impossible to establish parity between Bosnia and Serbia. In fact, under this agreement, there are provisions, that if you work out the ratios, amount to a ratio of five for Serbia, and I believe that is one and a third for the Bosnian Federation combined. The goal is to get, I think, enough balance within Bosnia, that at least Milosevic is the man in charge, and that we don’t have the spectacle that we’ve had for the last two and a half years of the Bosnian Serbs shelling Sarajevo with impunity and pushing forward and taking large chunks of the country that aren’t theirs.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (41:20)
In other words, Wolfowitz did not seek justice for Bosnia, but containment of a problem that had proved embarrassing for Washington. He fervently hoped that the U.S. troop presence authorized by the peace agreement would end soon and “would allow us depart with our credibility and our reputation intact.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (1:10)
The fanboys and Hitch hens who are inclined to defend Perle and Wolfowitz should ask themselves why neither man was as eager to wage war against Serbia as they were against Iraq. Certainly, the leftist Hitchens never expressed any admiration for either man in his Nation columns or on television. As far as I can determine, the only member of the right wing on whom Hitchens lavished compliments was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:
“Well, I always think it’s a shame that Thatcher and Reagan get mentioned in the same breath because though I was a political opponent of both, and still am, I mean I think in point of character and bearing she is worth ten of him at any time…I was sort of an admirer of the old battle-ax, a grudging admirer, I must say, but in point of fortitude there’s something to admire…And yes, I think it’s good that she’s held up the West, for want of a better word, to the humiliation that it’s inflicting on itself in its complicity in the mass murder in Bosnia.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153 (26:05)
The journalist was fearless in his praise for Thatcher’s stand on Bosnia, so it was unlikely that he harbored a clandestine reverence for Perle and Wolfowitz. Back then, Hitchens was an astute observer of the Washington scene, and he must have known them for what they were. It is utterly illogical now for Hitchens to claim moral inspiration from these two loathsome practitioners of realpolitik. He is merely trying to justify the betrayal of his own conscience.
In truth, Hitchens really had no need to travel right of the political center to find inspiration. Without a doubt, the late Representative Frank McCloskey of Indiana had little use for the militaristic principles of neoconservatism. As a liberal Democrat, McCloskey had opposed the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Yet, the torment of Bosnia touched his heart, instilling in him the determination to act.
McCloskey did not speak in slick sound bites, which I found refreshing after spending hours listening to Hitchens, Wolfowitz, and Perle. One needs only to watch footage of him to note his passion and concern. To McCloskey, the Bosnian people were not a means to a strategic end, but an infinitely valuable end in themselves. In the face of Serb aggression, the very concept of neutrality disgusted him. “You cannot say that heavy artillery besieging a civilian population is warfare,” McCloskey said with earnest fury in his face. “That’s obvious to the world that this is a slaughter going on.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (4:00)
Like Hitchens, McCloskey strongly favored lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians:
“We have a military role in this already in that the U.S. was the initiating power to impose the arms embargo on Bosnia. Bosnia almost had no arms. Still, they primarily have small arms while the former Yugoslavia, if you will, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro they have large arms ten times over the Bosnians from the previous Tito and Russian connections, if you will.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (7:20)
As early as 1992, McCloskey had advocated air strikes against the Serbs, far earlier than I would have supported them myself. Hitchens, for his part, initially only wanted to lift the arms embargo to give the Bosnians a chance to defend themselves. Based on my own research, it seems that Hitchens did not even endorse aerial engagement before his appearance on C-Span in 1994. Of course, the UN never lifted the embargo and the situation only worsened. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYu http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153 (3:08)
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that McCloskey never recommended the bombing of Serbian cities or other heavily populated areas. The Indiana representative favored airstrikes against artillery sites, supply lines, tanks, ammunition depots, and the bridges across the Drina River that connected Serbia to Bosnia.
McCloskey did not relish the idea of an American troop presence in Bosnia, nor did he think it likely. He believed that U.S. airstrikes, in combination with adequate arms for the Bosnians, would suffice. Unlike Perle and Wolfowitz, however, McCloskey would not have hesitated to support the introduction of ground forces, as a last resort, to stop the genocide.
At a time of fierce partisanship, McCloskey did not hesitate to criticize President Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat. Even though the representative was prepared to back unilateral American air strikes, he publicly revealed his doubt in 1994 that Clinton would take the initiative. “For one thing,” McCloskey said with a laugh, “the president has said several times a week for quite a long time now.” Empty threats did not impress the congressman. The few NATO air strikes that would take place would come too late. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (4:48)
Still, McCloskey stressed the importance of international cooperation with the Europeans. He would have vastly preferred multilateral action: “If all the NATO and European powers, including the U.S. together, can’t stem genocide within several hundred miles of Rome and Vienna, why do we have a need for NATO, or why should be purport to be leaders?” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (11:10)
McCloskey shared Wolfowitz’s strategic concern that the violence in the Balkans could spread and involve other European powers, but it is clear that compassion for the Bosnian people just drove the congressman.
Would it have been an essentially neoconservative position to support unilateral action to save Bosnia? Neoconservatives are notorious for their contempt for international law. To be sure, when the UN Security Council imposed the arms embargo against the former Yugoslavia, it became international law. Congressional legislation to unilaterally lift the embargo would broken that law. All the same, Clinton could have made a more substantial effort to persuade the UN to lift the embargo. Even if lobbying the UN would have proven ineffective, Washington could have adhered to a higher principle of international law by taking unilateral action. One could have made the case that the arms embargo violated the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
Obviously, President George W. Bush and his neoconservative handlers exercised the most flagrant disregard for international law by invading Iraq without the consent of the UN Security Council. The difference is that no higher principles of international law guided Bush’s plan of attack.
According to Samantha Power’s ‘A Problem from Hell’: American and the Age of Genocide, McCloskey was prepared to sacrifice his political career for the sake of the Bosnian cause. “I would rather actively try to stop the slaughter than run and continue to win, knowing that I didn’t face this,” McCloskey said. In 1994, he lost his congressional seat.
The cardinal tenet of the neoconservative philosophy is power. It is unthinkable that Perle and Wolfowitz would ever have sacrificed their positions of power for reasons of conscience.
“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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