Rectifying the Betrayals

A lengthy Hitchens interview in Prospect:

Last year, before the “surge,” Kanan Makiya was asked if, knowing what we now know, he would still have supported the invasion. Makiya, who had escaped Saddam’s regime, documenting its atrocities in his book Republic of Fear, still cannot bring himself to regret the fall of Saddam. But his reply to the question of regretting the invasion was as follows: “Bodies matter. I come from a tradition in the far left, back a long time ago in my life, where… bodies did not count. You know: the historical process, the victory for the working class. I would not make that argument any more. It is utterly repugnant to me.”

Coming from Makiya, this gets closer than anything generated by the anti-war movement to undermining Hitchens’s position. Hitchens points out that the figures given for deaths due to sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s were as high, if not higher than the current death toll—though he is suspicious of such audits. But he concedes the power of Makiya’s dismay: “Kanan is an Iraqi, and the pain he feels must be very much greater than the pain I feel, but I don’t think the interrogators will ever get a full-hearted recantation out of him. Yet if my Iraqi and Kurdish comrades start to say, ‘You know what: we wish it had never happened,’ then I would admit that my position had become an isolated one.”

The online magazine Slate recently asked a number of “liberal hawks” if they still supported the invasion of Iraq five years on. Hitchens was the only one to remain unrepentant. He explains his ongoing belief in the project with a summation of historic betrayals of the Iraqis by the US—starting, ironically, in 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath party to power. Hitchens views the 2003 invasion as rectifying those betrayals.

Hitchens does not pretend that things have gone to plan. But he asks what a post-Saddam Iraq would have looked like without the occupation. “Iraq was the property of a fascist and sadist who was butchering his people, squandering the resources of the country, preparing to hand over to his unbelievably nasty sons, who would probably have had an inter-dauphin fratricide of their own. And instead we have a humorous Kurdish socialist as the president of Iraq, and I’m supposed to apologise. Well, fuck that.” Hitchens alludes to the assessment of the enemy by the reporter Bartle Bull published in Prospect last year: “The other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam’s struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran.”

Comments

[Bob-B]

Those who have decided that removing Saddam was a bad thing need to explain how exactly things would have been better with him still running the show. They never seem to find the time to do that - too busy throwing words like 'debacle' and 'disaster' around.

[Lee]

Agreed. But at the same time, those who supported the war need to do much more than Hitchens has done (here as elsewhere) to confront the appalling carange that it has unleashed (by interventionists, Islamists, the entire shooting match). The least creditable aspect of Hitchens's position is his blithe substitution of prediction for concrete analysis. It's as if, feeling himself to be in the right at the level of ideas as he does, tens or hundreds of thousands of casualities somehow matter less than his own ideological rigour. Much as I like his prose, that remains an inexpensive position to adopt from the sanctuary of a Washington apartment.