Where have you gone Christopher Hitchens?

Our political spectrum turns its lonely eyes to you.

This week The New Yorker will have a profile of writer Christopher Hitchens, which unfortunately is not online yet, but has generated some talk already. Apparently one part of the profile recounts Hitchens chewing out fellow dinner party guests for having the gall of not thinking Howard Dean is a "raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag". Good times.

Before starting the pile-on of wondering and mourning about what has become of Hitchens though, I just want to point to the selective memory of the The New Yorker. Is Hitchens crazy and delisiounal for contining to not only support the Iraq War, but for attacking those who opposed it as moronic "fellow-travelers"? Yes, but at least he doesn't now publish articles about the incompentance and criminality of those who he supported with this "project". I'll probably write more about this later, but from just a little over a month before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, editor David Remnick had these comments:

...What is most unfortunate about the President's lack of public engagement in the argument for force is that the objections to it are answerable. There are, of course, some who oppose an invasion of Iraq on the ground that, say, peace is better than war, or that the "real issue" is a conspiracy of oil interests, or that the President is an avenging cowboy and all his advisers a posse. Far more seriously, there are questions of why now and why Iraq (and not North Korea or Iran); there are profound concerns about the loss of life (can't we just foment an Army coup?), and about what happens the day after Saddam is arrested, or killed, or lands on Elba. Do we really expect a Jeffersonian legislature to rise from the rubble of Saddam's palaces? Are we prepared for years of rebuilding in Iraq when we already seem to have lost interest in the continuing chaos in Afghanistan?...

The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Saddam's abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.

"Sure, we have no idea what will happen, but damn it, we have to do what's right unlike those soft-headed, peaceniks!".......[three years later in the same magazine]....."Wow, what a fucking disaster, only an idiot wouldn't have seen this happen!"

Back to Hitchens though. Ever since 9/11, when he came to believe he alone understood the true nature of the threat facing liberal democracies in the West and all others who had the gall to suggest otherwise were weak-kneed, sympathizers who had no intelligence or interest in justice and the like, Hitchens has progressively gone deeper and deeper to what can only be called (I believe this is the professional term) "gin-soaked madness". As someone who enjoys a drink, it might be unfair to call it that, but for a man who proclaims loudly to be dedicated to righteousness and logic, it is hard to understand how else he could still fail to see his horrific misjudgement and continue to still act as if events have somehow vidicated him.

It is especially painful for those of us who always admired Hitchens for his truth-telling, morally driven, belligerent style. I still think his book No One Left to Lie To is one of the best assessments of the Clinton administration, in all its hypocrisy and selling-out to the values and political views that they supposedly lead with. In the recounting of Clinton's rushing home to execute a mentally retarted inmate, the lie of "welfare reform", and the ugliness of "triangulation", Hitchens was one of the first political writers I read that actually seemed to speak about politics from a clear point of view, from an understanding of right vs. wrong, instead of it just being a sporting event with winners and losers.

Today, his best book only serves to show how far off the path he has strayed, how deeply he has become identified with those just a few years prior he damned in the strongest words possible. The Trial of Henry Kissinger was, and still is, an important work that looked at American foreign policy and its results honestly. Its entire premise, if one were to take things like the Geneva Conventions, international human rights law, and the Nuremberg trials seriously, the actions of Henry Kissinger during the 20th century have to be judged as crimes against humanity and should be punished justly, is a view he may still have, but is unreconizable in his writing and comments today. With the latest revelations that Cheney and Bush actually meet with and take advice from Kissinger, a man who Hitchens discribes in detail as being linked to both mass slaughter and individual murders, how can he still honestly believe all the actions he advocated for the last five years have been right? And that those, some who were his former allies and friends, who suggested otherwise were so wrong?

I know Hitchens would probably point to some misspellings and rhetoric problems in this as evidence I am a fool and don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I actually don't know what the fuck I am talking about, but I just want to give you the preamble to that book he wrote on Kissinger and ask again, what happened?

For the brave victims of Henry Kissinger, whose example will easily outlive him, and his "reputation." And for Josehp Heller, who saw it early and saw it whole:

In Gold's conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as Bismark, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious schlump who made war gladly. (Good as Gold, 1976)