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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Has the Iraq war made Americans safer? Nine months after their first encounter, Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner cross swords once more.
Nov 11, 2003 | As the situation on the ground in Iraq has dramatically worsened, are any of the pro-war hawks having second thoughts? If one of the most ardent and eloquent of those hawks, Christopher Hitchens, is a bellwether, the answer is an emphatic no. In a much-anticipated rematch of his debate with fellow journalist Mark Danner, the British radical turned White House supporter refused to yield an inch. Indeed, he lashed out at opponents of the war more fiercely than before, questioning not just their beliefs but their commitment and general moral fiber.
The question Danner and Hitchens tackled Tuesday night at U.C. Berkeley's Wheeler Hall was simple: "Has Bush made us safer?" Before turning to the rematch, it's worth summarizing the first debate.
Danner argued that invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein was both unnecessary and too risky. Although he acknowledged that Saddam was a loathsome tyrant and he would have supported ousting him under the right circumstances, he maintained that the costs were not acceptable. Saddam did not, he said, represent an imminent threat: There was no evidence that he was connected to global terrorism, and aggressive inspections backed up with the threat of airstrikes would keep him in his box. As for the consequences of invasion, they could potentially be dire. U.S. invasion would require a prolonged occupation that would expose American troops to guerrilla attacks and could result in a fractured, failed state that would be a haven for terrorists. America, with its short attention span, was not good at nation building to begin with, and was facing an enormously difficult task in Iraq, an artificially created country divided along religious and ethnic lines that had suffered despotic rule for decades. Finally, invading a major Arab state would be certain to stir up Arab and Muslim rage against the U.S., leading to more attacks against us -- just what bin Laden had hoped for.
Hitchens said that America had no choice but to invade, both because Saddam represented an imminent threat and because it was our moral duty to do so. Saddam was evil, unstable and connected to Islamist terrorists such as Ansar al-Islam. He possessed a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which inspectors would never be able to find, and had shown in the past that he was willing to use them. His eventual fall was sure to be chaotic and risky: It was better to seize the initiative and remove him at a time of our choosing. It was also essential to demonstrate to the bin Ladens of the world that America was not a paper tiger. The risks were not great: The war would be quick, the occupation relatively painless, we would be greeted by most Iraqis as liberators, and reconstructing Iraq would proceed apace. The rest of the Arab and Muslim world would not erupt: Indeed, striking down Saddam could help revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Above all, the U.S. simply had the moral responsibility to strike down psychopathic tyrants like Saddam Hussein.
Not surprisingly, as someone who opposed the war, I thought Danner's points were more compelling. But several people I spoke to thought that Hitchens won. Hitchens had the advantage of the idealist's lofty vantage: Danner's plainspoken cost-benefit analysis was, inevitably, less stirring than his opponent's call for America to unsheathe its terrible swift sword.
Many things have changed since that night, and few of those changes could have brought joy to the heart of the idiosyncratic British hawk. Hitchens correctly predicted that the invasion would be "rapid, accurate and dazzling," but he was wrong about just about everything else. Saddam's vast caches of weapons of mass destruction, which the Bush administration used to sell the war to the American people, have not been found. Securing and rebuilding Iraq has proved much harder than Hitchens or his fellow hawks acknowledged, not least because of the Bush administration's shocking failure to prepare for it at all. The occupation has been bloody and will be incredibly expensive. And the situation is deteriorating, as terrorists and jihadis slip into Iraq, ordinary Iraqis -- including, ominously, Shiites -- grow increasingly angry, and a shadowy resistance movement kills Americans every day. Nor can the global fallout from the war be considered a resounding success. Hatred and enmity toward the United States is at an all-time high, not only in the Arab and Muslim world but in Europe as well. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis remains mired in a bloody dead end, and Bush's recent call for the Middle East to embrace democracy fell on almost universally hostile ears in the region.
To no one's surprise, the Bush administration and its allies, faced with this litany of woes, have refused to admit that anything is wrong. Driven by a radically militarist idealism that plays on post-9/11 fear and nationalism, the White House, like a shark, is designed only to go forward: Any acknowledgment of weakness would be politically fatal and ideologically disastrous. In the first debate Hitchens, too, played by this script: He deviated not an iota from the standard neoconservative line laid out by such intellectual authors of the war as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. One of the questions hanging over Debate 2, then, was whether and to what degree he would be willing to criticize his newfound right-wing brethren, admit that he or they might have been wrong about anything, or acknowledge that some of his founding assumptions were more problematic and complex than advertised. For those who entertained no hopes that anything of this introspective nature would take place, the question presented itself in a somewhat crasser form: How would the legendarily silver-tongued Hitchens talk his way out of this one?
Hitchens won the coin toss and chose to speak first. He began by attacking the idea that the war against Saddam was voluntary, a war of choice. In fact, he said, it was "inescapable," because Saddam was so evil, insane and tied to Islamist terrorism that sooner or later we were going to have to fight him -- and it would be better to take the fight to him at a time of our choosing rather than wait for a catastrophic implosion that would fracture the country and bring in Iran. Reviewing a statement made by George Bush Sr. in which he explained that invading Iraq after the Gulf War would have been too risky, he dismissed it as "pseudo-realism ... it's not as practical or as hard-headed or as prudent as it purports to be."
The crisis, Hitchens insisted, had already been upon us. Iraq had been ready to explode. The "already lousy status quo wasn't really a status quo." The inspections and sanctions weren't working: "Saddam was not in his box. The box was falling apart." Continuing with the status quo ante bellum had a number of very obvious disadvantages. It left Saddam Hussein in power; it punished the Iraqi people with U.N. sanctions; it abandoned the Shiites and Kurds. Moreover, "It left the barbarous regime free to continue work on weapons of mass destruction, which we know for certain that the regime was doing on a very grand scale until at the very least 1999. And it left Saddam Hussein free to threaten his neighbors and to give support to jihad forces all around the world."
Hitchens adduced a number of examples to show that Saddam, like bin Laden, was a practitioner of what he has termed "Islamo-fascism." He said the dictator's actions "were becoming ever more demented, ever more extreme, and ever more Islamist in their turn. The flag of Iraq was amended to include a very threatening verse from the Koran, gigantic mosques were being built in Saddam Hussein's name, he financed openly suicide murderers in Palestine whose avowed objective is establishing a theocratic dictatorship over all, whether believers or nonbelievers."
Those familiar with Hitchens' longtime position as a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause were probably somewhat surprised to hear him use the expression "suicide murderer." This rhetorical usage, a variant of the phrase "homicide bombers" favored by Ariel Sharon (and that Fox News has mandated be used in its broadcasts), removes the actions of Palestinian terrorists from any historical or political context, casting their perpetrators as Islamo-fascist evildoers driven only by religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism.
Hitchens did acknowledge the bad news that has come flooding out of occupied Iraq. He chided war supporters who "rest their case largely on the underreporting of good news," acknowledging that those who would take praise for the war's positive consequences -- among which he listed the restoration of Iraq's southern marshes, the reconstitution of its universities, its burgeoning free press, Kurdish autonomy and the opening of mass graves -- also "automatically have to accept the blame" for the "huge lacunae in matters such as water, power and security." He did not say that those critical problems exist in large part because of the war planners' reckless optimism, bordering on criminal negligence -- an optimism that he had shared.
Defending President Bush's claim that post-invasion violence was a sign of "desperation," Hitchens argued that the attackers "are making our point for us ... There's no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can possibly be left to the mercy of such people. And there never was any justification." Hitchens closed his opening statement by criticizing "the tendency of today's left to take refuge in neutralism and isolationism."
In his response and throughout the debate, Danner played Sancho Panza to Hitchens' Don Quixote, disingenuously praising his opponent's splendid rhetorical raiment as fit for an emperor. And so Danner opened his remarks by saying, "Gosh, that was good. I feel saddened that I have to point out the distance of those beautiful remarks from the truth of what's going on on the ground. It feels like, I don't know, willfully destroying a masterpiece."
