The great debate

As President Bush all but declared war on Iraq, journalists Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner thrashed out the big issues that the country should have months ago.

By Gary Kamiya

Jan 30, 2003 | Will invading Iraq make America a safer or a more dangerous place? Can inspections and sanctions contain Saddam? Will the Arab and Muslim world respect an invading America for showing resolve, or react with violent rage?

These questions became at once more urgent and perhaps more irrelevant around 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, when President Bush set Feb. 5 as the day when the countdown to an invasion of Iraq will officially begin. It was somehow appropriate, in these peculiarly disconnected and weightless days running up to an unreal-feeling war, that an important public debate over the looming conflict took place just a few minutes after that war apparently became inevitable.

The subject of the debate was "How Should We Use Our Power? Iraq and the War on Terror." The opponents were New Yorker magazine writer Mark Danner, author of "Massacre at El Mozote" and a professor at the UC-Berkeley journalism school, and Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair writer and former Nation columnist, whose latest book is "Why Orwell Matters." The audience at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall heard out both speakers respectfully, leading one to wonder if any left-wing rowdies who might have been tempted to heckle the pro-war Hitchens were intimidated by his legendarily box-cutter-like wit. (One irrepressible Jacobite did interrupt the expat Brit with a cry of "Bullshit!" leading the moderator, J-School dean Orville Schell, to admonish the audience against such outbursts. To which Hitchens, who probably has an entire case of these verbal stilettos sharpened and ready to hand in his mental cupboard, calmly remarked, "I don't seek protection from people who make animal noises.") Judging by the applause, Danner's dovish position was more popular, but the audience seemed surprisingly receptive to Hitchens' arguments.

In some ways, the Iraq question has flipped the positions of the left and the right, forcing partisans of both camps to examine their ideological preconceptions. And intellectual ironies and strange bedfellows abounded during the debate. Hitchens, former Trotskyite turned pro-war hawk (it was a strange sight indeed to watch the scourge of so many Republican administrations, the man who argued that Henry Kissinger should be tried for war crimes, quietly clapping his hands for President Bush as he watched the State of the Union address on a TV in the J-School courtyard), took a classic interventionist-Wilsonian line: The U.S. is fighting the good fight, attempting to liberate an oppressed people. Danner, representing the left, took the hard-boiled realist position: Military action and occupation would endanger the U.S.

An even more peculiar irony concerned what was perhaps the central -- and most mysterious -- question raised by the debate, the Arab world's response to a U.S. invasion. In an audacious gambit that has also been utilized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Hitchens accused Danner and other pessimists of condescending to Iraqis and other Arabs, by not giving them credit for being capable of building a democratic society or assuming they would lash out at the U.S. in impotent rage. In effect, Hitchens was arguing that the left, for all of its defense of Arabs and Muslims, actually clings to an Orientalist, exotic series of Arab stereotypes: they are revengeful, proud, tribal, etc. For his part, Danner tacitly argued that potential difficulties in rebuilding Iraq were not due to Arab backwardness, but to the fractures in Iraqi society and the difficulties all nations face that have emerged from years of totalitarian rule. As for a terrorist backlash, one need not adopt any position vis-a-vis the Arab mind or Arab culture to draw certain ominous conclusions from Sept. 11, which -- it is often forgotten -- was partly the result of our earlier invasion of Iraq. It's useful to remember that much of Osama bin Laden's rage was sparked by the U.S. bases that were built in Saudi Arabia during that war.

Hitchens' bitter public split with the Nation, precipitated by his outrage over a torrent of America-bashing post-9/11 letters the journal printed, had left some wondering if irritation with the fools of the left had led the quick-tongued polemicist to throw himself, in classic inverted-Stalinist fashion, in with the fools of the right. But those who came expecting to hear Hitchens railing against the left went away disappointed. Although he did throw a couple of nasty jabs at received lefty thinking, Hitchens took the high ground.

The debate started with a coin flip, which provided Danner with the opportunity to begin subtly needling Hitchens by invoking the suddenly-no-longer-evil North Korean leader Kim Jung Il. ("One side of the coin has Kim Jung Il, the other Kim il Sung," he cracked.) Danner began by referring to Bush's State of the Union speech. Calling it "a very eloquent speech that was full of fear," he said it raised an underlying question: "What kind of country are we going to be? On what basis will we act in the world? Will it be out of fear and distrust of the rest of the world, acting as a musclebound troll, secure in our power, flaunting it, blustering, or will we act cooperatively, multilaterally, trying to make the world better?"

Danner argued that the debate over the war on terror represented the third time in this century that America had struggled with its role in the world -- the first being Wilson's attempt to create the League of Nations, the second the establishment of the post-WWII world order. The third iteration was shaped by Bush, and Danner argued that his Manichaean vision -- his division of the world into good and evil, and his concomitant doctrine of preemption -- were extremely dangerous. Danner derided the antiseptic term "regime change," noting that "in fact, we're talking about attacking, bombing, invading and occupying a major Arab country." He reminded the audience that 100,000 Iraqis died in the first Gulf War, saying "this is regime change." And he hammered home perhaps his central point: that a prolonged occupation would be required to stabilize postwar Iraq; that this occupation would be fraught with complications; and that it could result in more terror attacks against the U.S. He noted tellingly that Bush did not even mention the word occupation in his speech.

Danner took what might be called the minimalist antiwar position: Confining himself to a bottom-line, what's-good-for-America analysis, he alluded to other subjects -- the morality of preemptive attacks, the true motivations of the administration, and the role of oil -- but didn't really explore them. Danner's invocation of the 100,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War obviously raised moral questions (at what point do casualty figures incurred in liberating a country make the "liberation" meaningless?), but he didn't return to the subject. He was clearly suspicious of the administration's motivations: He read a passage from Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, two weeks after 9/11, "Should we be getting something going in another area other than Afghanistan, where the success and failure isn't measured just by Afghanistan?" Danner said he believed that strategic interests (read: oil) were the real reason the U.S. wanted to oust Saddam, but he did not seem to find that fact in itself problematic. Suspending moral judgments, he criticized Bush's Iraq war mainly because it did not serve America's self-interest.

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