Christopher Hitchens, anti-American apologist for terror

It is more in sorrow than in anger that I denounce Christopher Hitchens as an apologist for terror, possessed by an anti-American enthusiasm for the American invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens, were he to see this, would no doubt snort a draught of voting-aged single malt whiskey out his nose; after all, his columns and essays during the past years reflect an unambiguous opposition to the tactics of terror and critics of the American state. As we know, however, unambiguous opposition to a thing no longer serves as an affidavit of one’s true orientation toward it: an accurate portrait can only be painted with a brush made from selected and distorted phrases, ideally ones that arise in the context of an ongoing private correspondence.

I don’t have access to Hitchens’ email; the deficit imposes an unwanted reliance on his public writings, but needs must, and I persevere.

In a November 18, 2002 Slate column, Hitchens set out to create what he considered a workable definition of terrorism. He wrote many words on the subject, but we’re concerned with only 14 of them.

Here’s what Hitchens arrived at by way of that definition (translated word for word and idiom for idiom from the original English):

Terrorism, then, is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

In Hitchens’ view, the definition excludes groups such as the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah and various Palestinian “irregulars” from the ranks of terrorists. They can, he says, certainly be held accountable for their crimes, such as the murder of civilians, but the legitimacy of their cause and the ultimate accessibility of their goals place them outside his definition.

Unfortunately, the US invasion of Iraq places us squarely within it, and Hitchens acknowledges as much even in advance of the act.

Now put the case of [the Bush administration and their supporters] [he actually uses an Arabic term that translates into "the base" here, presumably in an effort to further offend - ed.]. Its supporters do not live under a foreign occupation … [i]t is partly a corrupt multinational corporation, partly a crime family … partly a sectarian religious cult, and partly a fascist organization … What does it demand from Muslim societies? It demands that they acknowledge their loathsome blasphemy and realize their own fitness for destruction.

There may be some minor issues with my translation of that passage, but trust me: English is my first language and there’s no need to read the quote in the original or resort to a third party for explication. And anyway, it’s not really relevant to the point. I just threw it in to astonish and delight the audience with my prestidigitational expository skills.

You’ll already have recognized the problem here: the US demanded the impossible from Iraqi society — the installation of a secular, westernized, Israel-friendly democracy — and did so at the points of a great many guns. And Hitchens was behind the adventure all the way. Or almost all the way, or much of it, or part of it, depending on where we stand in the arc of progress there; we’ll get to that in a moment.

Some of you may argue that the goal wasn’t illegitimate; others may argue that it wasn’t initially unachievable and may yet not be. Still others may raise your purpled middle fingers in eloquent, silent protest.

So what? You’re all stupid, and terrorists to boot. This isn’t just me talking: it’s Hitchens.

He doesn’t write much about Iraq any more; surrounded as he is by stunning women on the one hand and Iran apologists on the other (who have replaced the charmingly sleek Ahmad Chalabi on the one hand and the efficiency of the 3rd Infantry Division on the other), the country, along with its plight and the US role in it, may understandably have slipped his mind. But I, having obtained access to his Slate columns — I have my methods — am in the perhaps unenviable position to speak for him.

It’s not clear exactly when Hitchens realized he was in support of a terrorist action that while not of Hitlerian proportions — although, by Hitchens’s own definition, the Holocaust was not a terrorist irruption, by virtue of its goal having been got within spitting distance — certainly outshines any other recent example. The best we can do is place him at the points in time where he clearly wasn’t aware of it, i.e., when he still believed the goals were achievable, and when he clearly was.

Wasn’t:

So it turns out that all the slogans of the anti-war movement were right after all. And their demands were just. “No War on Iraq,” they said—and there wasn’t a war on Iraq. Indeed, there was barely a “war” at all. “No Blood for Oil,” they cried, and the oil wealth of Iraq has been duly rescued from attempted sabotage with scarcely a drop spilled. Of the nine oil wells set ablaze by the few desperadoes who obeyed the order, only one is still burning and the rest have been capped and doused without casualties. “Stop the War” was the call. And the “war” is indeed stopping. That’s not such a bad record. An earlier anti-war demand—”Give the Inspectors More Time”—was also very prescient and is also about to be fulfilled in exquisite detail.

Translator’s note: Hitchens isn’t really celebrating the prescience of invasion opponents; he was, rather, “obviously intoxicated [by the heady fumes of apparent success]” [translating my own intent there - ed.].

(I should interject here that early on in the war, Hitchens was concerned that the invading force refrain from committing the sorts of crimes for which he indicts even those engaged in the legitimate use of force; now, not so much. )

Was:

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

It’s true that Hitchens doesn’t explicitly confess to having embraced terrorism here, but he has without question scaled back his goal from the impossible — the replacement of Saddam by a secular westernized regime — to the possible — the replacement of Saddam by something that could well turn out not to be worse than what might have transpired had Saddam fallen on his own. You’ll notice that in this formulation, the imperative wasn’t to rescue Iraq from Saddam, but rather from what would have arrived in Saddam’s wake, and the role of the US isn’t to create a better Iraq, but to prevent it from devolving into that worse one.

It’s a much easier formulation to defend since, unlike with Saddam and the current situation, we never had the opportunity to examine the reality of a post-Saddam Iraq absent the US invasion. Hitchens may never be able to prove that the latter circumstance would have been worse, but equally, no one can prove it wouldn’t have been. It’s the emergency exit from the terror-supporting hovel he constructed around himself; he hasn’t written substantively on Iraq in months, and because the longer he goes the worse the situation he’ll be returning to, it seems unlikely he’ll revisit the subject with anything like his early enthusiasm.

He is, after all, not stupid: he can do the math that shows Americans killing Iraqis and Iraqis killing each other at a clip and after a fashion Saddam might have envied when he was in power and surely delights in now he’s not. If the insurgency continues for ten years, which is easily within the average life span of such things, and whether or not the US sticks around to contribute to the carnage or ameliorate it or both, many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will have been displaced, killed outright or have died from the ongoing deterioration of the country’s infrastructure even if none of Iraq’s neighbors get involved, and in less time than the thirty years Saddam devoted to the effort.

The subtext, if something this obvious can be dignified with the description, of the “saving Iraqis from post-Saddam Iraq” is that at least to Hitchens, life under Saddam no longer represents the worst-case scenario for the country.

What we have here is a man who defined terrorism to suit his inclinations (as most people do) and then, for a period of years, supported an action that fits the definition, and then slowly began modifying his conception of the action so as to remove the execution of it from the realm of terrorism. For a while there, he was both pro- and anti-terror, and pro- and anti-American. Now, he’s just adrift.

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