Hitchens now descended into the basement of the liberal id and began prodding its termite-ridden foundations. "Since we're talking about our safety, I want to put a proposition to you," Hitchens said. "There's a tendency in these discussions, one which I very much reprobate, and one that I find a good deal in the New York Times, and also the Democratic Party, to watch this outcome as if to say, 'I wonder how it's going to work out? I wonder if Bush is going to win? I wonder if the Fedayeen Saddam or al-Qaida are going to? Some days it looks bad for one side, some days not so bad.'

"Who is daring to look at this as if they were a spectator? Who is watching this as a neutral?"

He fired a shot across the do-good bow of the Berkeley audience, asking passionately why more people didn't ask, "What can we do to help the people of Iraq?" The audience burst into brief applause.

Hitchens excoriated those liberals who failed to salute the efforts of Texan Red Adair, who put out the huge oil-rig fires set by Saddam Hussein as he retreated from Kuwait. "But everyone would prefer to sneer at that, wouldn't they, and say that's just profits for Halliburton and Bush's cronies.

"What must not be and will not by me be pardoned in this debate is any flippancy of that kind, any paranoid conspiracy theory garbage," Hitchens said sternly. "Or any view that we have any right to regard this struggle as if it was a matter of indifference to us, and we are able and willing to take bets on the outcome. Don't let that be said of any of you here tonight."

The schoolmaster had summoned the erring fifth-formers to the front of the class and administered a painful caning, but Danner was unintimidated. "We certainly aren't spectators. No question about that," he said thoughtfully. "I think Christopher's appeal to the NGOs is very moving. Some of those people I saw on the way out of Baghdad. The NGOs are gone from Iraq. They've been attacked, they've been killed. The U.N. is gone. It's an enormous fort now, surrounded by sandbags, by layers of concrete barriers, it's an enormous wasteland. It struck me as, I don't know, some kind of postmodern symbol for what we have become, that this is the United Nations in Iraq. So if you want to go help, you can."

Of Hitchens' remark that the U.S. had absolute military superiority in Iraq, Danner said, "This recalls a comment made over the weekend by a general who said these attacks that we've seen in recent days are 'strategically and operationally insignificant.' That's not the case. No, the American Army is not about to be brought to its knees. But the American Army is not able to fight effectively against what's happening there. It is simply going out on patrol -- I went on a number of them -- and waiting to be attacked."

Danner warned that the Bush administration had created "what is coming to look like a failed state. A place where terrorists can enter the border at their will, carry out spectacular operations that are essentially a recruiting tool. These things are intended to build a movement, and by giving them a ground on which to do it and a clear front on which to face American troops and kill them at will, the Bush administration has helped in that recruiting tool." And despite Bush's repeated statements that the U.S. would never retreat in the face of the increasingly violent resistance, Danner pointed out that in fact it has "responded to each attack on the policy side by accelerating the movement to handing over security duties to Iraqis who are barely trained. They're handing them over to civil defense patrols that have two weeks of training."

That mattered, Danner said, because "the goal in Iraq is not simply to get out, but to leave a government that is stable, that doesn't threaten the country. I'm not going to stand here and say we should get out of Iraq. I don't think we can get out of Iraq. But I also don't see the solution that would make the United States and everybody in this room and everybody we know and cherish more secure, safer."

In his closing, Hitchens acknowledged that Danner had made some valid points but repeated his argument that "all of the things we're now seeing in Iraq were things that we were going to see in any case. They are not the product of the removal of the Saddam regime."

Turning to Danner's point that the United States had supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran -- what Hitchens called "one of Jimmy Carter's great crimes" -- Hitchens said this very fact was "one of the many reasons that I can't desert my position in the regime-change camp. The egregious errors and crimes on the part of U.S. administrations commit us morally, and also politically, to undo the wrong that we have done. We have inherited Iraq as a responsibility. There was no avoiding the inheritance of that responsibility."

As for the NGOs now fleeing Iraq, Hitchens accused them of abandoning their posts. He blasted "the disgraceful scuttle led by the United Nations but joined by the international Red Cross, both of these groups by the way with very spotty records in the past, in fascist Europe, in the Balkans and in Rwanda."

Hitchens closed by saying that the two options of "nonintervention and neutralism ... do not exist. They are not on the agenda. They are not open to us. Neutralism and abstention, non-intervention were never there as options."

He argued that the intervention needed to be "more thoroughgoing, more thought out, and more, if necessary, ruthless. And all of this would have been possible I think if so many of the American intelligentsia had not decided about a year ago that Saddam was really none of its business. That its advice and counsel would be withheld. That period of neutralism and abstention has come to an end. So get ready to think about what you're going to do about your own safety and also about the freedom and dignity and security of others. Internationalism is our only hope."

After drily commenting, "That was rousing," Danner said, "This is an intellectual's war, an idealist's war, no question about it. And you're getting some of that idealism here. But the embrace of idealism and high-flown words doesn't free us from having to look at the facts and the consequences of our actions." He then rehearsed some of the gross failures of postwar planning, detailed in David Rieff's damning recent article in the New York Times Magazine: insufficient and unprepared troops, the failure to stop looting, the decision to disband the Iraqi army.

These mistakes, Danner said, had helped create a situation that had no obvious solution, and Hitchens' call for the intelligentsia to put its shoulder to the wheel was, however rousing it might be, meaningless. "We're in a very messy situation in which the choice is no longer democracy or fascism, the choice is stability or chaos." And if creating a stable government in Iraq was the necessity, "It is very unclear what path leads to that conclusion."

He finished by repeating his point about lies and civic responsibility: "We have to look at this as citizens, as citizens who I believe were seriously misled about what our government was doing and about the consequences of its actions."

So who won? The answer one gives depends, of course, on one's ideological leanings. Hitchens' most powerful argument was that Saddam represented a permanent threat, one that was only going to get worse. No one who has studied Saddam Hussein's history and capabilities, as detailed in the most persuasive pro-war book, Kenneth M. Pollack's "The Threatening Storm," can deny that Saddam represented some type of threat, primarily to Saudi Arabia and Israel but to a much lesser degree the United States. In their well-founded outrage at the imperialist, militarist, unilateral bent of the Bush administration, and its equally well-founded fear that its Middle East policies seemed likely to make the U.S.-Arab/Muslim relationship indistinguishable from the Israel-Arab one, many on the left preferred not to consider the real dangers posed by a megalomaniacal regime in an age when the apocalypse can be packed into a suitcase. Saddam's Iraq may not have been the imminent threat that Bush and Hitchens claimed it was, but to maintain that it was no threat is myopic.

It was equally obvious, however, that launching an invasion against a major Arab state, especially given the current administration's total unwillingness to address the root cause of Arab and Muslim hatred of the U.S., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was extremely risky. The risk, of course, was that we would turn merely local terrorists into international ones -- that we would succeed in bringing together Baath thugs, Yemenis burning to avenge Palestine, enraged Iraqi nationalists, and Islamist jihadis of all stripes, uniting these angry men and women for the first time against us and giving them 140,000 conveniently located targets.

Before the invasion, Hitchens and his fellow hawks either completely failed to acknowledge this risk, or downplayed it as a nonissue. And now that events have forced them to admit that, yes, Houston, we have a problem, they have a simple answer: They're Islamo-fascists. They're the bad guys. They're al-Qaida, they're Saddam. Kill them all and let Allah sort them out. This kind of thinking is attractive to those inclined to unitary answers, satisfyingly visceral responses to terrorist atrocities like 9/11 and grand moral causes. But one need not go as far as the Stalinist left -- the ANSWER crowd is so historically ignorant and morally myopic that they refuse to acknowledge that ousting Saddam was a noble achievement and call those fighting the U.S. in Iraq "freedom fighters" -- to recognize that simply calling our foes "terrorists" and lumping them all together as "Islamo-fascists" is simplistic.

The heart of Hitchens' argument -- one you'll also hear from the neoconservative intellectuals who brought us this war, and from pro-war liberals like Paul Berman -- is the concept of Islamo-fascism, an irrational, totalitarian pathology erupting from the backward Muslim/Arab world. In this view, Saddam and bin Laden and Hamas are merely different manifestations of that same threat. Thomas L. Friedman gave voice to a version of this belief when he wrote that we had to invade Iraq to "burst the terrorism bubble" -- implying that al-Qaida, Palestinian terrorism and Iraqi totalitarianism are all related, that these Arab terrorists need a taste of the lash, that a decisive blow would show them that the U.S., contrary to bin Laden's claims that we're soft and cowardly, is tough. Friedman has shown considerably more awareness of what the U.S. needs to do for the Arab world than Hitchens or his fellow hardline hawks, but on the underlying concept they agree.

The problem is not just that Hitchens' arguments for this crucial point are weak and unconvincing, but that he never even acknowledges that it is a controversial point -- let alone that neither the majority of experts in the field (including pro-war analysts like Pollack) nor the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government agree with his position. The examples he gives are dubious: Saddam's connection to Ansar al-Islam is highly questionable, his support for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers had nothing to do with Hamas' Islamist ideology, and his Islamist rhetoric was merely part of his egomaniacal desire to portray himself as a legendary Arab hero. The only caliphate Saddam wanted to restore was the caliphate of Saddam. None of these questionable arguments justify Hitchens' repeated assertions that the truth of his position is beyond doubt: "That there is a connection between Saddamism and jihadism I think need not be doubted, cannot be doubted"; "There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism."

Hitchens derided the CIA, but never mentioned that this very issue is what caused the bitter break between the administration and the intelligence agencies. It was the hawks who demanded that the CIA find evidence of this alleged connection between Saddamism and jihadism -- and when it failed to come up with even a shred of evidence that there was any such connection, those same hawks set up their own intelligence units to come up with information more to their liking. One would expect the zealots at the American Enterprise Institute to dogmatically insist on the truth of ideologically driven assertions for which there is no evidence; one would expect better from Hitchens.

A striking example of the crude arguments Hitchens adduced in support of the concept of Islamo-fascism was his characterization of Palestinian suicide bombers as having the "avowed objective" of "establishing a theocratic dictatorship over all, whether believers or nonbelievers." This is only true of the Hamas leadership, not of secular militant organizations like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. And it is a completely false characterization of most of the Palestinians who carry out such attacks. As Amira Hass, the Israeli journalist who probably knows more about Palestinian suicide bombers than any other journalist, noted in a recent talk at Berkeley, religion is not the motivating force behind most Palestinian suicide bombers. Many of them may not be particularly religious at all, she noted, and most are driven by the desire for revenge.

In the end, what was disappointing was Hitchens' failure to acknowledge the ambiguities and complexities of the issues at hand. There was no evidence that any doubts about his position had entered his mind: Indeed, he was more strident and accusatory than in the first debate, accusing the intelligentsia of a trahison des clercs. One does not expect the hawks in the current administration -- the Rove-programmed, Lone Star-swaggering Bush, the choleric old rams Rumsfeld and Cheney or the true-believing Wolfowitz -- to dispassionately examine their beliefs. But Hitchens is not an administration apologist, he is an independent thinker. And the role of independent thinkers is to question everything, including their own beliefs or those of their circle -- to be "clear, dry, without illusion," to cite Stendhal's prescription for the novelist.

Yet for whatever reason -- perhaps a conviction that the importance of the cause trumps all other considerations, perhaps continuing anger at the dogmatic leftists who turned on him in a fury when he dared to violate orthodoxy after 9/11 -- Hitchens did not acknowledge any shades of gray in the pro-war position. Although he did offer several very mild, general criticisms of the Bush administration, he also went considerably further than necessary in defending it. And on several occasions -- when he flatly denied that it had surreptitiously tried to pump up the connection between Saddam and bin Laden, and when he derided the U.S. intelligence services while refusing even to acknowledge that the Bush administration had cooked its own intelligence, to take two examples -- he came dangerously close to sounding like a party hack.

As the occupation grinds on, the rhetoric on both sides is likely to become harsher, more dogmatic, more moralistic. This is not desirable. Hitchens and Danner rightly agreed that we are responsible for the broken nation of Iraq; I am sure they would both also agree that we are responsible for our own. Americans and Iraqis are dying, and many more will die. The road ahead is dark and full of danger. It will take all of our clarity of thought, unimpeded by rancor and partisanship, to see our way.

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