More In Anger Than In Sorrow

Christopher Hitchens, I would argue, is the best political essayist of the last few decades of the twentieth century, and the funniest, and among the most insightful. But his two most recent pieces are, in conjunction, a panegyric for his style and for his integrity.

"Flirting with Disaster," appeared in Slate back when---it seems so long ago---Bush was cruising towards victory. Although most of his criticism during the summer months was directed at Democrats and liberals, Hitchens had consistently asserted during press appearances that he had plenty of bones to pick with the administration's handling of the war in Iraq. Silly me, for thinking that he would enunciate these complaints in print. Instead, he penned a column that could only, even interpreted more generously than a neutral party would allow, have been written by a Republican party hack. Thus, I fisk:

There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":

"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.

As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable.

I happen to have read the essay (essays?) in which Hitchens considers the theory that Ronald Reagan surreptitiously negotiated with Khomeini's government to delay the release of American hostages in order to embarrass Jimmy Carter. I've read the Trial of Henry Kissinger several times, and on each reading, Hitchens comes to the unambiguous (and correct) conclusion that the 1968 Nixon campaign conducted illegal diplomacy with the South Vietnamese government, convincing them to break off peace talks and thus discredit Hubert Humphrey's position on the war. In other words, this is not even close to the first time that Hitchens has seen, in print, speculation about Republican presidential candidates using covert manipulation of foreign policy to aid their electoral prospects. He's seen it at least twice before, under his own byline. Was Hitchens' own previous journalism "deplorable, detestable, unforgivable"?

As a blogger, my instinct is to point out these instances of rank hipocrisy and let them stand on their own. But as a philosopher, I feel compelled to probe deeper. After all, Hitchens is within his rights to have flip-flopped on whether or not it's kosher to toy with October surprise theories [September 11 changed everything--ed.], and it could well be that his current position is the right one. Still, there are a couple of salient differences between what Mrs. Heinz-Kerry said and what Hitchens published. The most obvious is that she was merely quoted in a newspaper suggesting a possibility; he took it upon himself to write articles that, far from idly speculating, drew certain and damning conclusions. The most important difference is this: her speculation concerns behavior that, while cynical and manipulative, would be within the legal powers of an administration; he went as far as to accuse presidential candidates of crimes that are de facto and perhaps de lege akin to treason.

On the question of whether Mrs. Heinz-Kerry was wrong to raise the possibility of an October unveiling of Osama, the most we can say is this: it's paranoid and conspiratorial. But let's just consider the track record of Karl Rove: he sank previous opponents by insinuating that they were gay pedophiles, he conducted push-polls in South Carolina suggesting that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child, and that's only scratching the surface. Anyone who claims that some sort of stunt involving the capture of Osama is beyond the realm of possibility for the Bush campaign simply has his head buried in the sand. And for the record, relative to some of the awful things that Karl Rove has done, opportunistically breaking news about the capture of Osama really isn't all that bad; any administration would policitize such an occasion.

Although (or so it seems to me) any announcement of Osama's capture is highly unlikely at this point, the probability is certainly not zero. And that is Teresa's fear: If Osama turns up in shackles, Bush will almost certainly be re-elected, even though the capture of Osama would not justify a four year record of abject failure. Since the probability is quite low, her fear is irrational---but morally condemnable? Hardly.

Let's speed up the fisking:

The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise."

Well, somebody gets a gold star in inferential reasoning. Refer to my remarks above about Hitchens' own familiarity with October surprise theories.

This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.

On the other hand, somebody has to stay after class for a vocab drill. "Collusion," as far as I know, does not mean holding someone in custody against his will for the purposes of a) bolstering one's electoral chances, b) humiliating the captive so as to shatter his followers' illusions about him, c) holding the captive accountable for his crimes against humanity. Nor, I think, do the terms of most incidents of collusion involve one of the colluders deservedly imprisoned for life or else executed at the hands of the other. The accusation, such as it is, is that Bush would exploit positive developments internationally for domestic political gain. And that, I think, is undeniable. (Do a little thought experiment: suppose bin Laden is captured tomorrow, purely coincidentally. Now ask yourself what the first sentence of every Bush stump speech thereafter would be.)

I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print.

There's a "but" coming, oh lordy there's a "but" coming.

But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place.

If responsible liberal senior Democrats are seriously or semiseriously engaged in something so sinister, perhaps Hitchens could provide us with one fucking name. If what Hitchens means is that most liberals don't think the probability of bin Laden's capture before the election is equal to zero, then he's unimpressively right. If he thinks that most liberals expect bin Laden to be captured before the election, then perhaps he would be so kind as to provide some data beyond one conversation at a dinner party and various "all over the place" hearsay to support his claim. To insinuate that there is some major component of the Democratic party engaged in a project that is "deplorable, detestable, unforgiveable," with only anonymous anecdotal evidence is, well, deplorable and detestable. (Whether or not it can be forgiven is an open question.)

It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")

Far be it from me to defend Michael Moore or the Democrats' arm-length embrace of him (it was never more than that). But it is in these lines that Hitchens begins to expose his descent into pure shill-work for the Republicans. Both parties have uneasy and frankly disturbing relationships with their fringe partisans. Plenty of what Michael Moore does is deceitful propaganda (actually on the lines of Leni Riefenstahl but without so much talent), but it's not any more distasteful than Ann Coulter calling all Democrats traitors, or Sean Hannity subtitling his book with a call to defeat terrorism and liberalism as if they were the same thing (to adduce only a couple of examples), and nothing the Democrats did vis-a-vis Moore can compare to the Republicans' endorsement of Zell Miller's fascistic remarks at the Republican convention. Perhaps more importantly, in terms of the validity of some Democrats' contentions about an October surprise involving Osama bin Laden, the party's relationship to Michael Moore is neither here nor there. If their worries have merit, then they have merit, even if Michael Moore would be disposed to thinking that they do. Hitchens' reference to Michael Moore is a non-sequitur, which he attempts to pose---and this is where his dishonesty and hackery is revealed---as a synthetic entailment.

What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around?

Hitchens is just too smart to write something like this with a straight face. "Dicking around" is the perfect description for Bush's foreign policy in general and Iraqi policy in particular. The administration built a case for war on premises it knew to be suspect, namely posession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and ties to al Qaeda, and once the regime had been defeated, it wrote the manual on how not to conduct nation-building. The borders were left unsecured. The conventional weapons stockpiles were left unguarded. The coalition force was geometrically undermanned. Political leaders, including Hitchens' hero Paul Wolfowitz, overruled the tactical assessments of generals in the field, of which the most notorious example is the vacillation and flip-floppery that has resulted in Fallujah becoming a terrorist stronghold. The supposed green-zone is falling out of the control of the interim government. The insurgents launch attacks within Baghdad with impunity. Iyad Allawi, an ex-confidant of Saddam Hussein, handpicked to be a strongman figure, is holed up in a James Bond villain-style complex, from which he doesn't emerge for fear of being shot on sight. The Bush-Cheney campaign actually writes Allawi's speech in Washington. And on and on in this vein. (I just gave the executive summary of a good quarter of the non-fiction books that will be written during the next decade.) In the wake of the Duelfer report which proves that Saddam's regime was quite the opposite of a "grave and gathering threat," the president and vice president argue that Saddam's corruption of the oil-for-food program justifies the war ex post facto. The vice-president himself, after numerous press-appearances in which he encouraged people to draw the conclusion that Saddam had a hand in 9/11 (including suggesting that there was something to the stories about a Prague/Atta meeting---talk about loony conspiracy theories), claims innocently never to have suggested an Iraq-9/11 connection. This stuff would be funny, except that thousands of Americans and Iraqis are being murdered and maimed as a result.

And Hitchens accuses the Democrats who control not one branch of government of "dicking around." This is either intensely delusional or intensely cynical. You decide.

Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.

Would it be impertinent to point out, as John Kerry did, that 10 times the number of troops in Afghanistan are in Iraq? Either Hitchens knows that it doesn't take a battalion to guard a single prisoner, in which case he shouldn't have raised the point, or he doesn't know anything about military affairs, in whch case he shouldn't write about them. His point, of course, has nothing to do with tactics per se; it is to conflate criticism of policymakers with callous attacks on American soldiers. For shame.

Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"—which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates—but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.

Wasn't I wise to wait until after the debate to comment on this? I'll just laugh aloud, as should you, without gloating excessively. Who looks more foolish now, the Democrats who hoped the debates would turn things around, or Hitchens for mocking them? Was this column written before it was revealed that the Bush campaign was writing Allawi's speech, or afterwards? As for Democrats pinning their hopes on disaster in Iraq, more in a moment.

The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?

No honest, serious, grown-up person thinks that the battle for Iraq can be decided before the election, and that was just as true two weeks ago when Hitchens wrote the column. No one, furthermore, except lying propagandists, would claim that the reconstruction effort is going well. What John Kerry's supporters hope for is not that things will get even worse (and worse in this case means truly catastrophic); they hope that the electorate will finally see just how badly things are going, how many mistakes could have been avoided, how false and offensive is the administration's binary choice of immediate withdrawal versus obstinate refusal to adjust strategy or conciliate allies. They hope that the voters will recognize that the Bush administration does not deserve a second term, and that nothing that could be done within the next month will earn them that second term.

I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If Hitchens is aware of any senior Democrats who actually hope for disaster in Iraq, he is welcome to say so. Otherwise he is simply gushing McCarthyite innuendo. He's free to believe what he wants to, but this amounts to a violent annihilation of his integrity as a writer.

I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters.

If it's true that Zarqawi is the more dangerous and ruthless jihadist (Hitchens is right that that's arguable), then perhaps the administration should have made an effort to capture him when they had a golden opportunity to do so two and a half years ago. They dicked around instead.

But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.

Could someone tell me just what the hell this means. I suspect that Hitchens was trying to be too cute, and if pressed, he wouldn't give a terribly direct explication. The obvious (only?) interpretation is that the Democrats shouldn't be fielding a candidate for president. Senator Miller couldn't have put it better. To reiterate: for shame.

Now for a coda.

At the time time "Flirting with Disaster" was published, George Bush appeared to be on a course for a 3, 4, 5 point victory. The opposite appears to be true now, and we'll know for sure after tonight's debate. But in the aftermath of the first debate, Hitchens wrote for the Mirror a column that rather judiciously eviscerated Bush's atrocious performance. He concluded with these remarks:

I have forgotten to mention Kerry's dishonesty. This takes two forms: Saying things he knows are false and making claims he cannot back up.

This is even more clumsy than the "dicking around" charge in Slate. Relative to the average candidate's debate performance, Kerry was sublimely honest. He could be argued to have been somewhat dishonest about some of his probabilistic contentions. Neverthelss, if the accusation of "[s]aying things he knows are false and making claims he cannot back up" weighs at all against Kerry, then it self-evidently impales Bush. Case fucking closed.

And finally:

Deep down, it's only the prospect of defeat in Iraq that keeps people in Bush's camp. If he had the sense to realise this, he could make a strength out of weakness. As it was, he managed to perform the other way around.

Thus style and honesty are buried side by side. Matt Welch identified the only plausible way to wrench meaning out of this semantic and semiotic trainwreck:

I guess there's a way you can see this making sense, especially if you believe (as I don't) that Kerry will take the first or second opportunity to cut & run from Iraq. And I guess you could have also used this logic to vote for Nixon in '72, which is something I presume Hitchens still would find retrospectively unthinkable, though who knows with him nowadays.

So much for the anger. Now the sorrow. As recently as June, Hitchens was near his incisive best. Here is his response to the Abu Ghraib atrocity:

It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

I say that he was near his best, since he's still relying on anonymice. But how odious, and how ultimately sad, that he supports the administration that let this happen; and "let" might be an understatement, given the fact that internal memoranda in the DoJ and White House counsel's office argue for presidential fiat power over all international conventions, and seek to create a de lege justification for torture.