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Christopher
Hitchens continues
his devolution as the War Party's favorite leftist, and
by the time he's done he may have invented a whole new school
of thought: but, hey, come to think of it, he's about 30 years
too late: the neoconservatives beat him to it. It's pathetic,
really, to read his latest rationalizations for war: Henry
Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, the Saudis, the Turks – how can
they be right about Iraq, he wonders, or about anything?
"Those
who don't want a 'regime change' in Iraq now include the Saudi
royal family, the Turkish army, the more prominent conservative
spokesmen in Congress and the Kissinger hawks. General Sharon,
at least in his public pronouncements, appears to be against
it as well. And somebody with a good contact among the Joint
Chiefs of Staff seems to be leaking pessimistic or pacifistic
material at a furious rate. Those who like to think of themselves
as anti-war or anti-imperialist might wonder what there is
left for them to say: all the war-loving imperialist hyenas
are barking for peace at the top of their leathery old lungs."
He's
wrong about Sharon. The New York Daily News reports
Ranaan Gissin, a top aide to the Iron General, opining:
"Postponing
the action to a later date would only enable Saddam to accelerate
his weapons program, and then he would pose a more formidable
threat."
And
Sharon, in declaring Iraq "the
greatest threat," boasted to the Knesset that "strategic
coordination between Israel and the United States in dealing
with Saddam Hussein's regime 'has reached unprecedented dimensions.'"
Oh, but don't worry, says Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon
Peres, far be it from us to "pressure the Bush administration
to speed up a military strike against Iraq," reports
Fox News. "The timing of such an assault is solely
a U.S. decision." Gee, that's pretty generous of them,
don't you think? But just in case the Bush administration
gets giddy with its new-found freedom of action, we have Mr.
Gissin reminding us that "Any postponement of an attack on
Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give
him [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program
of weapons of mass destruction." If the Israelis are skeptical
about anything, it's over whether Bush will really ignore
the best advice of the US military, and override the considered
opinion of his closest advisors, in order to kowtow to Israel's
pro-war lobby.
Oh, but never mind that: the Vanity Fair school of
interventionism isn't too particular about details. Kissinger
may be, in The Hitch's inimitable phrase, "a one-man
rolling crime wave," but this newly-minted neocon is
a veritable tsunami of oh-so-fashionable warmongering. Having
gone in search of "a respectable radical case for eliminating
Saddam Hussein," one feels sure that, by the end of his
piece, he is almost certain to find it.
His
angle is to examine "the motives of the anti-war establishment,"
he says, and naturally all those "leathery-lunged"
baddies are impure of heart, unlike the heroic Hitch:
"The
Saudis do not want an Americanised Iraq because it might favour
the Shia Muslim majority, which in turn might favour Iran,
and they also know that with Iraqi oil back on stream their
own near-monopoly position – the profits of which have been
used to finance bin Ladenism worldwide – would be much diminished."
An
"Americanized" Iraq? Don't hold your breath. If
that country were conquered and admitted to the Union tomorrow,
it would be about as "Americanized" as Afghanistan
is now, i.e. not at all, unto eternity. As for the Saudis
"near-monopoly" on oil: lefties are notoriously
ignorant when it comes to economics, but there ain't no such
thing as a "near-monopoly" – either you got one,
or you don't. In
the case of the Saudis, it's the latter. The price of
oil has been plummeting
because of an over-supply, and that's the whole reason
for the Kingdon's current economic crisis. (And the crisis
of the Western oil majors, by the way, who would be the real
beneficiaries of the conquest of Iraq. But, then, The Hitch
doesn't mind being in their camp, as long as he isn't
in Kissinger's…..)
As
for the Saudis being responsible for financing "Bin Ladenism
worldwide" – has there ever been a more tenuous, less
convincing conspiracy theory than this one? It's the thesis
of The
Forbidden Truth, the worst-written book of the last
50 years, and one that points an accusing finger at … the
Bush family, in league with a nebulous cabal of corporate
insiders, as the secret collaborators with terrorism. Naturally,
the Left loves to hear this stuff: it's all a capitalist plot,
you see….
The
slickness of Hitchens' presentation is that, as in the Kosovo
war, this sort of warmongering is done under the rubric of
humanitarian concern for an oppressed minority group, in this
case the Kurds:
"The
Turks are hostile to the idea because it would almost inevitably
extend the area of Iraqi Kurdistan that is currently ruled
by its own inhabitants, who abut the restive Kurdish zone
of Turkey."
But
if Kurdistan is now ruled by the Kurds, then why-oh-why do
they need to be "liberated"? Perhaps Hitch is too
sozzled, or too hypnotized by the rhythm of his own illogic
to notice that he's making a complete fool out of himself.
He barrels merrily onward, drunk with the idea that all his
old enemies will just hate this war and wouldn't that be lovely:
"A
sizeable chunk of the American military and business elite
is peacenik as well, either because it fears damage to its
polished and expensive arsenal or because it fears the disruption
of Opec and the corresponding loss of business and revenue.
Jordan's operetta monarchy thinks that it might fall if Iraq
is attacked and – even though this collapse might give an
opportunity for cleansing the West Bank in the confusion –
the Israeli hard-liners are sceptical also."
Ah,
yes, the "peacenik" epithet – spoken like a true
neocon! From Trotskyism to warmongering is such a short distance
to travel: how long before the American Enterprise Institute
honors The Hitch with a celebratory
dinner or the
White House confers on him a Medal of Freedom. We are
witnessing the birth of yet another neoconservative literary
celebrity. He's less boring than Norman Podhoretz (but, then
again, who isn't?), and a lot more photogenic than Irving
Kristol. His memoirs will be published in three drearily self-infatuated
volumes, with an introduction by
some neocon drone comparing him to Orwell and an afterword
by Donald Rumsfeld thanking him for services rendered. In
his dotage, he'll be dragged out every so often to utter a
few witticisms over the ruins of the latest country we've
"bombed out of the Stone Ages," as The Hitch once
quipped after our glorious Afghan victory.
Like
all neocons, Hitchens' idea of an army is that it doesn't
really consist of individual persons: it is, in his phrase,
a "polished and expensive arsenal," entirely expendable
in the pursuit of ideals best defined by intellectuals such
as himself and his friends. It is the old Leninist dream,
reborn in American triumphalism, and hailed by the former
followers of the founder of the Red Army. Oh well, Red,
or red-white-and-blue – what difference does it make? It's
the Revolution that counts.
It's
important to people like Hitchens that they see themselves
as revolutionaries, crusaders against bourgeois conventions,
or, at least, against the conventional wisdom:
"Shall
we just say that the anti-war position is the respectable
status quo one? That's interesting in itself. Who would be
the beneficiaries of an intervention, always supposing it
went well and Saddam's vaunted army fought no better than
it did the last time? Only the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples.
Well, from the Kissinger-Saudi-Turkish viewpoint, and from
the vantage of the Dallas boardroom, where is the fun in that?
The consequences might be – if we employ the revealing word
of choice among the conservatives – 'destabilising'."
That
anyone could write such drivel with a straight face would
be impossible, which perhaps explains Hitchens' permanent
smirk. To speak of the beneficiaries of this war without mentioning
Israel seems rather too obvious. For what about all those
infamous "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam is
supposed to have constructed out of matchsticks and smuggled
Crazy Glue during a decade of draconian sanctions? Will they
be aimed at London? Los Angeles? Tel Aviv, it seems to me,
is a far more likely target – and the Israelis seem to agree,
as indicated
by their furious
war preparations
and their relentless
lobbying for a U.S. strike, the sooner the better.
The
benefits of not living under Saddam may indeed be outweighed
by the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives: I'll
leave that kind of amoral calculus to Hitchens and his fellow
neo-Leninists. As for the fate of the Kurds: it will be sealed
if and when this war commences. For all Hitchens' pious concern
for this much-oppressed people, a war would threaten the de
facto independence the Kurds have already won. The weakening
of Baghdad as a centralizing force has ceded most of northern
Iraq to the two major Kurdish factions. A war would upset
the status quo by bringing in Turkey, and, as Hitchens complains,
usher in "a centralised Sunni Muslim military regime."
No wonder they aren't exactly rushing to embrace their would-be
"liberators."
Being
both a leftist and an insufferable snob confers certain immunities,
one of them being a complete indifference to the economic
consequences of war. Oh, those terrible people in those
Dallas boardrooms will suffer, supposedly, "loss of business
and revenue" – how crass of them to complain! But what
about when the US military "Americanizes" the Iraqi
oil fields – does he think the Joint Chiefs are going to go
into the oil business? The Western oil majors will profit
both short-term and long-term, since war will drive
the price of oil through the roof – and, ultimately, deliver
a rich prize into their hands. Big Oil won't suffer from this
war: ordinary people, who have to drive to work, will pay
the price at the gas pump, and in the tax increase that is
sure to come no matter which party is defiling the White House.
Can
it be that Hitchens doesn't understand this – or is this just
his way of announcing that he's sold his pen to the highest
bidder?
In
his brief against what he calls "pacifist realpolitik,"
Hitchens brings to the Iraq debate what he brought to the
debate over the conquest of Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade
– loud jeering at the anti-war opposition. It's not a pretty
sight, but it's one we've seen repeated endlessly: ex-leftists
morphing into warmongers of a particularly monstrous stripe,
the sort who glory in the prospect of the destabilizing aspects
of war and laugh at the qualms of grizzled generals who have
looked Death in the face. Isabel
Paterson, an acerbic libertarian writer of the 1940s,
had Hitchens' sort pegged in her classic 1943 book, The
God of the Machine. In the chapter entitled "The
Humanitarian with the Guillotine," she wrote:
"Certainly
the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading
settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants
would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers
with good intentions."
Pointing
to the Western Stalinists, whose hosannas to the Soviet Union
dominated the intellectual world when Paterson's book was
published, she averred:
"We
have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions
of his own people to starvation, admired by philanthropists
whose declared aim is to see to it that everyone in the world
has a quart of milk."
The
spectacle, in all its peculiarity, rolls on. Hitchens has
his own softness for Stalin & Co., as chronicled in a
new book by Martin Amis, Koba
the Dread, in which Amis
takes Hitchens to task for calling Lenin "a great
man, and, toward the end, addresses his old friend directly:
"So
it is still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more
distance between yourself and these events than you do, with
your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted discipleship
of Trotsky ... Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is
meaningless without an admiration for terror. They would not
want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration
for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom"
Ah,
the humanitarian with a guillotine would reply, but there
is no freedom without the terror. Whether "left"
or "right," neo-Leninist or neocon, our war-birds
are uniformly shrikes.
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