Christopher Hitchens' "Existential Despair". posted by Richard Seymour

In a rather foolish and self-flattering article for the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal the Late Christopher Hitchens makes interesting meat of the Fallujah atrocities. Yes, these pictures are "Dantesque", but after all, "a broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what", because of the way that Saddam and his regime had been "playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite", thus preparing the way for "a Hobbesian state of affairs". (The language of Hobbes in this context is rather revealing, since that is exactly the language of neocons like Robert Kagan who like to pretend that the US is the vanguard of order in a disorderly world. Does Hitchens now believe this?)

And Hitchens plays seer:

"[W]ho knows what the death-throes of the regime would have been like? We are entitled, on past experience, to guess. There could have been deliberate conflagrations started in the oilfields. There might have been suicidal lunges into adjacent countries. The place would certainly have become a playground for every kind of nihilist and fundamentalist. The intellectual and professional classes, already gravely attenuated, would have been liquidated entirely."


Who indeed knows, Christopher? Who besides Hitchens would have the chutzpah to bewail the conditions of an imaginary future (apparently unavoidable except through war) which already exist in the present, thanks to the war? Hitchens also has a complaint about the fact that we may no longer cite WMDs as a valid pre-war concern:

"Prescience, though, has now become almost punishable ... Given Saddam's record in both using and concealing weapons of mass destruction, and given his complicity--at least according to Mr. Clarke--with those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and with those running Osama bin Laden's alleged poison factory in Sudan, any president who did not ask about a potential Baathist link to terrorism would be impeachably failing in his duty."

The point would be more impressive if all Bush had done was ask relevant questions. But the administration did not simply ask. They concocted, they confected, the colluded in a miasma of deception and exaggeration. They bluntly stated what they knew to be fiction:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
Dick Cheney, Speech to VFW National Convention, August 26, 2002.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld, ABC Interview, March 30, 2003.


Rumsfeld: "I Asked Him, 'Is That A WMD In Your Pocket, or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?"

"I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program."
George W. Bush, Remarks to Reporters, May 6, 2003.

(All quotations owed to Billmon .

Hitchens avers:

"It's becoming more and more plain that the moral high ground is held by those who concluded, from the events of 1991, that it was a mistake to leave Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait."

Indeed, siezing "the moral high ground" has proven something of an obsession for Hitchens as neophytic imperialist. (Ever since the Blumenthal fiasco, in fact). But I wonder if Hitchens seriously expects educated readers (which obviously doesn't include the bulk of WSJ readers) to accept that the decision to leave Saddam in power was simply a "mistake"? Could it have been related to the fact that the US preferred an Iraq that was united under Saddam as a counter-weight to Iran to a perhaps federated Iraq with a pro-Iranian government? Isn't this the reason why the US government acted so swiftly to thwart an uprising it appeared to have triggered? Why, for example, General Schwarzkopf allowed Iraq to fly helicopter gunships in areas with no coalition forces, effectively freeing them up to crush the uprising. And General Sir Peter de la Billiere obviously understood this when he said:

"The Iraqis were responsible for establishing law and order. You could not administer the country without using the helicopters." (Ibid.)

John Major put the matter even more succinctly:

"I don't recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection. We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein."(John Major on ITN, 4 April 1991)

Or, as General Brent Scowcroft had it:

"We clearly would have preferred a coup. There's no question about that." (Interview on ABC news 26 June 1997 quoted in Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam. The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris,1999), p. 19.).

Hitchens is on even better form when defending the neocons, somewhat recycling the line Anne Clwyd tried some days ago:

"People like Paul Wolfowitz are even more sinister than their mocking foes believe. They were against Saddam Hussein not just in September 2001 but as far back as the 1980s."

If this is so, perhaps Hitchens would care to explain why Rumsfeld was busy shaking Saddam Hussein's hand? Why Richard Perle as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reagan between 1981 and 1987 offered no rebuke to the flagrant support for Saddam's atrocities? Or why Paul Wolfowitz himself was busy assisting a tyrant with perhaps an even worse record than Saddam Hussein in Indonesia? If mass murder and oppression really is his concern, I mean?

Instead of pondering the transparent (if not lucid) problems of his own position, Hitchens would rather throw some questions at the antiwar movement:

"I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. Clarke's word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf War"? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?"

Very well. The answer to the first question is no. The second question is therefore rendered null. The answer to the third question is that I did know this and, oddly enough, it has absolutely nothing to add to the American case. The apparent story is that Saddam wanted to build North Korea's missiles for them - but the North Koreans stiffed him. The only remaining mystery to be cleaned up is how such a production facility could have possibly avoided detection by American sattelites? The answer to the next question is that I can't possibly say, although I'm sure that neoconservatives like former CIA director James Woolsey and Laura Mylroie of the American Enterprise Insititute are in no way ideologically motivated when they attempt to attach Saddam Hussein to this attack. In answer to the question of no-fly zones, I don't see what difference it would have made. They had become all but irrelevant in southern Iraq following the US backed suppression of the Shi'a uprising, and in the North following repeated incursions by both Turkish forces and Saddam Hussein's army (invited in by Barzani's Kurdish faction). As to our contentedness with allowing Shi'ite and Kurdish forces to "do all the fighting for us", I don't know how much worse this would be to have them do all the fighting against "us". Indeed, many Shi'ites now longer have that choice because "we" have slaughtered them and their families while wrecking their country through sanctions and war. The last question presumes a positive answer to question number one, which I have already declined to give.

So, answering him thus, what might he reply?

"I hope I do not misrepresent my opponents, but their general view seems to be that Iraq was an elective target ... This ahistorical opinion makes it appear that Saddam Hussein was a new enemy, somehow chosen by shady elements within the Bush administration, instead of one of the longest-standing foes with which the United States, and indeed the international community, was faced."

And let us give Hitchens some merit here. It is, of course, not the case that Hussein suddenly became an enemy in 2001. No, that happened in 1990. But the circumstances of the choice to wage war are revealing in that respect. The Project for the New American Century, a far right think-tank for whom Hitchens may consider writing some time, was screaming for an invasion as far back as 1998. Indeed, the first thing Donald Rumsfeld, a signatory to the PNAC, did when confronted with the destruction of New York and the Pentagon was to exploit it for such political capital:

" ... best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at the same time, not just UBL ... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Irony abounds at Hitchens' expense. Hussein had indeed been a chosen target of neoconservatives for some time, and they were content to usurp the agony of 9/11 to accomplish their geo-strategic goals. It was, in other words, "an elective target".

And Hitchens finishes with the sort of depraved casuistry he is always so eager to spot in his opponents:

"Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand."

Hitchens could do with a drink and a reminder that this is what the present looks like under conditions of apparent success. It is a direct result of a successful war, which ended with the successful over-running of an entire country, the appropriation of its political command and its economy. This was not an inevitable future, as he alleges, but a fact of life under the occupation. "Credit belongs", Hitchens suggests, to those who "accepted ... this long-term responsibility". Indeed, those who shoulder the white man's burden do "veil the threat of terror" even when "sloth and heathen Folly/ bring all your hopes to nought". They do "reap his old reward:/ The blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard". Credit to them, indeed. Credit them with Fallujah, with Baghdad and Najaf . Credit them with ten thousand ghosts . Credit them with a cluster of atrocities here, and a rifle of killings there. Why not, indeed. Credulous where it's due.