Hitchens on Iraq

Back in the day, I used to buy Christopher drinks and got glazed-eyes as he would wax eloquent on the evils of Reaganism and conspiracies on how V.P. Bush [later #41] arranged to have the Americans in Teheran kept hostage until Reagan was elected and inaugurated. These theories were spiced with his almost rabid anti-Zionism---he once told me over a table at the Iron Gate Restaurant on N St., N.W. that he had no equal as an anti-Semite.

It was the liquor talking, and since he found out in the nineties about his Jewish ancestry, he has spectacularly recanted. Now he is a staunch supporter of Number 41's efforts in Iraq to establish a democratic state. Here are some excerpts from a recent interview:

Hitchens explains that his new status as an articulate advocate of the second Gulf War is essentially the product of personal evolution – beginning with the deep shock he felt over the 1989 "fatwa" issued against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses."
Hitchens saw the fatwa, or marked-for-death, on the head of Rushdie as a dangerous example of "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face."
Following Desert Storm in 1991, Hitchens linked up with Kurdish freedom fighters and saw first hand the towns where the chemical weapons had been used and the uncovering of mass graves.
With the Kurds, he noticed a photo of former President George H.W. Bush taped onto the windshields of their vehicles. He was told by the Kurds with him that but for George H.W. Bush and Operation Desert Storm, they and their families would have been dead.
Hitchens came to see the U.S. intervention in Iraq as inevitable – and a good thing.
"It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia."

On Bush's fumbling and feckless attempts to promote his vision:

Partly because of the debilitating inter-agency fratricide between State, Defense and CIA, the administration has never been able to speak with any coherence about such critical matters as WMDs and the connection between Saddamism and Islamism.
The damage done by this failure is now irreparable. Clearly, the Iraqi democracy theme is more appealing, but that case makes itself without any administration "spin." Meanwhile, it is a rare week that does not bring news of some appalling blunder or misjudgment: most recently the planting of "good news" in the Iraqi press and the misuse of the NSA.

On Defeatism by the left and sister-cities:

The frigid neutrality of the soft-left human rights, ecological and feminist "community" has meantime been eclipsed by something even more contemptible: the open alignment of Ramsey Clark, doyen of the "anti-war" forces, with the past policies of the Saddam Hussein regime. His apologia for the crimes of which Baathism stands accused is an unmitigated disgrace, as is the silence of his political allies on the point.
As for precedent, even during the debate on whether or not to intervene in Bosnia, cities like New York did "adopt" Sarajevo. The connection between the current indifference and an open or covert wish to see a Coalition defeat in Iraq is one of the most horrible things I have ever witnessed.

On the ups and downs of Ahmed Chalabi:

Even if every informer supplied by the INC had been a conscious agent of disinformation (and nobody has ever even suggested as much), it is self-evidently impossible that such a small operation could have hijacked the intelligence services of so many countries.
The CIA has tried to use Dr. Chalabi as a scapegoat for its own incompetence, corruption and defeatism, and has found a depressing number of liberal and "left" allies in this brazen attempt to change the subject. Its attempted frame-up of Chalabi in Baghdad itself has been a resounding failure, while he himself (at some cost in political re-branding) has become an admired and useful politician in his own country.
I think his past ability to work with Kurds, Communists, Shi'a and other disparate forces gives him an advantage, despite the risk that proteanism can be confused with opportunism.