Hitchens & The Neocons

Former Marxist Christopher Hitchens, a truly free thinker, has alienated his old Trotskyite buddies by siding with the US on the Iraq invasion:

To many of Christopher Hitchens' old friends, he died on September 11th 2001. Tariq Ali considered himself a comrade of Christopher Hitchens for over thirty years. Now he speaks about him with bewilderment. "On 11th September 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed the planes they had hijacked into the Twin Towers of New York. Among the casualties, although unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again," Ali writes. "The vile replica currently on offer is a double."
This encapsulates how many of Hitchens' old allies - a roll-call of the left's most distinguished intellectuals, from Edward Said to Noam Chomsky - now view him. On September 10th, he was campaigning for Henry Kissinger to be arraigned before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague for his massive and systematic crimes against humanity in the 1960s and 1970s. He was preparing to testify in the Vatican - as a literal Devil's Advocate - against the canonisation of Mother Theresa, who he had exposed as a sadistic Christian fundamentalist, an apologist for some of the world's ugliest dictatorships, and a knowing beneficiary of corporate fraud. Hitchens was sailing along the slow, certain route from being the Left's belligerent bad boy to being one of its most revered old men.

Emphasis mine. Ali calls Hitch vile because he is backing a cause that real Leftists should, the removal of a nation from the evil spector of torture and rape at the behest of a dictator. It seems that terror appeasers like Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky are the real sell-outs to the Leftist ideology.

He explains that he believes the moment the left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings."
Hitchens - who has just returned from Afghanistan - says, "The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.

Again, emphasis mine. Read that line again. Hitchens is speechless because he didn't shun his cause, his cause shunned him because of sheer hatred of George W. Bush. Hitch explains his views on Neo-conservatism thusly:

He believes neoconservatism is a distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy. "It's explicitly anti-Kissingerian. Kissinger hates this stuff. He opposed intervening in the Balkans. Kissinger Associates were dead against [the war in] Iraq. He can't understand the idea of backing democracy - it's totally alien to him."
"So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx.

I consider myself a Neocon and this hits upon the Neoconservatism better than most pieces I've read. Hitch was really impressed (and still is as far as I know) with Paul Wolfowitz whom he based the first first pages of A Long Short War on:

But can we trust the Bush administration - filled with people like Dick Cheney, who didn't even support the release of Nelson Mandela - to support democracy and the spread of American values now? He offers an anecdote in response. There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book ?Reading Lolita in Tehran' documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? [US Deputy Secretary of Defence] Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."
With the fine eye for ideological division that comes from a life on the Trotskyite left, Hitch diagnoses the intellectual divisions within the Bush administration. He does not ally himself with the likes of Cheney; he backs the small sliver of pure neocon thought he associates with Wolfowitz. "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart. He's from a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. You know the drill - Kennedy Democrats, some of the family got out of Poland in time and some didn't make it, civil rights marchers? He impressed me when he was speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington a few years ago and he made a point of talking about Palestinian suffering. He didn't have to do it - at all - and he was booed. He knew he would be booed, and he got it. I've taken time to find out what he thinks about these issues, and it's always interesting."

A facinating, if disjointed article that is worth reading.

Update: Over at Slate, the reponses to Hitch sum up the thinking of Leftists with regard to Hitchens support of the Iraq War:

…Let's be honest, Hitch. Your solemn tone is not the product of an actual reverence for American war dead. If it were, you would not have advocated sending them to their doom simply to effectuate some radical social reform in a land that is not our concern. You would be more concerned, as am I, with then NEXT 1,000, and the next, and the next, and the next.....Be honest, good Hitch. If, instead of a rabid murderer like Allawi ruling Iraq, it was the kindly face of an elected former exile, you would be crowing now. If, instead of a rapidly expanding piles of rubble studded with IEDs and car bomb shrapnel, Iraq's cities had functioning power and water treatment plants, you'd be quoting George M. Cohan, not Spencer…For me, the 1000th American death is simply another campaign ribbon to strap on the colors in the fight to end this insanity. It goes along with the other ribbons-- the ten, or is it thirty? thousand Iraqi civilians murdered for no better reason than their ill judgment to live on top of 12 billion barrels of oil. It goes with the billions in tax payer profits handed over in no bid contracts to companies largely owned by the men directing this war and their life-long business compadres. It goes with the name of a prison that will stain the reputation of our nation and our armed forces for decades. Right now, those 1,000 deaths are politically meaningless for one reason only-- they were all volunteers-- all professionals. Professional armies have always been the playthings of sovereigns…--doodahman

'Nough said.