Hitchens vs. Galloway
Over the weekend, CSPAN aired an extraordinary debate between Christopher Hitchens, the one-time radical turned Iraq War apologist, and George Galloway, the renegade anti-war British MP who notoriously testified before the Senate last May and schooled the witless Senator Coleman (R-MN) in the niceties of political debate.
In the five years since 9/11, Hitchens has, in the opinion of many, gone from being an intellectually-respectable if somewhat cranky contrarian to an out-and-out partisan hack and bagman for the most extreme neocon ideology. While Hitchens remains mostly composed and logical in print, he has often exhibited bizarre behavior in recent TV appearances (notably a recent interview on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show), where he comes across like the town drunk muttering incoherently in a gin-soaked Oxford accent. Galloway seems, in his way, equally out of control but not nearly as tragic about it. A perennially marginal figure for his extreme views, he’s obviously happy as a pig in shit that the American far left is taking him seriously and is milking his brief notoriety for all its worth.
The debate was sponsored by some sort of leftist group in New York and the crowd appeared to be heavily pro-Galloway. The exposure and the adversity seemed to bring out the best in Hitchens, who was in top form, despite his disheveled appearance and twitchy body language. And frankly, Galloway presents the perfect target for Hitch: just the sort of bombastic left-wing fanatic caricature that Hitchens (and many on the pro-war right) seems to believe represents the mainstream of political opposition to the war.
Really, you have to search high and low to find anyone who fits the bill as well as Gorgeous George. An old-line socialist as comfortable with the hackneyed rhetoric of “workers revolution” as he was in his fashionable beige suit, Galloway is stridently anti-Zionist (as is Hitchens, by the way) and seems to believe that the insurgents in Iraq represent a legitimate campaign of national liberation. On one occasion, he even came precious close to excusing Al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks on the grounds that these were a defensible response to legitimate grievances that we should be listening to. He has also been accused of accepting financial favors as part of the corrupt Oil-for-Food program – an accusation he vehemently denies but which seems to hover about him like a stale fart.
In the debate, Hitchens exhibited a dazzling command of language, forensics, wit and passion. Occasionally annoyed by the hostile crowd, he was generally composed even when going straight for the rhetorical groin. Galloway, red-faced and ranting, harangued the crowd in full voice, stringing together ad hominem attacks, odd non-sequitors and occasionally tart zingers that sounded a bit like a prepared stump speech. It seemed to me that, on points and style, the night belonged to Hitchens.
There was only one wee little problem. Very little of Hitchens’s elaborate defense of the Iraq invasion had more than an incidental contact with reality.
A few years ago, I noted that Hitchens seemed to be superimposing his own agenda and his own morality on the activities of an Administration who shared neither his ethics nor his intelligence. He was rabidly in favor of the war he wanted to fight for the reasons that he wanted to fight it, and strangely indifferent to the one that was actually being planned. This was an understandable, if dangerous, position before the bombs were dropped. At this late date, as Galloway pointed out in his closing statement, it was just madness.
For Hitchens, the Iraq war was a war to liberate the Kurds (and, incidentally, the other Iraqis) from the grip of a diabolical tyrant and install a progressive, secular (preferably socialist) regime that would stand in opposition to neighboring tyrannies and incite other Arabs to revolution. As events unfolded, more and more inconvenient facts about the nature of the occupation, the venal and ideological motives of the neocons, the complexities of Iraqi politics beyond Kurdistan, and the likelihood of Iraq becoming an Iranian-dominated Shia theocracy had to be lopped off in Hitchens’s increasingly procrustean defense of the struggle.
The odd result is that Galloway, the preening, ranting hard-line leftist sounded, at times, like the cold-eyed realist, while the coolly-logical, witty and urbane Hitchens embroidered a tapestry of wishful thinking, propaganda and deceptive rhetoric that evoked memories of the old Reds’ defense of Stalin in the 1930s.
In a sense, it was instructive to see Hitchens present his views in this context. He was obviously trying to appeal to the instincts of the left-leaning crowd, which requires a different line of argument than one generally sees used in public. In doing so, he made the best possible moral case for the war, or his support of it anyway, and could contrast his principles with those of the very dubious Galloway. But not even this man of extraordinary wit and intelligence, of obviously sincere commitment to liberal, secular principles and human dignity, could square the circle. Not even he could connect the admirable goals he champions to the disgrace and disaster that the Iraq war predictably became. Sadly, Hitchens is dug so deep into his position that it seems unlikely he will ever see the gap between his own ideals and those of the men prosecuting “his” war, or acknowledge why this gap is the reason why the free Iraq of his fantasies bears such scant resemblance to the one in the here-and-now.
I still admire Hitchens for his courage and his ability. But when you lose a debate on the merits to the likes of George Galloway, it’s time to re-examine your position. That he is highly unlikely to do so is a great loss for Anglo-American civilization.
8:36:20 AM 
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