Christopher Hitchens: Still Insane

Christopher Hitchens rails against the left opponents of the Iraq war (sigh...yet again) in this Slate piece subtly entitled "Losing the Iraq War: Can the Left Really Want Us To?" I think the answer is none-too-subtly implied, but whatever. Sadly, the rest of the article is worse. I should say in advance that this post is going to be long, because it's possible to refute almost every sentence in a typical Hitchens Iraq column, but I'll try to restrain myself. Let's start at the beginning:

"Another request in my in-box, asking if I'll be interviewed about Iraq for a piece 'dealing with how writers and intellectuals are dealing with the state of the war, whether it's causing depression of any sort, if people are rethinking their positions or if they simply aren't talking about it.' I suppose that I'll keep on being asked this until I give the right answer, which I suspect is 'Uncle.'"

Not surprisingly, the rest of the piece has as little to do with this paragraph as it does with the title of the piece. I think Hitchens merely seeks to remind the poor reader that he is both writer and intellectual...though this reader thinks he's merely the former, and barely at that. But that's neither here nor there.

"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."

Here, Hitchens makes the assumption that Iraq, left to it's own and without the might of Saddam to unite it, would have collapsed into chaos. This of course is nonsense. While some tyrannies have collapsed when the strong leader that led them was removed or died, plenty of others have continued unintirrupted. Take for example the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, or North Korea after the death of Kim Il-Sung. One cannot simply assume that Iraq would have descended into chaos, especially considering that Saddam had two sons who could claim succession to his rule, one of whom he was clearly grooming for just that. The true irony of the point that Hitchens' is attempting to make with his flawed assumption is that it is in fact invasion and intervention that has led to Iraq becoming a "vortex of chaos and misery"; not the failure to intervene. As for his point about the irrelevance of the blunders...his logic is diabolical, and takes a moment to appreciate. Our failure to plan appropriately for the aftermath of the war, and the resulting chaos, leads us to appreciate the need to invade in the first place, because it's exactly what Iraq would have looked like if we hadn't invaded! Genius! But there's more:

"How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?"

His first two questions imply that he's talking only of political "commentators" who, probably sitting in air-conditioned cable news network studios, dispassionately discuss our need to either remain in or leave Iraq. The rest of his paragraph makes clear though he's really talking about those on the left who can't seem to muster any great effort to get involved in Iraq. Of course things are a lot more complicated then he makes them seem. Sadly he's correct that our humanitarians were, before the invasion, more interested in what we were doing to harm the Iraqi people (the oil-for-food program) then what Saddam Hussein was doing to his own people (putting thousands of them in the ground), but that's old news. The story now is that our humanitarians can only hope to control the egregious actions of our own administration, not the horrible actions of violent terrorists. I suppose Hitchens thinks that the Sierra Club should send an exploratory team to Southern Iraq, though it might be best if that sort of thing is postponed until Americas not in armored-up Humvees can safely travel in the country.

He goes on to discuss Dr. Alal Tamimi, the embattled mayor of Baghdad, now saying:

"Question: Why have several large American cities not already announced that they are going to become sister cities with Baghdad and help raise money and awareness to aid Dr. Tamimi? When I put this question to a number of serious anti-war friends, their answer was to the effect that it's the job of the administration to allocate the money, so that there's little room or need for civic action. I find this difficult to credit: For day after day last month I could not escape the news of the gigantic "Live 8" enterprise, which urged governments to do more along existing lines by way of debt relief and aid for Africa. Isn't there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet? Unless someone gives me a persuasive reason to think otherwise, my provisional conclusion is that the human rights and charitable "communities" have taken a pass on Iraq for political reasons that are not very creditable. And so we watch with detached curiosity, from dry land, to see whether the Iraqis will sink or swim. For shame."

It's here that Hitchens truly enters the world of non-reality. Announcing that your city has become "sister cities" with a sleepy little burg in Switzerland is not quite the same as announcing you've become the sister city of a city of 8 million people bogged down in a violent insurgency. I'm sure the reason no American mayors have latched on to this scheme is because...well, it's ridiculous. What solidarity can the mayor of say, Dallas, find between her city and Baghdad? This, along with his "Live 8 for Iraq" idea, lead me to believe that Hitchens does not understand that there is precious little American or western civilian organizations can do in a country fighting an ever more powerful insurgency, where Americans and other westerners can hardly travel without the threat of attack and death. And, as always, what rebuilding can be done in the midst of war? For war in Iraq is certainly what we have, and it is brutal war that has prevented even the spending of the billions allocated by our government for rebuildling. None of this supports his conclusion that charitable organizations of the left have "taken a pass" on Iraq. There is no doubt that these organizations overwhelmingly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but certainly had the conditions after the war been more favorable, there would be more civic participation in the rebuildling in Iraq. The fact is that no westerner is truly safe in Iraq unless they're surrounded by an armored convoy, and armored convoys don't replenish wetlands or defend the rights of Iraqi women.

Really this column amounts to yet another sad attempt by Hitchens to take swipes at the American left for daring to be opposed to the war, and for being mostly right about the Bush administration's general incompetence in running both the war effort and the reconstruction effort. He could rightly go after some on the left for the willingness to abandon the Iraqis regardless of the consequences for their country (or ours) but that would require refuting difficult questions using plain undeniable facts, which would be too much work for this writer and intellectual. Hitchens is actually probably smart enough to contribute something to the debate on what we should now do in Iraq. But doing so would require him to take a principled approach to the issue. Since that may be impossible for him, perhaps Hitchens should stick to his book reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, and the leave the debate to those who are willing to face the reality of Iraq.