CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS JOINS THE POSSE

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS JOINS THE POSSE


Christopher Hitchens has in the past two decades established himself as one
of the finest writers of the left in the English speaking world. It is,
therefore, nothing short of tragic to see him, in his polemic with Noam
Chomsky and others over how the left should respond to the atrocities of 11
September, descend into a repellent mixture of casuistry, moral blackmail,
and law-and-order ranting.

Hitchensıs declaration of solidarity with George W. Bush rests on three
propositions:

(1) What happened on 11 September was a wicked crime;
(2) It is morally disreputable to compare it with the crimes committed by
the US government;
(3) It is equally disreputable to seek to trace the causes of this crime.

(1) is of course indisputable.  Hitchensıs prose gains such power as it
possesses from his constant efforts to remind us of the enormity of the
events of 11 September. But the aim of his bullying rhetoric appears to be
to stop us thinking calmly about their significance. But, having discovered
(or, perhaps better, been reminded) that we live in a world where such
things can happen, we need calm thought more than just about anything.
Hitchensıs articles are the literary equivalent of shouting, apparently
intended to drown out such thinking. If only for this reason, they are as
morally and intellectually sleazy as anything he attributes to others.

When we ignore the shouting and try to think things through, we confront the
issues that Hitchensıs proposition (2) seeks to shut down. For very many
people in the South, and quite a few in the North, any attempt to weigh up
11 September are led to compare it to other atrocities ­ most notably those
that flow from Anglo-American policy, particularly, but not solely, in the
Middle East. Now Hitchens wants to ban such comparisons. The reason he gives
in his latest reply to Chomsky is that what he acknowledges to be crimes
such as the cruise missile attacks on the Sudan in 1998 arenıt of the same
order of moral turpitude as the atrocities committed against Manhattan and
Washington. The Clinton administration did not intend thousands of Sudanese
to die when it ordered the destruction of the countryıs main pharmaceutical
factory, even though these deaths were the consequence of this action, while
the suicide bombers of 11 September consciously sought the mass killings
they caused.

This doctrine makes it very hard to judge the atrocities of the past
century. For those are composed, probably in equal measure, of planned and
organized massacres and preventable mass deaths caused by bureaucratic
callousness and negligence. For example, despite the efforts of Robert
Conquest to prove the contrary, I doubt if Stalin actually intended that the
forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture would lead to several millions
dying in the Great Famine of the early 1930s. These deaths were,
nevertheless, the predictable result of the measures Stalin ordered, and
they represent, I would say, his greatest crime and one of the outstanding
atrocities of the 20th century.  But, for Hitchens, the holocaust in which
millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants died is presumably less worthy of
condemnation than the Great Terror of the late 1930s, when the Cheka put yet
more millions to death of the orders of the Politburo.

The issue is an important one because the preferred method of Anglo-American
warfare since Napoleonic times has been bombardment and blockade rather than
direct combat. Often the larger number of the victims of this method are not
the intended target but ­ as the Pentagon likes to put it ­ collateral
damage. For those waging war in this way, many of the deaths they inflict
are a regrettable but unavoidable by-product of their strategy, a kind of
overhead cost of pursuing the right policy. Madeleine Albrightıs notorious
comment that bringing down Saddam Hussein was Œworth Š the priceı of half a
million Iraqi childrenıs deaths exactly sums up this kind of obscene
accounting. Sure, Clinton didnıt want to take thousands of innocent lives
when he ordered the missile attacks on Sudan. He wanted stave off
impeachment and to hit bid Laden. But he took those lives all the same:
their effacement was a predictable consequence of their actions. Hitchensıs
last book was a splendid indictment of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal:
what was that all about if not holding the wielders of state power
accountable for such consequences?

Drawing such comparisons is necessary in order to set the atrocities of 11
September in their context and thus to begin to explain them. But Hitchensıs
proposition (3) is indeed to block any move from judgement to explanation.
His thought seems to be that the crime is so great that explanation is
unnecessary: all that is called for is support for the posse that his
President is rounding up to catch or kill the perpetrators. But this just
seems terribly wrong. The point of trying to understand the causes of a
crime is to help prevent its recurrence. Does Hitchens really believe that
killing bin Laden and his associates (assuming that they are indeed
responsible for 11 September) will bring terrorism to an end?

It is the awareness that seeking retribution is likely at best to be
ineffective, at worst to intensify the hatred of the United States that is
already widespread in the world and thereby to encourage yet more and
perhaps worse acts of terrorism that informs the growing unease about, if
not outright opposition to a Western military response. The irrelevance of
retribution is so obvious that even Tony Blair had to promise the Labour
Party conference the other day that the Bush coalition will root out global
injustice as well as seek vengeance for 11 September. This promise must have
caused great surprise in the White House, but it should also have provoked
outrage in the Hitchens household. From Hitchensıs vengeful perspective,
even the apostle of the Third Way shows dangerous signs of getting ­
rhetorically at least ­ all mushy and liberal.

Reflection on the causes of 11 September further undermines Hitchensıs case
because of the harsh light it throws on his preferred agents of retribution.
Letıs suppose that bin Laden and Al-Qaıida were indeed responsible for the
attacks on Manhattan and Washington. As Hitchens himself acknowledges, the
briefest trawl around the Internet will produce masses of material revealing
the links connecting this network to Washington and its allies, dating back
of course to the role of the CIA in funding, arming, and organizing the
Islamist resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but embracing
also the role of the Saudi elites and Pakistani military intelligence in
backing bin Laden and his allies in the Taliban. Why is the Bush
administration treating so gingerly if not for fear that an indiscriminate
military response will subvert key allies such as the Pakistani, Saudi, and
Egyptian dictatorships? But a more Œtargetedı attack is likely to involve
precisely the murky network of intelligence agencies and special-forces
operators that first released the genie of Islamic terrorism from the
bottle. Does Hitchens really believe that the CIA and the Pentagon, along
with their British askaris in MI6 and the SAS, will not, in destroying bin
Laden, unleash yet more murderous forces to haunt our future? If he does,
heıs a lot more naïve that his knowing prose lets on.

Defending his governmentıs promise to get tough on crime back in the early
1990s, the then British Tory prime minister John Major said: ŒWe must
understand less and condemn more.ı Understanding wasnıt in any case an
option for poor Major, but it is for Hitchens. Some of his best work has
been devoted to exposing the ways in which Establishment intellectuals have
mentally subordinated themselves to the demands of Western raison dıEtat: I
have in mind especially the superb essay in which he revealed Isaiah
Berlinıs complicity in the crimes of the American state during the
Kennedy-Johnson era. But Hitchens now seems also ­ much more noisily and
aggressively than the prudent and politick Berlin ­ to be placing his brain
and his pen at the command of the Empire. From a critic of power he is
becoming one of its mere servants. This melancholy spectacle should not stop
us rallying the widest possible coalition against the coming war.

Alex Callinicos    
5 October 2001
atc1@york.ac.uk