PRESIDENT George W. Bush has kidnapped Christopher Hitchens and has replaced him with a robot designed to tout the administration's line on Iraq. In the Sunday Washington Post, Hitchens, one of the foremost leftist intellectuals in the world, a columnist for Vanity Fair and formerly affiliated with The Nation, has announced that he cannot support the Left's opposition to a war with Iraq ("So Long, Fellow Travelers," Oct. 20). Hitchens change of view ispositive because he decided to ignore ideological exaggerations in looking at the case for going to war with Iraq, something which all Americans should do.
Hitchens had a column in The Nation, a left-leaning magazine, for 20 years. According to his column in the Post, he quit because of his view on war with Iraq. He is considered a giant in the Western -- especially English speaking -- intellectual community by many on the Left.
Hitchens has always been at the lead of liberal movements and revisionist history, such as opposition to Vietnam, the Apartheid in South Africa, the American supported coup of Salvador Allende in Chile and support for sovereignty for Palestine and East Timor. Hitchens always seemed like a younger version of Noam Chomsky, the famed linguist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who over the years has established himself as the preeminent Leftist intellectual in America. But Hitchens did something which Chomsky never could. By taking the courageous step to abandon his fellow Leftists, he made himself relevant.
In the article, Hitchens talks of how some Leftists in the United States view war with Iraq as an attack on the Muslim world.
Hitchens correctly points out, "Are the Kurds not Muslim? Is the new Afghan government not Muslim? Will not the next Iraqi government be Muslim also?"
Hitchens also tears down another favorite liberal argument against going to war with Iraq, in that Leftists typically assert that there are other dictatorships in the Middle East besides Iraq, yet they are not being attacked. Hitchens responds, "And since when is the Left supposed to argue for preservation of the status quo?"
The Left is supposed to be a group that believes in change, but in the case of Iraq, they are content to ignore the awful human rights violations of that country simply because many countries in the Middle East do not have accountable governments.
This is not to say that those on the Right do not use equally disingenuous arguments to make their case. Some Republicans have mentioned the human rights violations of the Iraqi regime as a possible reason for war. Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) urged President Bush to make the case to topple Saddam Hussein to the American people on Fox News: "I want him to enumerate the fact that Saddam Hussein, in instance after instance after instance, personally has killed people, violated all kinds of human rights and U.N. resolutions, and that he is the problem" ("Bush Presses Case Against Iraq," CNN.com, October 7,).
But when President Bill Clinton wanted to stop the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it was the Republicans in Congress who were the most skeptical. The Senate resolution in 1999, supporting American intervention in the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia passed 58-41, and of the 41 senators who opposed, 38 were Republicans including Trent Lott ("Senate Votes to Approve NATO Airstrikes Over Kosovo," CNN.com, March 23, 1999). But now with a Republican president back in office, they seemed to have regained their moral consciousness, or perhaps more realistically, they are following their partisan party line.
The Right wants to go into Iraq to protect American interests. Iraq poses a threat to the Middle East, if not American national security. There is nothing wrong with advocating this position, but the conservatives should not pretend that security interests are not their main motivation. Although they may well indeed care for the welfare of the people of Iraq, there are many oppressed peoples in the world, who the United States does not plan to help.
No matter what one's political view is, they should admire what Hitchens did by abandoning his comrades on the Left and advocating war with Iraq. Too often in the United States people become ideologues, confined to view the world through their distorted ideological lenses. Hitchens, by stating his support for war with Iraq, has said what he thought needed to be said, and for that he may have ostracized himself from the Left permanently. He will certainly never be accepted by moderates or the Right for his past views on various topics.
The issue of war with Iraq has become a hostage of Left and Right ideologies, each seeking to bolster their claims by using arguments which contradict their past positions. No matter what one believes regarding the question of war with Iraq, it is important to examine the facts, and not the rhetoric from the Left and the Right.
(Harris Freier's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at hfreier@cavalierdaily.com.)
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