Bush taped to their windshield. The thought of America on the side of a liberation movement occurred to Hitchens then, for the first time. The idea was that Hitchens had sold out for the sake of celebrity and dinner invitations.
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, , 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. It was brilliant at times, shallow at times, badly organized, gratuitously tendentious, and debaterly rather than scholarly.
The whole consideration of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil little men. The whole life of Falwell shows that this is an actual danger to democracy, to culture, to civilization. For Hitchens it was a kind of apotheosis.
He stood alone, apart from Left and Right, in alliance only with the truth. It was also a last hurrah, and a melancholy one—because last hurrahs are by their nature melancholy, and because although Hitchens sounded sharp and agile when he was on television, he looked tired and bloated.
He had help getting it wrong. Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, and Paul Wolfowitz, whose ultimate loyalties were to their own interests or delusions rather than to the truth or the American public, gave him a way to believe that the American government was finally going to put aside its cynical pursuit of self-interest abroad and seek justice instead.
And he was given a push by the ghost of his father and the ghosts of the unnamed legions of stolid, stoic, noble British men who for centuries had shipped out to fight for the West in the name of patriotism and civilization. Hitchens was also betrayed by history. If Henry Kissinger had come out for the war earlier rather than later, Hitchens might have thought twice. If George W. Hitchens, however, ultimately failed himself.
He was too much the romantic, too much the contrarian, and too much the narcissist to chart out the ways that history might fail to conform to his desires. His bullshit detector, which had served him so well for so long, somehow failed to properly take the measure of George Bush.
What could have saved Hitchens was blind luck. Or blind loyalty—to the Left, to his editor, to his colleagues, to his old anti-imperialism.
But luck failed him, and his method, which was designed to outwit the failings of every other method, led him astray. Even Vaclav Havel can be wrong. Even George Orwell, it turns out, can be wrong, or we can be wrong about Orwell. Excerpted from "Exit Right" by Daniel Oppenheimer. Published by Simon and Schuster. He argued in the Slate piece that the U. S has been involved in Iraq at least since , when the CIA played a role in the coup that later brought Hussein's Baath Party to power.
In the decades that followed, Hitchens noted, came the Gulf War, sanctions, and the passing of the Iraq Liberation Act of Hitchens not only continued to assert he was right, but from the start of the war, he openly mocked its critics -- in an April Slate piece , "Giving Peace a Chance," and in the weeks and months to come.
He not only defended the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, but dismissed the arguments of those opposed to it as being on the wrong side of history, according to a Nation write-up of the event.
If the antiwar contingent had had its way over the years, Hitchens argued, "Kuwait would still be the nineteenth province of Iraq, the ethnic cleansing of Kurdistan would have gone unpunished, Bosnia would now be part of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would be another cleansed howling wilderness and the Taliban would still be the government of Afghanistan.
For another eight years -- long after the "short" war was supposed to have ended -- Hitchens argued that the invasion was the right thing to do and justified given the history of the United States and Iraq. If decades from now, historians view Hitchens favorably when it comes to his arguments for war in Iraq, it will no doubt be an outcome he expected.
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