Ian Buruma's scathing review of Hitch-22

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/believer/?pagination=false

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Weapons of mass destruction did not clinch the argument for Hitchens. For even if it could have been proved that Saddam had none, he writes, “I would have argued—did in fact argue—that this made it the perfect time to hit him ruthlessly and conclusively.” Since 2001, in the mind of Hitchens, was like 1939, he skates over any distinction between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and talks blithely about “the Saddamist–Al Qaeda alliance.” So keen was he to be among the liberators, and so attracted to the heroic gesture, that both his moral compass and his journalistic instincts began to seriously let him down.

In an earlier phase of his career, Hitchens tells us, “I resolved to try and resist in my own life the jaded reaction that makes one coarsened to the ugly habits of power.” Quite right too. He was also commendably staunch about the use of torture by the British in Northern Ireland. A Labour minister who defended torture as a necessary measure is called “a bullying dwarf.” Hitchens writes: “Everybody knows the creepy excuses that are always involved here: ‘terrorism’ must be stopped, lives are at stake, the ‘ticking bomb’ must be intercepted.” What on earth was this same Hitchens thinking, then, when he adopted Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as his new good friend?

Hitchens was so smitten with George W. Bush’s Pentagon, despite its connivance at torture, that he appears to have believed everything he was told: “In all my discussions with Wolfowitz and his people at the Pentagon, I never heard anything alarmist on the WMD issue.” To be sure, Wolfowitz has since admitted that oil was a major reason for going to war, and the threat of WMDs was just a convenient “bureaucratic” excuse. But his Pentagon boss certainly was alarmist about the nuclear threat, as were the President and the Vice President. In claiming that there was no alarmism at the Pentagon, Hitchens is either disingenuous or a lousy reporter.

He appears to want it both ways, however. On the one hand, WMDs didn’t matter, and on the other he wants us to believe that they were indeed a threat, and what is more, that he, Hitchens, found proof of this. UN inspectors under Hans Blix looked at five hundred sites in Iraq without coming up with any evidence of WMDs before they were recalled. But Hitchens dismisses these as “very feeble ‘inspections.’” Blix must have been very feeble indeed, for Hitchens, on one trip to Baghdad, in the company of Paul Wolfowitz, was shown components of a gas centrifuge dug up from the back garden of Saddam’s chief physicist. And he was told by the US Defense Department that “some of the ingredients of a chemical weapon” had been found under a mosque.


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Again, the narcissism, the narrow scale of characters, and the parochial perspective are startling: “We were the only ones to see 1968 coming.” It is as if the central focus of the Iraq war was about scores to be settled between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky or Edward Said. It is odd that in all his lengthy accounts of the war, the name of Dick Cheney is mentioned only once (because he happened to share the same dentist with Hitchens). What is utterly missing is a sense of perspective, and of the two qualities Hitchens claims to prize above all: skepticism and irony. A skeptic would not answer the question whether he blamed his former leftist friends for criticizing the war with: “Yes, absolutely. I was right, and they were wrong, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.” Asked about his literary influences, Hitchens mentioned Arthur Koestler. He was right on the mark. Koestler, too, lurched from cause to cause, always with the same unshakable conviction.

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What's not to like? :*

However his desire for a war with Iraq for reasons that had nothing to do with the ones stated and his willingess to try to rewrite history for his own benefit detracts somewhat from his other qualities that I admire more.

His anti-choice stance turned me off long ago. Then he became rabidly anti-Clinton, even to the point of selling out his "friend" and colleague Sidney Blumenthal to the Starr probe. Then he went neo-con during the Iraq war. There's not much I like about him to balance all that out.

But that's just me.