Christopher Hitchens Right-Wing Obscurantist

Back in October of 1991, a younger, more radical Christopher Hitchens wrote a superb essay entitled “A State within a State” for Harper’s magazine plumbing some of the then recent filthy deeds and unconstitutional crimes committed by the CIA. Hitchens favorably mentioned in passing the crusading work of Senator John Kerry, who unearthed both financial links between corrupt Saudis, South American drug smugglers and the CIA (in the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)). Kerry also took a lead in investigating the many connections between narcotics and the Nicaraguan Contras. But that was a more daring and far different Senator Kerry from the one that ran for President this past November, and alas, we have a far different and much diminished Hitchens to contend with as well. Hitchens version ‘91 noted that the CIA’s shadowy imperio in imperium is ultimately the domain of the President, which interestingly enough, molded the figure of the senior Bush through the dark arts and black ops he commissioned as former director:

“No ‘new’ CIA, will be formulated from within the agency itself. Nor will pressure for such come from anywhere in the executive branch. Lest we forget. It was the CIA which molded the plastic figure of George Bush [the elder] and laid the trail of calamities and cover-ups that helped him along the road to the presidency.”

Hitchens piles scorn on how George H. W. Bush, as Director of the CIA, circumvented the conventional wisdom of the intelligence community on the relative strength of the Soviet threat with hyperbolic secondary opinions culled from a high powered crew of ideological hawks:

“It was also Director Bush who used the agency to tighten the ratchet of 1970s anti-Commie paranoia by appointing ‘Team B’ to second-guess the annual intelligence estimates. ‘Team B’, made up of Paul Nitze Richard Pipes. Lieutenant General Dan Graham and others of a similar stamp, is perhaps best remembered for its belief in the unfalsifiable superstition that Moscow sought and could obtain strategic superiority. Out of this smoke came the atmospherics of Reganism.”

Ah yes! How bizarre and utterly sad then, that the Hitchens who castigated the “unfalsifiable superstition” and the “smoke” and “atmospherics of Reganism” that inflated Soviet superiority, could years later so eagerly subscribe to the cloudy atmospherics of Bushism, blown to bellicosity on the “smoke” and “unfalsifiable superstition” of Iraqi WMD. The depth of his declension is evident in that one of the “others of a similar stamp” working under Nitze, Pipes et al in the nefarious Team B was a younger Paul Wolfowitz -- according to James Mann in his “Rise of the Vulcans” (p. 74) -- who Hitchens now reveres to the point of fawning over.

So too does Hitchens now dally with neoconspiracy theorist Laurie Mylroie, a favorite sibyl of influential neocons such as Richard Perle, James Woolsey and “Scooter” Libby, who proudly proclaims that Saddam Hussein was the prime instigator not only of the 9/11 attack, but also the World Trade Center bombing of ’93 and the Oklahoma City bombing. This is so far beyond the paranoid that even Bush himself concedes that there is no known link between Iraq and 9/11. As Peter Bergen, a journalist and professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, writes of Laurie Mylroie:

“Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America."

Bergen, by the way, was part of the CNN team that interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997, and in his dissection of Mylroie she appears batty, hysteric . . . . and well connected. It is unsurprising then, that for her “The War Against America,” which asserts her many “crackpot” theses, Mylroie sports a prominent frontcover blurb by former Team B member Paul Wolfowitz:

“Provocative and disturbing . . . argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing . . . was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence.”

Her next novel has no less a personage than former radical Christopher Hitchens who says on the backcover of her “Bush Versus the Beltway” (You can view these blurbs on Amazon.com):

“In the face of the glibly repeated slogan that America is ‘in search of enemies,’ Mylroie shows that many in our intelligence establishment are fatally unable to recognize an enemy even when they meet one. A caustic and spirited statement of the original case for regime change.”

Hitchens' nervous clinging to discredited neoconspiracy theory and the deflated WMD cassus belli can still be witnessed in his latest column on Slate.com. When the New York Times recently reported on the mass looting of Iraqi weapons sites,

The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.

Hitchens somehow reached the following question:

My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

OK then, so where are they? What of WMD inspector David Kay’s assertion, after months of fruitless searching that utilized the best intelligence the government could provide, that “We were almost all wrong”? What Hitchens only begins to painfully hint at is that the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq is actually the better option for proponents of the War. The worse option is that Saddam Hussein actually maintained or recreated some manner of WMD and that they have been left free floating or unsecure for two years in anarchic present day Iraq; a vicious combat zone with various active insurgencies including a well organized Al-Qaeda affiliated campaign against the population and coalition troops. In that latter scenario, it’s hard to argue that the invasion made Iraq or the world safer from the threat of WMD. That “Saddam Hussein had WMD but now we don’t know we they are” is just about the worst argument imaginable in defense of a hollow cassus belli.

Hitchens can’t bother to countenance widely reported stories about the intelligence culled from lengthy interviews with Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants in which the decaying Baathist regime is portrayed as a place “where members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities.” Nor does Hitchens consider that “nuclear mujahideen” might be so much trash talk, but he prefers to ignore alternate, more plausible explanations in his strained effort to jump from “machinery . . . . that could be used” to must have had. Capacity is not possession, especially when capacity itself is questionable. The ability to manufacture missile parts is of a different order of industrial expertise from that of building and maintaining nuclear biological or chemical weapons. As a recent article in Popular Science on “Can Terrorists Build the Bomb” explains:

Enriching uranium is a vastly complicated and expensive process well beyond a terrorist group’s reach. It requires the use of expensive centrifuges whose production and export is closely monitored and which require sophisticated expertise to operate. Iraq tried in vain for years to enrich uranium, and Iran is approaching success only after decades of effort. “Iran has poured hundreds of millions—some would say billions—into their program, and as far as we know, they’re not there yet,” says Charles Ferguson, a science and technology fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well that allows me to click my safety back on. A caveat here, some manner of WMD might still, one day, be found in the vast deserts of Iraq. It’s a remote possibility and I’m far too cautious to dismiss it outright. However, the argument for pre-emptive invasion was to deprive and secure such stockpiles and as I’ve argued above, if WMD were present when the US invaded, American forces and investigators certainly can’t find them now and far too many heinous militants are running loose with the potential to unearth or use them to make that even a remote victory. Let’s hope that David Kay is right and Hitchens is simply a dupe for Team B.


Christopher Hitchens Left Wing Conspiracy Theorist

Where as the right-hand smacketh down the left hand raises up. Allow me, in this contrarian instance to extend to Hitchens the fraternal paw. I don’t know what went down in Ohio and I’m not going to jump to any theories but Hitchens makes a convincing case here that the strange tilt of occurrences, the deeply odd alignment of coincidences, at least merits an investigation. Fat chance of that though . . . probably as likely as the US handing Henry Kissinger over to the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Hmmm, Ohio conspiracy theories, Kissingerian war crimes, it all makes me wonder just what Hitchens and David Horowitz will talk about together on their London vacation.