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CounterPunch
October
1, 2002
Adieu, Christopher,
Adieu
Contrary to Reason
by
RICHARD HARTH
Christopher Hitchens remains for many, a much
admired contrarian, a title no doubt reinforced by his recent
decision to leave The Nation magazine, for whom he has contributed
a biweekly "Minority Report" since 1982. The
contrarian avocation however, is not without its occupational
hazards, principally, the need to constantly raise the bar in
attempt to outdo one's own sheer contrariness which sooner or
later tests reason beyond its graded tensile strength.
It is one thing to dissect the less-than-saintly
inner workings of a Clinton or Mother Theresa before an uninformed
and unreasonably sympathetic public--a task Hitchens carried
out with his characteristic eloquence and flair. It is quite
another to take on the infinitely more daunting challenge of
saying warm and fuzzy things about a globally recognized lout
--a through and through despicable human being about whom any
effort at thoughtful compliment must strike the ear as either
jarringly insincere (to the point of satire), or as some Koreshian
echo of delusion.
Such a man now takes his ease in the
Oval Office or may be found squinting into the middle distance
on his dude ranch, in the favored home state where so many of
his domestic victims met their untimely end. Hitchens--much in
the style of OJ's defense team apparently figures--'if I can
get THIS creep off the hook, my rhetorical skills are truly unlimited!"
That he fails prodigiously at the task of absolving our vermin-in-chief,
is hardly a surprise (though something of a disappointment to
us--his once-devoted fans). Even the best high jumper can not
leap over a building--let alone the moon, (a more appropriate
metaphor in this case).
While Hitchens doesn't shy away from
chiding the Taung Child from Texas, regarding his routine atrocities
against the English language, he nonetheless seems to find much
worthy of approval. Absenting any shred of decency, industriousness
or literacy in the current president, one must assume Hitchens
admires Dubya's deeply contrarian streak. Indeed, among
aspiring contrarians, it is Dubya, rather than Hitchens who ought
rightly to be considered the Tiger Woods of the sport, as even
a casual tour of our leader's curious cosmology ought to make
plain.
Bush rejects evolution-cornerstone of
biological science, considers global warming (against the informed
opinion of the best atmospheric and climate scientists on earth),
to be a leftist hoax, regards 40-cell embryos as deserving of
full citizenship, insists the way to best serve the environment
is to wage unrestricted war on it, and the most appropriate means
of fighting terrorism is to engage in it.
In a technological age at the dawn of
the 21st century, the president appoints an Attorney General
who declares that dancing is caused by evil spirits, a textbook
psychotic who plainly belongs in a nut house. Among Bush's other
'non-partisan' choices, the world-class atrocity denier Elliot
Abrams and death squad cheerleader John Negroponte--oh not just
for any old post, mind you. He is now our "human rights"
ambassador to Honduras. Pretty contrarian stuff. These and
other human disasters were described by Hitchens as "a series
of more or less statesmanlike appointments."
One could hardly expect someone like
Hitchens, (whose desire to be an ideological maverick is only
surpassed by his deep-seated need, bordering I believe on the
pathological, to be the center of attention), to forego the opportunity
presented by the events of 9/11. This need found its early expression
primarily in print, though increasingly Hitchens has been making
his signature bedraggled appearance on America's medium of choice,
television.
Following the attacks on Washington and
New York, and given these preconditions, the ever-opinionated
Hitchens had two possible avenues of response, each guaranteed
to maintain his title of provocateur in good standing. He could
advance the contention of many career leftists that America had--through
at least a half century of disgraceful and murderous foreign
policy, done nearly everything possible to ensure an event like
September 11th (a stance certain to make him persona non grata
in our lavishly praised "open society" and to excommunicate
him rather definitively from the beckoning arms of CNN, NBC,
and CBS (to say nothing of Fox). It was the principled stand
taken by Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward Herman, Robert Fisk,
John Pilger, Lewis Lapham, Noam Chomsky and many other courageous
observers. Alternately, one could attempt to have his cake and
eat it--that is, opt for maximum contrariness as well as maximum
public exposure by attempting to out-Pentagon the Pentagon.
To my great disappointment and Hitchens'
lasting shame, this once invaluable polemicist has opted for
the latter approach. Such shame and disappointment however, are
as nothing beside Hitchens' role, however minor, in abetting
the injury and destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent
lives and the fomenting of incalculable human misery. Indifference
to the all-too-human toll of America's 'war for civilization'
has of late, turned to uninhibited enthusiasm in Hitchens' rich
prose, with the horrific effects of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan
apparently falling short of the effort needed to satiate his
newfound bloodlust for the 'evildoers'. Commenting on Bush's
war strategy in Afghanistan in The Nation on December 17, 2001,
Hitchens lamented the undue restraint practiced by U.S. heavy
bombers, referring to the carpet and cluster bombing forays in
heavily populated areas as "an almost pedantic policy of
avoiding 'collateral damage.'"
A brief reconnaissance of the effects
of these 'pedantic' policies is in order, and ought to include
the repeated bombings of Red Cross facilities, the accidental
near-murder of America's interim puppet Karzai (in a botched
attack which killed 3 Americans and injured 19 others), massacres
of wedding parties in Mazar I Sharif (Oct 15), Niazi Qalaye (Dec
29th) Bal Khel (May 17th) Kakarak Village (July 1st) not to mention
the scores of Afghan children in many areas of the country--raked
by cannon fire from AC-130 gunships, mauled, disfigured and blinded
by cluster bombs and blasted apart in numerous high intensity
bombing raids, often carried out on the flimsiest suspicion of
possible Taliban presence in the vicinity .
Some of these latter victims of our war
for civilization were seen in a recent PBS film Afghanistan,
Year 1380. They lay about, our helpless 'enemies' (who had likely
known nothing but severe poverty and hunger during their short
lives), too weak, too severely injured to move. Many were the
sole survivors, their parents and remaining family having been
obliterated in the aerial carnage. In a wretched facility in
Kabul, these latest victims of Mr. Bush's righteous struggle
against "evil" were attended to by an Italian emergency
team, whose chief surgeon Gino Strada reported that 85% of the
victims treated were civilian--30% of these, children. Are you
listening Christopher? Many were cluster bomb victims, whose
shrieks punctuated the makeshift operating theater--a 'theater
of war' our leaders, with the gracious assistance of friends
like Hitchens, hope we'll never learn of--or learning of, not
care about. Hitchens described these indiscriminate weapons of
terror as having a "heartening effect" when used against
presumed Taliban positions, a comment the ruthless bastard Donald
Rumsfeld would likely find too distasteful to use--at least in
print.
Hitchens in his latest incarnation would
doubtless also approve of his government's decision Oct. 11th
to purchase exclusive rights to high-definition Ikonos satellite
pictures of Afghanistan, following the initial reports of heavy
civilian loss of life north-west of Jalalabad. Who knows what
mischief Hitchens' enemies on the "soft left" could
get into with detailed graphic evidence of American war crimes?
Anyway, fear not--civilian access to these images has been shut
down. The military by the way, have their own satellites with
far more detailed imaging than that provided by the 1-meter resolution
offered by the civilian Ikonos. They simply don't want anyone
else to have pictorial proof of their lethal transgressions --period.
In any case, a "war on terrorism" is bound to sound
better than it looks, a fact the American and camera-shy Israeli
butchers have learned through painful trial and error.
Which brings us to what has come to be
known as the Mid East question. Here we witness Hitchens'
final emergence from his oozing rightwing chrysalis. Improvising
on a melody by Thomas Friedman, Hitchens opines in his final
Minority Report:
"In case I should be accused of
avoiding the question of Palestine, I should simply say that
George W. Bush was right in making it plain to the Palestinians
that suicide bombing, at this time or any other, would be suicidal
for them. But this does not dissolve [sic] America's longstanding
promise to sponsor mutual recognition between equal populations--a
promise that has been unkept for far too long and is now made
more urgent rather than less."
This worthless platitude and excuse for
Israeli ruthlessness would not be out of place in the grotesque
monologues delivered by Ari Fleisher. It gets worse, as Hitchens
tells us, in the same article: "The Palestinian plight is
being allowed to worsen (though the Palestinians do seem to be
pressing ahead hearteningly with a "regime change"
of their own)." That is a fine touch indeed. The Palestinian
situation is "being allowed to worsen" as America continues
to supply all the means (in the form of billions of dollars of
leading edge weapons, and vetoes of resolutions demanding Israel
be held to the standards of International law) and encouragement
to the serial murderer Ariel Sharon, (whose name has been omitted
through some oversight from the Hitchens/Bush list of terrorist
culprits to be brought to justice).
Regardless, the trivial concerns of an
entire people terrorized, dispossessed and violated for 35 years
ought not sidetrack us from the important business at hand--the
re-destruction of Iraq. Here however, Hitchens is willing to
voice his adamant misgivings: "I am appalled that by this
late date no proclamation has been issued to the people of Iraq,
announcing the aims and principles of the coming intervention."
One wonders just what he has in mind. "Hey you..Iraq people..listen
up! There's no point wasting your time crawling in terror into
some underground fortification with your friends, wives and children,
once we start bombing. Our latest weapons (many ingeniously outfitted
with depleted uranium) will make short work of you. You may as
well relax and get on with your business, whatever that is, because
there's no defense for you anyway. If you survive, we'll fix
up what's left of the country--good as new, if not better. So
quit whining and get with the program. Show some spirit, and
Uncle Sam is certain to reward you. He always does."
As Bush's latest willing executioner,
Hitchens even climbs on board to reanimate the baseless accusations
concerning a supposed meeting between lead highjacker Mohammed
Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague--allegations strenuously denied
by both present and former heads of the FBI, CIA officials and
just about everyone else active in anti-terror circles. Even
Bush admitted recently to the Canadian Prime Minister that this
farcical approach to furnishing a pretext for preemptive assault
on Iraq was being abandoned, out of a total lack of evidence.
In the end, we have little hope of understanding
the startling inconsistency of Christopher Hitchens, who has
done a great service in further illuminating the vicious crimes
of Henry Kissinger, while giving nearly unbridled support to
our current president--a fellow traveler and kindred spirit on
the genocide circuit. Indeed, Bush's space-cold indifference
to human life would meet with leering approval from just such
scum as Kissinger and for precisely the same reasons.
Hitchens' often valiant and always eloquent
articles on behalf of human rights and decency and against the
world's tyrants and monsters can not alas absolve him of responsibility
for supporting a campaign of murderous retribution in Afghanistan
and encouraging the immanent slaughter of the long-suffering
people of Iraq, the next victims in the crosshairs of Bush's
'war without end.'
The left has lost one of its most prolific
and compelling voices.
Richard Harth
is a writer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. He may be reached
at c_rharth@bellsouth.net
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