5/18/2023 0 Comments Hitchens blind liberasIn turn, his brave talk of sticking by his “comrades” in Baghdad rang false to me. We had both supported it, but as Iraq disintegrated, my criticisms of the policy struck him as weak-kneed and opportunistic, an effort to curry favor with bien-pensant liberals. It breathed new life into Hitchens, his persona, and his prose. (One of his lesser known books was called “Letters to a Young Contrarian.”) And nothing could be more contrarian, in the early years of the last decade, than for a hero of the left to embrace George W. He was, by his own lights and that of his admirers, a thoroughgoing contrarian. It propelled him straight through the last, most productive, most visible decade of his life. 9/11 gave Hitchens a sense of purpose like nothing since that early intimation, the Rushdie fatwa. It burned so hot that he turned it without a second thought at a secular, totalitarian Iraqi dictator. September 11, 2001, put Hitchens in touch with the molten anti-clericalism that was one of his elemental passions. From there, it was a fairly short and direct line to the late evening, a few years later, when I met Paul Wolfowitz at a party in Hitchens’s D.C. He was saying that he had been wrong, something that Hitchens didn’t do often enough-wrong not about anything in particular (he defended every specific political choice he’d made), but about the core question of whether America was a force for good or evil in the world. His monologue continued up until 9/11 and the singular insight that the attacks had given him: the American revolution was “the last one standing” and beat pretty much any conceivable alternative in the oppressed corners of the world. It didn’t change his position on the war, but it planted a seed. The thought of America on the side of a liberation movement occurred to Hitchens then, for the first time. He described driving through the refugee camps in Kurdistan at the end of that war, with peshmerga fighters who had a picture of George H.W. Hitchens took me on a long excursion through his political life, an account of the Education of Christopher Hitchens, with key stops at the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, which had pitted everything he loved against everything he hated, and the first Gulf War in 1991, which he had opposed. I hadn’t known Hitchens until then, and what I remember from that long afternoon of drinking (now a cliché of Hitchens eulogies, and one that doesn’t make me smile, since it helped kill him) was the sense of a man who was girding for battle. just months from going to war with Iraq, I went down to Washington to interview Hitchens for a piece on liberal intellectuals and the coming war. Two years later, after 9/11 and the overthrow of the Taliban, with the U.S. It’s a position from which much thunder can be visited upon the meek accommodations of ordinary political life, but it’s also a dead end of sorts. Wag the dog, not Islamofascism, was the cardinal sin, the scandal that got Hitchens to the keyboard.īy 2000, he had embraced Naderism, finding nothing significant to distinguish Bush from Gore, and explicitly refusing to accept the lesser evil. When Clinton ordered Cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan after Al Qaeda bombed the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Hitchens wrote a series of columns dissecting the American retaliation: he concluded that Clinton had chosen to kill innocent people (primarily Sudanese) in order to distract attention from Monica Lewinsky. As late as 1998, Hitchens hated Bill Clinton much more than Osama bin Laden. If, as Hitchens once said, hatred was what got him up in the morning, the first three decades of his career were motivated more than anything by a contempt for American foreign policy and the hypocrites and evil characters who carried it out. I read almost every one of his “Minority Report” columns in The Nation from the mid-eighties until he gave them up after the 9/11 attacks, because they were reliably less predictable and more exciting than anything else in the magazine. Given the deadliness of much left-wing writing in the age of Reagan, Hitchens achieved the rare feat of being dazzling while sticking fairly closely to political orthodoxy. Until then, his work fit roughly within the conventions of the left. In the trajectory of his career as brilliant talker and polemicist, man of letters, self-dramatizing personality, and traveller to bad places, Iraq was the turning point. Christopher Hitchens and the Iraq War ended on the same day, December 15, 2011-a historical coincidence that only he might have known what to do with.
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