Juan Cole: Christopher Hitchens' last battle (demolishes Hitchens)

Christopher Hitchens' last battle
The British hawk gives 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. He goes 0 for 10.
By Juan Cole

Sept. 3, 2005 | Bush administration foot-dragging and ineptitude in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has profoundly demoralized his supporters on the right. The hawkish intellectuals who gathered around George W. Bush to support his "War on Terror" once used language that suggested his machine-like omnicompetence. The Afghanistan War was to be "Operation Infinite Justice" until it was pointed out that Allah was the only one in that part of the world generally permitted to use that kind of language. The images of civilians abandoned to their fates and unchecked looting from New Orleans, however, reminded everyone of Bush's disastrous policies in Iraq, and suggested a pattern of criminal incompetence.

These bellicose intellectuals--a band of Wilsonian idealists, cutthroat imperial capitalists, Trotskyites bereft of a cause, and neo-patriots traumatized by Sept. 11 are now increasingly divided and full of mutual recriminations. Among them all, the combative British essayist Christopher Hitchens continues most forcefully to uphold the case for the war, most recently in a piece for the Weekly Standard.

In contrast, this week Francis Fukuyama, long since upbraided by History for his Hegelian fantasies concerning the end of History, openly castigated the Iraq war as an unfortunate detour in the War on Terror, in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Hitchens, fighting a rear-guard battle against public disillusionment with the war, suggested 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. His essay appeared the week after George W. Bush launched his own public relations crusade for "staying the course" in the face of the media attention given to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a U.S. soldier killed in the war. (Hitchens dismisses her campaign as "the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates.") The campaign was a dud, derailed by dithering in Baghdad over a never-finished constitution and continued mayhem and U.S. deaths. Bush's alarmed handlers are looking at polling numbers on his performance as president and on his handling of Iraq that are heading so far south that they'll soon be embedded in the wilting Antarctic ice shelf.

It is sad to see Hitchens reduced to publishing in the Weekly Standard, intellectually the weakest of the right-wing propaganda fronts for the new class of billionaires created by the excesses of corporate consolidation in recent decades (it is owned by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch). It is even sadder to see this grotesque, almost baroque, essay carom from one extravagant argument to another, miring itself in a series of gross fallacies and elementary errors in logic. I have read Hitchens for decades and usually admire his acute wit, his command of detail, his polemical gifts, and his contrarian sense of ethics, even when we disagree. He must surely know, however, that his argument for the Iraq misadventure is growing weaker every day, since he clearly does not any longer care to defend it rigorously.

(much more)

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/05/hitchens/index.html