You Would Not Tell With Such High Zest--(long)

It seems an interesting coincidence that the end of the Iraq War coincides with the death of one of its fiercest proponents.  Of the various errata among Hitchens' works are evidences of sexism, religious bigotry (but of course!), elitism, but the unforgivable mistake is clearly support of a war of choice engaged by the United States against Iraq, a nation unfortunately burdened with a dictator in the despicable person of Saddam Hussein--of whom nothing good I have to say, a complex history, and rich oil fields. Oh, and the Islamic religion--of which I have nothing to say in relation to the conflict in Iraq, because it should not have mattered.

But it did.  In the aftermath of 9/11, not just the usual PNAC neocon folks were itching to invade Iraq (Because of: WMDs, or programs to develop WMDs, or ties between Saddam and al-Qaida, or because Saddam was a genocidal war criminal, or...oh take your pick!) A lot of the Villager/pundit/talking head class were for it. After all, Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy.  Ask the Marsh Arabs, or the Kurds. And he really did have a sophisticated weapons program as of the first Gulf War.



Of course, UN inspectors weren't finding any evidence of weapons programs as of 2002-03. And the crimes of Saddam Hussein had passed without prosecution from the end of the Gulf War to....whenever it was that the Bush Administration decided that invading Iraq was a necessary thing. Which on reflection seems to have been always. But never mind that. A variety of forces conspired to make this war look like a Very Good Idea to a lot of the voices who mattered. Digby suggests that Hitchens was hoodwinked in part by the plausible-sounding con artistry of Ahmed Chalabi. That didn't hurt...but I also suggest that because of the chummy atmosphere between the pundits and the politicians, it was harder for anyone in that milieu to positively state that the war was going to be a great mistake, if not a criminal undertaking. It's one thing, after all, to indict a Henry Kissinger from afar, but a harder thing to suspect friends of great bastardy after being entertained under their roofs, drinking their booze, or meeting their as-yet uncorrupted family-members.

In the beginning, Hitchens' defense of the Iraq war effort strike me as being of a piece with the general pro-war tone of much of the media--he was only more bombastic about it, but then, his was a style a trifle given to excess. It was only that he didn't divert from it, or recant.  He only defended it the more as it became more....contrarian.....to do so.  Coates points to his piece, A War to be Proud Of, as painful to read, and I agree, adding that his answer to the question "Why did we get it wrong?" in the five-year anniversary retrospective of "liberal-hawks'" in Slate was: "I didn't."

So help me, if that piece did not strike me as saying "We have always been at war with Eastasia." But in there, I saw what he was saying. The history of the US with respects to Iraq had been one of meddling without accountability.  Even in the instance of the first Gulf War, GHWB gave Hussein's subjects reason to think they might be supported if there were an uprising, but let them down. Maybe he thought, and maybe others thought, that the mistakes of the past might be expiated by one grand act of war. A neat, clean surgical affair. Like the first one, but for good and all.

The problem with that is history. The problem with that is that if one allows that a Nixon/Kissinger collusion prolonged Vietnam and complicated affairs for political purposes, or acknowledges that the Reagan Administration ran a black ops war in Central America whilst selling arms to and negotiating with a state sponsor of terror--one can't then also expect anything like a nice, clean, happy little war from the direct heirs of the Nixon and Reagan Administrations.

Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded and repudiated the practice. He should have known better, however....he shouldn't have needed water thrown in his face to be awake to the reality that those capable of torture are capable of anything. The mistake he made was a mistake possibly made for the right reasons--a belief that the people of Iraq would be better off without a dictator--that they deserved better; the twin grave errors were in thinking that the dictator alone was the problem, and that force was the sole solution. Or allow a third: that the Middle east needs western intervention because we are so super cool and enlightened. And while history will judge whether it was right to support the Iraq War, what it will not be judged by is what might have been if it had not happened.

Hitchens thought that the Frankensteins of war would not make a monster this time, as if something stitched together from corpses would be anything but.

I think history may still provide something positive for the Iraqi people, but it will be because they chose their path, and we can't really say what would have happened if the war had not happened. And that is why I am a little jarred when reading that Leon Panetta has looked upon the past nine years, and pronounced it "worth it."

I am not so sure. But I don't think anyone decides that--once the bargain is made, the price can't be unpaid.  That should be the lesson learned, if any.