Left, Right, Left, Right
Patrick Marnham
REGIME CHANGE by Christopher Hitchens Penguin, £5.99, pp. 104, ISBN 0141015675 1 nthis collection of republished polemics, Christopher Hitchens sets out his case for supporting the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. 'At the risk of seeming ridiculous,' he notes in a specially written introduction, 'I want to begin by saying that I have tried to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I am setting this down, without any throat-clearing or on-the-side wagering, to see how it holds up a few weeks from now.' Regular readers of Hitchens who know him as one of the most talented polemicists on the American Left will enjoy the journalistic risks such an undertaking involves, particularly when they have the additional pleasure of watching him enter the lists in defence of George W. Bush.
The kernel of Hitchens's argument, mostly published in Slate, the on-line magazine, between November and April last, is that it was meet, right and just to overthrow the Baath regime because Saddam Hussein was a very bad man who had murdered thousands of Kurds. This defence neatly sidesteps the wider debate about weapons of mass destruction, the completion of the UN inspection programme, the necessity of multilateral action, the growth of US 'imperialism', the war against terror, the existence of other very bad men, and so on. Saddam Hussein had to go because he was literally a neo-Nazi with a record as a genocidal mass murderer. And, since the US was the only power capable of ousting him, American motives were finally irrelevant. Hitchens appears to accept that under a neo-conservative leadership the USA today is an imperial power but he does not hesitate to support an imperialism that is acting against 'evil'. (It is always refreshing to see a left-wing polemicist endorsing the concept of personal 'evil', aka original sin.) Hitchens has been a loyal friend to the Kurds for many years and was a witness to the after-effects of Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks in 1991. So his support for Bush the Younger is consistent with an honourable personal commitment. Nonetheless his reasons for supporting the war appear to have little to do with the Bush administration's reasons for waging it. Embracing the Beast on page 1, line 2, Hitchens introduces his new hero Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, and something of a cult figure as the original for one of the characters in Saul Bellow's Rave/stein, It is of course Mr Wolfowitz who, since Regime Change went to press, has described the 'weapons of mass destruction' motive for attacking Iraq as 'a bureaucratic pretext'. The real reason for the war, he now says, was to enable America to move its military bases out of Saudi Arabia. This frank admission will have done little to ease Washington's relationship with the Iraqi pre-war opposition whose interests Hitchens is so passionate to defend. Apart from which Mr Wolfowitz's 'bureaucratic pretext' was of course the only legal basis for the war. But waging a little illegal war has always been a small price to pay for a major increase in imperial power, as Hitchens would normally be the first to point out.
In the course of his onslaught Hitchens dishes up 20th-century history with zest. Charles de Gaulle, who makes an early appearance on a list between Salazar and Papadopoulos, reappears as morally superior to Roosevelt. Hitchens later suggests that the second world war would have been avoided if the Comintern's Popular Front had persuaded Britain, France and Russia to attack Hitler and Mussolini at an early moment, ignoring the fact that at that time Britain had no army, France had no air force and Stalin's forces were still being trained and armed by the Wehrmacht.
What does not hold up so well in reprint is the tone of his argument. Unlike the modern US military, Hitchens does not favour 'smart bombs'. He is the General Curtis LeMay of the intellectual bombardment. Hitchens's opponents are a mixed bunch. We include the Democratic party, the Vatican, most Christians (unless they are Chaldean or Nestorian Catholics), President Chirac, the Arab world, Aridl Sharon, Noam Chomsky, old Europeans, 78 per cent of French opinion and 92.4 per cent of the Spanish, as well as political mavericks, pacifists and anti-Americans, but we have a universal tendency to 'whimper' — or moan, bleat, dither, snigger or waffle. A little judicious abuse certainly helps the polemic along, but if you are writing for posterity it is unusual to treat everyone who disagrees with you as a fool or a knave.
Arabs who opposed the war were not inevitably 'friends of Saddam', as Hitchens suggests. A significant body of opinion in Cairo, Damascus. Ramallah and of course Baghdad, opposed despotism and was in favour of regime change. It would have accepted a UN-sponsored war but did not want an earlier US operation that established the United States as a regional power installing its own model of democracy and awarding itself a contract to rebuild the spiritual and cultural centre of the Arab world. The real argument was between those like Hitchens who favoured a gung-ho US attack and 'stuff the Security Council', and those who believed that the principles of multilateralism and respect for self-determination were worth a sixmonth wait in implementing regime change. It is still too early to say to what extent Bush has been playing al-Qaeda's game, and whether or not Washington has finally ripped off Ariel Sharon's figleaf. But it is surely already clear that 'regime change' never did equal 'civilising mission'. Passionate support for the Kurds was never enough. It was not only important that Saddam Hussein was pushed, it was essential that he was pushed by the right hands.
Only in the lengthy Epilogue to this collection does Hitchens hit his normal form as an essayist. Reporting from Safwan with the Muslim Red Crescent, and far from the spooky presence of Mr Wolfowitz, he is honest enough to record the persistent support for Saddam Hussein and the appalling complications of the post-war relief effort. Irrelevant jokes and wellselected anecdotes at last jostle with a fine reporter's perceptions.
My own, old European, view is that Regime Change is actually a significant engagement in a much longer war, the war between the Hitchenses. Whereas 'rabid, right-wing' Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday proved to be a stout opponent of President Bush and swiftly identified the US imperial adventure as 'a left-wing war', his brother Christopher, one-time literary editor of International Socialism, shows that he could have a bright future as a Republican party Alastair Campbell. Unfortunately I never met their mother, but Mrs Hitchens must be a remarkable woman and I like to think of her as a tight-rope artiste or a superb tango dancer. I believe that were she to intervene today she would say, 'That's enough Kurds, Christopher, it's time to meet more Arabs.'
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