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. 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. Until then, his work fit roughly within the
conventions of the left. 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.
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. 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. As late as 1998, Hitchens hated Bill
Clinton much more than Osama bin Laden. 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. Wag the dog, not Islamofascism, was the cardinal sin, the scandal
that got Hitchens to the keyboard.
By 2000, he had embraced Naderism, finding nothing
significant to distinguish Bush from Gore, and explicitly refusing to accept
the lesser evil. 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.
Two years later, after 9/11 and the overthrow of the
Taliban, with the U.S. 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. 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. 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. 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. Bush taped to
their windshield. The thought of America on the side of a liberation movement
occurred to Hitchens then, for the first time. It didn’t change his position on
the war, but it planted a seed.
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. 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. 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. apartment.
Some of his critics on the left, the former devotees
of “Minority Report,” accused Hitchens of currying favor with the
powerful—specifically, with those in the Bush Administration who were leading
the war effort. The idea was that Hitchens had sold out for the sake of
celebrity and dinner invitations. I don’t buy it—in spite of his
well-established attraction to fame and fortune. So why did he throw himself
with complete zeal into the idea of the war, breaking with so many old
comrades, often with relish?
One reason was his hatred of religion. September 11,
2001, put Hitchens in touch with the molten anti-clericalism that was one of
his elemental passions. It burned so hot that he turned it without a second
thought at a secular, totalitarian Iraqi dictator. 9/11 gave Hitchens a sense
of purpose like nothing since that early intimation, the Rushdie fatwa. It
propelled him straight through the last, most productive, most visible decade
of his life.
The second reason is a little
murkier. He was, by his own lights and that of his admirers, a thoroughgoing
contrarian. (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. Bush. It breathed new
life into Hitchens, his persona, and his prose.
He and I argued a lot about the war. 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. In turn, his brave talk of sticking by his “comrades” in Baghdad rang
false to me. Who were they, after all? Exiled politicians whose sectarian
agendas helped take Iraq into a terrible civil war. The only comrades worthy of
the name that I knew were those who had risked their lives for the American
effort—the Iraqis who were betrayed by Bush, and have been betrayed again by
Obama.
Iraq led Hitchens to some of his worst indulgences—the
propaganda trip to Iraq in Wolfowitz’s entourage, the pose of Byronic heroism.
But perhaps the war and the enemies it made him helped give Hitchens the
courage of his last years and months—the atheist in the foxhole. Hitchens was
one of the very few people who could slash and burn you in print, then meet for
drinks and talk in the true warmth of friendship, discussing a writer we both
admired, garrulous to the very last. It was a sign of his essential decency
that he didn’t make it personal.
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