Hitchens on Zarqawi posted by Richard Seymour

Norman Finkelstein has suggested that Christopher Hitchens saw 9/11 as an opportunity to get out of the Left, a disaffiliation he had apparently been considering for some time. In his interview with Johann Hari , he describes how as early as the mid-1990s he found neoconservatives more inclined to his views on foreign policy than the left. He had also explained some years before 9/11 that the 'game of socialism' was over. If true, this would explain the jaw-dropping hyperbole, slander and fabulation that has characterised Hitchens' writing since.

To illustrate the former, I offer a few highlights from Hitchens' latest from the Mirror, entitled 'The New Enemy of Humanity':

1) "JUST try this thought: what if the battle against Abu Musad [sic] al-Zarqawi is now more significant than the hunt for Osama bin Laden?

Consider: bin Laden hasn't been heard of, even in one of those scratchy and inconclusive audiotapes of his, for many moons."

2) "The last part of that might be the most significant one: a letter carried by a known Zarqawi associate, with the excellent name of Ghul, was intercepted some months ago. It was addressed to bin Laden, and it proposed that the easiest way to destroy any post-war settlement in Iraq was to incite a civil war between Sunni and Shia."

3) "Until recently, it has been surprisingly easily accepted that there is scant evidence for any tie between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But it begins to look rather as if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in person and in action, IS that tie."

Several remarks suggest themselves, so I'll deal with them ordinally, as above.

1 Whatever one thinks of the hyping of bin Laden's reputation, the suggestion that the threat from al-Zarqawi is so great as to exceed that posed by Al Qaeda is palpably absurd. One way of expressing this point is to note that the Bush administration knew the whereabouts of Zarqawi's base in Kurdish controlled Iraq, had much greater access to it than anywhere else in Iraq, and chose not to destroy it. Further, of 3000 resistance attacks against occupation forces, only six can be attributed with certainty to Zarqawi . It is even questionable whether al-Zarqawi is actually operating in al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. Noone has claimed to see him alive since 2001. Tawhid wal-Jihad do not even account for the entirety of the 'foreign fighters' alleged to be operating in Iraq, but even those account for only 5-10% of the overall resistance force according to coalition sources. (This estimate was made before the dramatic growth of the domestic resistance in Fallujah, Najaf and elsewhere).

2 The reports of a letter on a CD being kept on or near the person of Hassan Ghul when he was arrested earlier this year have been contradictory, probably for the excellent reason that they are untrue. For instance, while the New York Times reported that the discovery of this document coincided with the arrest of Hassan Ghul, and was located in a suspected Al Qaeda 'safe house' in Baghdad (this was the line from intelligence officials) on its way to be delivered to bin Laden in Afghanistan, the reports :

Hassan Ghul, described as the most senior associate of Osama bin Laden found in Iraq, was picked up last week in the northern part of the country by Kurdish forces, the official said. "He was a senior facilitator who was caught coming into the country," the official said. [Emphasis added]

If he was on his way out of Iraq to deliver the letter, it seems strange that he was also sneaking into the country. This inconsistency, I might add, is replicated across several reports - and all of them cite intelligence officials. Further, for reasons I now come to, the idea that this one-legged, possibly dead Jihadist is serenading Al Qaeda is counterintuitive and highly improbable.

3 Even Donald Rumsfeld has given up on any connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda . The CIA report that they can find no compelling evidence of a link even between Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. But the story of Zarqawi, who is after all supposed to have been Al Qaeda's "ambassador" to Iraq, militates against such a view in any case. The first obstacle is the fact that Zarqawi has always operated independently of bin Laden, and, according to al-Tauhid suspects arrested in Germany in the late 1990s (al Tauhid was a group working under Zarqawi at the time), he is a rival of bin Laden, not an ally. That is, his goal was to provide an alternative to bin Laden's outfit, not to work with it. The most likely ideological difference is that bin Laden's group has disapproved of attacks on co-religionists - they have even gone so far as to issue apologies where their attacks have caused 'Muslim collateral damage'. Zarqawi, by contrast, appears to be profoundly anti-Shi'ite and, if he is indeed associated with Tawhid wal Jihad, could hardly be accused of going soft on his brethren. (Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, 2003, pp 270-1). The second hurdle is that, while Hitchens discusses Zarqawi's alleged activities in the Kurdish controlled North, he does so very much in the manner of Colin Powell in early 2003, ignoring the fact that the group he was then working with - Ansar al-Islam - was an anti-Saddam Islamist faction. Indeed, even Colin Powell has since paused to acknowledge that there was no 'smoking gun' about this alleged collaboration - uncharacteristically, Powell riots in understatement.

Indeed, intelligence experts have ridiculed the claims made in this regard by Bush administration officials, so devoutly echoed by Hitchens:

"Militarily, their statements are almost absurd," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security and military intelligence expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is no evidence of activity … by extremist terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaida."

Administration officials have admitted that there never was any solid evidence of such a connection. Indeed, the 9/11 commission went so far as to suggest that if bin Laden was interested in such an alliance, it was roundly rejected by the Iraqi government.


The only story that obtains here is that so far there is no solid proof that a) Zarqawi is even still alive, b) he operates in Iraq as a leader of Tawhid wal-Jihad, c) that he has ever had any contact with Saddam Hussein much less worked with him, d) that he has ever had any connection with Osama bin Laden. On the contrary, most reliable evidence suggests that a) if Zarqawi is alive and operating in Iraq, he represents a minute anti-Shi'ite bloc of extremist Wahabbis rather than a significant component of the resistance, b) he is bin Laden's rival, not his ally and, c) he worked against Hussein, not on his behalf. That, of course, is in the realm of hard evidence, now foreign territory to the once redoubtable Hitchens. Almost every single story that has emerged as 'final proof' of that ill-starred special relationship between bin Laden and Hussein is demolished in short order. There was no Prague meeting , as Czech intelligence officials confirmed at the time. Numerous other shocking tales have collapsed with similar speed.

It does not require even half an education to guess why Hitchens feels obliged to adduce flimsy evidence and extrapolate fanciful conclusions from it. At all costs, the 'war on terror' must be just, and how could it be more just than if the current war had been initiated by Hussein's perfidy, and if indeed the threat now posed within Iraq by Zarqawi is even greater than the menace of bin Laden. It is deflating to see Hitchens reduced to such lifeless shibboleths and gimcrack foolishness, and the only bright side is that his position as a Washington propagandist is so transparent that only the wilfully purblind could possibly be taken in.