Ian Williams

Logos 2.4 – Fall 2003

A Short Long Diatribe
Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War:
the Postponed Liberation of Iraq

reviewed by
Ian Williams

It is sad to read Christopher Hitchens’ shrill and un-nuanced polemics in A
Long Short War. It is also confusing, since he is trying to maintain all the
former positions he held while on the left, while uncritically embracing his
new friends, whom he calls, “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougher
thinkers in the Defense Department.” The resulting portmanteau politics are
an ill-matched and disturbing mix.

It is a shame because Hitchens has often performed an indispensable role in
debunking the unthinking dogmas pushed by the thought police of the left.
But now he has finally succumbed to the disease of the Leninist left: he has
become a free-floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accept as
such his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration.
Everyone who disagrees with him on the cardinal issue of uncritical support
for the war on Iraq is attacked in quasi-Vyshinkyist fashion.

It has always been lonely on the American left, one reason being its tendency
to shrink itself by throwing people overboard at the first hint of
thoughtcrime. One wonders over the years how many other decent people
may have been harried rightwards by dogmatic intolerance and application of
political litmus tests. Were you for or against Vietnam, McCarthy, Kosovo,
Afghanistan?

Few of those doing the persecution had much time for nuance. Please
comrade, may I be anti-McCarthy and anti-Soviet at the same time? May I
oppose the Vietnam War, without condoning the behavior of Vietnamese
communists? All too often the answer has been “certainly not,” and one can
almost (almost, I stress) sympathize with the neocons and others, and wonder
if the intolerance of the left did not drive them to the right.

Luckily, orthodoxy in all its left forms took a serious hit with the fall of the
Soviet Union, but even so one could easily get a feeling of thankfulness that
the tumbrels were no longer running when one saw the reaction to
suggestions that Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein were not nice
people. Hitchens was in the honorable vanguard of those on the left who
thought that human rights were a cardinal moral and political principle in
themselves, not just a cudgel with which to beat imperialism. One may
instance those who campaign for Mumia while cheering on Cuban
executions.

But old habits die hard. Hitchens, like so many of the neocons he now seems
to have joined, is steeped in the robustness of Trotskyist and Leninist
polemics. When he was under attack for supporting NATO action against
Milosevic, he was robust, and mostly correct in his counter-attacks. And then
came September 11th. Ironically, some on the left who had opposed a war in
the Balkans over ten thousand dead Kosovars, supported one in Central Asia
over three thousand dead Americans.

Very few on the left, or indeed anywhere else, actually tried to justify the
attack on the World Trade Center itself, but some did oppose the ensuing
war in Afghanistan. However, with broad sweep, Hitchens now accuses
“many cultural leftists,” of “somewhat furtively” uniting with the European
hard right in “believing that September 11 was a punishment for American
hubris.”

It is at this stage that Hitchens has become his own enemy. He has become
the mirror image of the shrill dogmatists who had opposed him all along. In
emulation of George W. Bush’s instructions to his speechwriters, he no
longer does nuance. It was, in fact, perfectly possible to be horrified by the
atrocity at the World Trade Center, and even to admit that military action
against the Taliban and bin Laden was desirable, while still pointing out that
it was the previous amoral work of the hard right now in the Bush
administration and their involvement in Afghanistan that had made the
Taliban and Al-Qaeda possible. After all, Neville Chamberlain’s name is still
mud for his part in paving the way for the Blitz on London. One can deplore
the cause without condoning the effect.

September 11 was, of course, what made the invasion of Iraq possible. There
were and are some serious arguments to be made for a multilateral
humanitarian intervention in Iraq and other places to remove genocidal
regimes. Hitchens did in fact have an honorable record of opposing the
Ba’athist barbarism against Kurds, and indeed all opposition in Iraq.

But Hitchens’s uncritical support for the motives and methods of the Bush
administration dropped him to a whole new level. To begin with, while much
of what George W. Bush said about Saddam Hussein was, of course, true, as
Hitchens knows, it was equally true when many figures in this administration
were covering for Baghdad in the honeymoon years before their protégé ran
amok and invaded Kuwait.

In real politics, one accepts good consequences even from evil actors. But
while welcoming, for example, Stalin’s belated support in the war against
Hitler, Hitchens’s hero, George Orwell, did not flip to uncritical support for
the regime in Moscow the way that Hitchens has for the Bush
administration. The White House’s motives for intervention were neither
publicly nor privately about democracy in Iraq and it betokens a desperate
act of faith on Hitchens part to presume they were.

It is true that Hitchens has a long and honorable record of support for
democracy in Iraq, and for the rights of the Kurds. But that does not really
justify his adulatory defense of Bush and calumniation of his critics. For
example, he himself managed to support intervention in Kosovo without
becoming a noticeable cheerleader for Bill Clinton’s all around moral probity.

Hitchens’s well established contempt for Clinton should not obscure the
issue that many in this administration, with the help of Clinton’s own deep
irresolution, harried him into military ineffectiveness because he had not
served in Vietnam, a war he had in fact opposed. In contrast, many of the
most sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the war—but
dodged the draft. Hitchens’s response is to attack those who used the well-
deserved epithet “chicken hawk” against them. It is true, as he says, that
there is now a volunteer army, and even if it were not, those he calls the
“Pentagon intellectuals” are not of age or health to qualify. But that does not
detract from their fundamental hypocrisy.

While we touch upon Vietnam, along with McCarthy for long the Shibboleth
of the Left, it seems equally odd that Hitchens vilifies Harold Wilson, the
British prime minister for his “disgusting” support for the war in Vietnam. In
fact, Wilson successfully resisted LBJ’s extreme political and economic
pressure and refused any British military involvement in the conflict
whatsoever, which was no mean achievement under the circumstances. I’m
afraid that vilifying Wilson while praising Bush and Blair does not make a
seamless political and historical whole. In his realignment of his political
perspectives, Hitchens has not made the necessary adjustments to the
intellectual baggage he inherited from his Trotskyist youth

Hitchens quite rightly excoriates primitive anti-Americanism, but then does
Bush’s work with equally primitive anti-anti-Americanism, tarring everyone
who disagrees with current American policies with the same brush. He is
quite right that the simple-minded refrain of “blood for oil,” made little
economic or political sense. He is even right about the motives of the some
of the organizers of the mass protests who did not allow criticism of Saddam
Hussein on their platforms (not, incidentally in New York, where anti-
Saddam dissidents spoke from the platform). But the delusions of the
marginal are surely a lesser subject for polemics than the Orwellian use of
images and hints from the administration that led 70% of Americans to
entertain the likelihood that Baghdad was involved in September 11th?

Hitchens neatly avoids this question with a humorous hypothetical aside on
the likely fate of the Iraqi intelligence chief who denied knowledge of the
perpetrators the day after, which sadly avoids the main issue: there is no
evidence whatsoever of Iraqi involvement.

For evidence of a nuance missing from neo-Hitchens, one could look at Kofi
Annan’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23, in which he
called for multilateral support for genuine humanitarian intervention, while
warning of the grave dangers to the world order of the unilateral attack that
the U.S. had undertaken.

In these polemics, Hitchens allows no room for those who agreed with him
about Saddam Hussein, but saw profound dangers in the Bush
administration’s contempt for International Law and the United Nations. Six
months after the Iraqi invasion, with chaos spreading across Iraq, Bush
reinforcing support for Sharon’s rampages, no sign of weapons of mass
destruction, and no evidence of any links between the still at large Saddam
Hussein and terror, it is sadly evident that Hitchens has bravely but foolishly
jumped on a sinking ship, morally and practically.

Unlike the neocons who have only their residual admiration for Leon
Trotsky and their utter self-certainty remaining of their old politics,
Christopher Hitchens’s portmanteau politics retains enough hybrid vigor
from his old principles for us to hope that he will recover from being a neo-
neocon. We can rejoice together in the downfall of Saddam Hussein while
deriding the parochial, self-centered and faith-based worldview of those
currently making every predictable and indeed predicted mistake in the
occupation of Iraq. But sadly this book represents a fine mind boiled in
vitriol.

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