Hitchens is in the house: count the forks and spoons. posted by Richard Seymour

The "Downing Street palimpsests"; a tissue of lies. A conspiratorial thriller without thrill and, in the end, without proven conspiracy. A rag passed out among snotty internet nerds, to catch their effluviations. The Downing Street memo was noteworthy only for "its niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems". This is Hitchens' verdict on the Downing Street memo . To which you will say, 'so?' So this: a couple of years after Hitchens made his lamentable pact with the Dark Side, Stefan Collini wrote a very witty piece in which Hitchens was compared to a fox-hunter - cheeks red with English blood, eyes flashing as he gallops full-speed through Albion's fields and meadows, a blush of pleasure mantling his face as he goes in for the kill... On this evidence, however, Hitchens is unhorsed and the fox has long since got away.

Here, for the perplexed, is the key passage from the DSM:

C [Richard Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

So, war was "inevitable", not a last resort . And the intelligence and facts were being "fixed around" this policy.

Hitchens' take:

Well, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what does. We apparently have an administration that can, on the word of a British clerk, "fix" not just findings but also "facts." Never mind for now that the English employ the word "fix" in a slightly different way — a better term might have been "organized."

For Hitchens, the word 'fixed' is a "solecism", which is to say that it was written in error and constitutes an offense against etiquette (presumably for refusing the rustic argot of the Foreign Office). He doesn't like the meaning of what was written, so he must stipulate for anxious readers what the "junior note-taker" meant. Honey, please - he said fixed, he meant fixed. Extruding a bit of minute linguistic analysis from a reasonably straightforward paragraph is a tediously transparent way to divert the issue. Bush planned war, but told anyone who listened that it was a "last resort" and that no decision had been made to go to war. Indeed, we have been led to believe that the decision was made on account of French intransigence, or on account of Saddam's unwillingness even to smile prettily and bat his eyes at Bush - as Hitchens once put it, Saddam Hussein could have bought his regime a fresh lease on its ghastly life if he had been even slightly willing to "make nice" . This memo says that the Bush administration planned war, and was shaping/fixing/organising intelligence and facts to support that policy. All subsequent serenading of the UN and 'the international community' (whatever that is supposed to be) was therefore fraudulent.

The next step is a non-sequitur. If the memo doesn't prove that Bush had a war planned well in advance and was therefore lying when he claimed to hold it a "last resort", Hitchens is nevertheless bewildered:

Who is there who does not know that the Bush administration decided after September 2001 to change the balance of power in the region and to enforce the Iraq Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, which made it overt American policy to change the government of Iraq?

The decision to go to war may be arguably a logical corrolary of the Iraq Liberation Act, or at least congruent with it, but it had nothing to do with 9/11 or enforcing the ILA. I cite from the Act :

Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of United States Armed Forces (except as provided in section 4(a)(2)) in carrying out this Act.

Now, go check section 4(a)(2) and see if invasion is mentioned. Hitchens then goes on to mention the reasons he felt legalistic objections to the war were wrong, and why he feels invading was right (Rwanda, Bosnia - but never Somalia, Vietnam or... well, you list them). This doesn't bear on the question of whether Bush lied the world into war, and Hitchens does not exactly riot in eloquence on the matter of his views, so I won't detain you with that.

Suffice to say, that's sort of it as far as argument about the DSM goes. There is certainly a great deal of rhetorical tricks, sleight-of-hand knock-off jobs that any fool could spot within five seconds. There's some giggling about the US left taking its cue from "the most reactionary institution of the British state" (and the Pentagon is the vanguard of progressive virtue?). There is what I suppose is intended to be the telling juxtaposition of different sorts of 'conspiracy theories', linked by the sort of anfractuous logic that informs Horowitz's "Discover the Network". There is the casual minimisation ("junior note-taker"), a ruse known to every political hoodlum and charlatan in the business (cf Perle trying to downplay the importance of government documents in debate with Chomsky, who enjoyed the noteworthy advantage of having read them - a trick Hitchens could learn next time he wants to cite some Act or other). There is the insinuation that the war had something to do with 9/11, although the relationship is painfully and poorly adumbrated. (Yes yes yes, 9/11 forced Bush to realise he had to democratise the Arab world, in alliance with his friends, Crown Prince Abdullah and President for Life Hosni Mubarak). And, once again, the tic that will never fade or die, the insistence that his opponents are subsumed into the establishment, while he, a contrarian loner fuelled by whisky and argument, represents an embattled position. He, with allies no more powerful than President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, is living "at a slight angle to society" as he explains to his Young Contrarian.

"Popinjay", did Galloway say? It would be hard to be so pestered with a popinjay. This one's a barfly, an obnoxious ex-fighter whose talent has subsided into a flabby mound of belligerence, a Barnie Gumble who found his calling too late in life, a creepy wastrel cheering on a creepy sub-Straussian sect. That's a closing statement.