A response to 'Understanding Christopher Hitchens'
note: this comment was initially written in response to this article on Christopher Hitchens. I initially aimed to post it on the blog in question, but they closed their comments section and hence I reprint it here:
Good article on Hitchens. I think you make a lot of important points, especially in the way you destroy the faux-naive reasons offered by Galloway for what he (and many others) see as Hitchens' 'betrayal' of the left. As a liberal, anti-fascist individual who remains determinedly against the war, I am often dismayed by the media attention granted to Galloway, Moore and their ilk, who are all-too-easily painted by the right as the only manifestation of liberal anti-war discourse. I am fully supportive of Hitchens attempts to shatter their deluded, self-serving campaigns, although less enamored by his inability to differentiate between those who supported Hussein and those who have always loathed his brutal regime.
However, I feel that you neglect to consider one of the key inconsistencies on Hitchens' post-September 2001 embrace of American military involvement in the Middle East. Hitchens has been a constant critic of totalitarian religious authority wherever he has seen it, from the Catholic church to the Ayatollahs in Iran. This latter case is for him a personal one, as your article notes, due to his friendship with a number of secular Kurdish pro-democracy groups - the Kurds just being one of the peoples to have suffered under both the Shah and, latterly, the progenitors and inheritors of the 1979 Khomeini revolution. In Iraq, the 'coalition' troops have managed to remove a totalitarian - yet secular - regime; one, it should never be forgotten, responsible for some of the worst crimes against its own people since the Second World War; in exchange, Iraq is now a barely functioning, yet existent, democratic state. Yet what kind of democratic state is it likely to become? The likelihood is, one that represents many of the things that Hitchens purports to abhor - a Shi'ite theocracy, a puppet state largely under the control of the mullahs in its northerly neighbour, a place where women are forced to wear the veil and are beaten and even killed for daring to show an ankle in public (these things are already coming to pass in the country's Shia-dominated south). The country's President pays lip service to the idea of women's rights, yet it features not in the much-maligned Constitution, which to virtually all intents and purposes reduced Iraq to a barely affiliated trio of often hostile regions.
This may bode well for the future of Hitchens Kurdish friends, who will be granted in everything but name their long-cherished country of Kurdistan; but what of the Shi'ites who, having endured the viciousness of Saddam, are now forced to live under a brutal theocratic regime? Do we just wash our hands of the whole matter, chalk it down to the quirks of 'democracy', and move on to better things? If Iran is already a thorn in the side of the West, a Shi'ite Iran-Iraq axis will not only prove a massively destabilising force in the region - particularly in Saudi Arabia, which has long feared a united Shia presence on the edges of the peninsula - but will no doubt create more justification in the West for intervention in order to stop the development of nuclear weapons, or in order to provide 'freedom', or for whatever post-hoc reason they can come up with. Would it be impossible to suppose that, with the coalition troops removed from Iraq so that 'democracy can flourish' (or whatever ridiculous epithet is coined), they would have to be sent back in to defeat the very regime they helped to establish?
I feel these are legitimate concerns that Hitchens has yet to properly address.
Good article on Hitchens. I think you make a lot of important points, especially in the way you destroy the faux-naive reasons offered by Galloway for what he (and many others) see as Hitchens' 'betrayal' of the left. As a liberal, anti-fascist individual who remains determinedly against the war, I am often dismayed by the media attention granted to Galloway, Moore and their ilk, who are all-too-easily painted by the right as the only manifestation of liberal anti-war discourse. I am fully supportive of Hitchens attempts to shatter their deluded, self-serving campaigns, although less enamored by his inability to differentiate between those who supported Hussein and those who have always loathed his brutal regime.
However, I feel that you neglect to consider one of the key inconsistencies on Hitchens' post-September 2001 embrace of American military involvement in the Middle East. Hitchens has been a constant critic of totalitarian religious authority wherever he has seen it, from the Catholic church to the Ayatollahs in Iran. This latter case is for him a personal one, as your article notes, due to his friendship with a number of secular Kurdish pro-democracy groups - the Kurds just being one of the peoples to have suffered under both the Shah and, latterly, the progenitors and inheritors of the 1979 Khomeini revolution. In Iraq, the 'coalition' troops have managed to remove a totalitarian - yet secular - regime; one, it should never be forgotten, responsible for some of the worst crimes against its own people since the Second World War; in exchange, Iraq is now a barely functioning, yet existent, democratic state. Yet what kind of democratic state is it likely to become? The likelihood is, one that represents many of the things that Hitchens purports to abhor - a Shi'ite theocracy, a puppet state largely under the control of the mullahs in its northerly neighbour, a place where women are forced to wear the veil and are beaten and even killed for daring to show an ankle in public (these things are already coming to pass in the country's Shia-dominated south). The country's President pays lip service to the idea of women's rights, yet it features not in the much-maligned Constitution, which to virtually all intents and purposes reduced Iraq to a barely affiliated trio of often hostile regions.
This may bode well for the future of Hitchens Kurdish friends, who will be granted in everything but name their long-cherished country of Kurdistan; but what of the Shi'ites who, having endured the viciousness of Saddam, are now forced to live under a brutal theocratic regime? Do we just wash our hands of the whole matter, chalk it down to the quirks of 'democracy', and move on to better things? If Iran is already a thorn in the side of the West, a Shi'ite Iran-Iraq axis will not only prove a massively destabilising force in the region - particularly in Saudi Arabia, which has long feared a united Shia presence on the edges of the peninsula - but will no doubt create more justification in the West for intervention in order to stop the development of nuclear weapons, or in order to provide 'freedom', or for whatever post-hoc reason they can come up with. Would it be impossible to suppose that, with the coalition troops removed from Iraq so that 'democracy can flourish' (or whatever ridiculous epithet is coined), they would have to be sent back in to defeat the very regime they helped to establish?
I feel these are legitimate concerns that Hitchens has yet to properly address.
posted by DN at 11:02 AM
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