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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The British hawk gives 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. He goes 0 for 10.
Sep 5, 2005 | Bush administration foot-dragging and ineptitude in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has profoundly demoralized his supporters on the right. The hawkish intellectuals who gathered around George W. Bush to support his "War on Terror" once used language that suggested his machine-like omnicompetence. The Afghanistan War was to be "Operation Infinite Justice" until it was pointed out that Allah was the only one in that part of the world generally permitted to use that kind of language. The images of civilians abandoned to their fates and unchecked looting from New Orleans, however, reminded everyone of Bush's disastrous policies in Iraq, and suggested a pattern of criminal incompetence.
These bellicose intellectuals--a band of Wilsonian idealists, cutthroat imperial capitalists, Trotskyites bereft of a cause, and neo-patriots traumatized by Sept. 11 are now increasingly divided and full of mutual recriminations. Among them all, the combative British essayist Christopher Hitchens continues most forcefully to uphold the case for the war, most recently in a piece for the Weekly Standard.
In contrast, this week Francis Fukuyama, long since upbraided by History for his Hegelian fantasies concerning the end of History, openly castigated the Iraq war as an unfortunate detour in the War on Terror, in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Hitchens, fighting a rear-guard battle against public disillusionment with the war, suggested 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. His essay appeared the week after George W. Bush launched his own public relations crusade for "staying the course" in the face of the media attention given to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a U.S. soldier killed in the war. (Hitchens dismisses her campaign as "the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates.") The campaign was a dud, derailed by dithering in Baghdad over a never-finished constitution and continued mayhem and U.S. deaths. Bush's alarmed handlers are looking at polling numbers on his performance as president and on his handling of Iraq that are heading so far south that they'll soon be embedded in the wilting Antarctic ice shelf.
It is sad to see Hitchens reduced to publishing in the Weekly Standard, intellectually the weakest of the right-wing propaganda fronts for the new class of billionaires created by the excesses of corporate consolidation in recent decades (it is owned by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch). It is even sadder to see this grotesque, almost baroque, essay carom from one extravagant argument to another, miring itself in a series of gross fallacies and elementary errors in logic. I have read Hitchens for decades and usually admire his acute wit, his command of detail, his polemical gifts, and his contrarian sense of ethics, even when we disagree. He must surely know, however, that his argument for the Iraq misadventure is growing weaker every day, since he clearly does not any longer care to defend it rigorously.
The essay begins by arguing that cowardice and short-sightedness dominated the 1990s, during which democratic leaders declined to react, or reacted too late, to the dictators, genocides and failed states that emerged with the end of the Cold War. Rwanda, Serbia, Kosovo and Afghanistan stand in this view as monuments of shame. Once the West finally shed its cynical isolationism with the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and once the dangers of inaction had been demonstrated by Sept. 11, Hitchens argues, it was natural and proper for the United States and the United Kingdom to fix their sights on Iraq.
Hitchens lays out the familiar charges against the Baath regime in Iraq. It had invaded neighboring countries, committed genocide, given refuge to terrorists, and contravened the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Hitchens' argument succeeds only by confusing the situation in Iraq in the 1980s with that in 2003. He mysteriously neglects to note that the Baath regime had in fact given up its weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, in perhaps the most thorough-going and successful U.N.-led disarmament in modern history. At the time of the 2003 war Iraq was neither in contravention of U.N. resolutions on disarmament nor of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A further problem is that the same charges could be made against other states. For example, Israel has launched several wars of aggression, gave refuge to terrorists of the Jewish Defense League, defied a whole raft of U.N. resolutions, and thumbed its nose at the Non-Proliferation Treaty far more successfully than Saddam, producing hundreds of nuclear warheads where Iraq never produced a single bomb. Of course Israel cannot be compared to Saddam's Iraq in the numbers of persons killed by its wars and repression, but if the issue is crimes against international law, then the numbers are surely less important than the fact of an infraction.
Hitchens is, moreover, highly selective in his outrage. He is not disturbed by the brutal, scorched-earth tactics of the Russians in Chechnya or the heavy-handedness of India in Kashmir. The deaths of 3 million Congolese pass without mention. The terrorist threat posed by the Tamil Tigers and the weakened state in Sri Lanka does not attract his attention. Many more dangerous situations existed in the world than the one in Iraq, which turns out not to have been dangerous at all.
Hitchens castigates Iraq as having been both a rogue and a failed state, and offers this self-contradictory depiction as a legitimate cause for war. If we translate this Orwellian concept, it transpires that a warrant is being offered to superpowers to invade other countries at will, since all possible targets clearly will either be fairly strong states (rogues) or weak ones (failed).
The argument is most dishonest in leaping from alleging crimes to lauding unilateral action to punish them, outside any framework of international legality. The U.N. Security Council declined to authorize a war against Iraq. Iraq had not attacked the United States or the United Kingdom. Iraq had no nuclear weapons program and no unconventional military capabilities, and it posed no threat to anyone except its own people in 2003. Hitchens collects anecdotes about centrifuge plans and centrifuge parts being kept by Baath figures after the nuclear program was dismantled, as though a few buried rotting blueprints and rusting parts were something more than pitiful testaments to a decisively defeated dream. In essence, Hitchens is arguing for the legitimacy of a sort of hyperpower vigilantism, in which the sitting president of the United States decides which regimes may continue to exist, virtually by himself. The U.S. Congress did not even have the moral fortitude to declare war. The U.N. charter forbids wars of aggression, and, indeed, forbids all wars not clearly defensive that are not explicitly authorized by the Security Council. The Security Council may be, as Hitchens implies, corrupt and yellow-bellied, but it represents most of humankind, while Bush did not even represent a majority of Americans.
