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Political gadfly Hitchens defends American policies in Iraq

Christopher Hitchens
10:46 a.m., Nov. 18, 2003--British-born American journalist Christopher Hitchens is not afraid to state his views, in print and in person, on a host of controversial topics.

On Tuesday, Nov. 4, Hitchens demonstrated his up-front style by sharing his views on American involvement in Iraq with an audience of about 200 persons in the Perkins Student Center.

Since supporting the Bush administration’s action in Iraq, Hitchens has taken heat from liberals because he has taken aim at leading leftists for being soft on what he calls “Islamofacism.”

Hitchens told his audience at UD that he seems to be working his way into a full-time job writing about the political, cultural and sexual conflicts both within Islam and between Islam and the West.

Before explaining why he took the side of President George W. Bush in the war in Iraq, Hitchens challenged opponents of the current White House strategy to examine the validity of their opposition.

“I think that those who are critical of the war or the explanation or the conduct of it must be able to answer whether or not the confrontation with the Saddam Hussein regime was inevitable or unavoidable,” Hitchens said.

For Hitchens, the journey from stalwart member of the Anglo-American left to a supporter of U.S. strategy in Iraq, began when the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, put a $5 million death bounty on author Salman Rushdie for his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.”

“My friend, Salman Rushdie, was hit with a very negative review of ‘The Satanic Verses,’” Hitchens said. “The review amounted to a life sentence as well as a death sentence in which the government of Iran offered money, in its own name, for the murder of Rushdie. This was the most direct assault of our Bill of Rights and freedom of speech that there has ever been.”

Hitchens got a firsthand look at the results of Saddam Hussein’s policies against the Kurds in northern Iraq when he accompanied Kurdish freedom fighters there following Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

“I could see the towns where the chemical weapons had been used,” Hitchens said. “There were towns that were almost completely poisoned. There also was the uncovering of mass graves.”

In the midst of this in-person inspection of the aftermath of the genocidal polices of Saddam Hussein, Hitchens said he was surprised to see a picture of former President George H.W. Bush taped onto the windshield of the vehicle in which he was riding.

When he asked why this presidential portrait was displayed in such a prominent place, Hitchens said the Kurds told him that they wanted the picture there because if it had not been for George H.W. Bush and Operation Desert Storm, they and their families would have been dead.

“I realized that I did not have an answer to that question—I had no comeback, no response,” Hitchens said. “I had to realize that what they were saying was a self-evident truth.”

For Hitchens, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is a continuation of the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.

“The greatest mistake was not following through during the first war,” Hitchens said. “Had it been done, we would have been 12 years into nation building, and many, many thousands of good people who are dead would be alive, while many, many hundreds of very bad people would be dead.”

His belief in the potential benefits of regime change, Hitchens said, is based on subsequent visits to northern Iraq, where the Kurds then enjoyed the protective cover of the American/British “No-Fly Zone.”

Hitchens said that although this area is the most rugged, backward and difficult part of the country and is also the most tribal, the Kurdish population, once liberated from Baath Party control, had managed to open a university, establish 21 newspapers and place three female members on their high court.

“They also established a parliament—not much of a parliament—but better than no parliament at all,” Hitchens said. “They also have a two-party system—not a great two-party system, but nevertheless capable of resolving clan disagreements in that way.”

The people in the north also were able to buy satellite dishes, which enabled them to receive foreign news broadcasts—a practice that would have been punishable by death under Hussein, according to Hitchens.

The Kurds also got a large number of refugees to return and were able to make decisions to spend oil revenues on pressing needs such as food programs, road building, hospitals and schools, Hitchens said. Additionally, he said, freed from having to support the upkeep of “a parricidal, genocidal military regime headed by a crime family,” they were able to invest in educational programs geared to creating a democracy.

“This was the state of affairs in Iraq, a state of affairs that could not long endure. You might even say that Iraq could not exist half-slave and half-free,” Hitchens said. “It was the decision of the United States to make that call.”

Hitchens also answered critics who maintain that the Bush administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat and the implication that Iraq supported jihadist groups such as Al Queda and that the United Nations should have been the “equivalent nation” to make a move against Saddam Hussein.

In speaking of the two biggest opponents of the war, the leaders of France and Germany, Hitchens noted that both publicly stated that under no circumstances would they ever have voted to authorize the use of force as authorized in U.N. resolution 1411.

“I will put this in reverse.... Mr. [Jacques] Chirac in France and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany ... were good enough in public to tell us that under no circumstances would they ever have voted to authorize the use of force to fulfill United Nations resolution 1411,” Hitchens said. “This is more of a violation of the sense and wording of the U.N. charter, that France should unilaterally decide a resolution to use force any more than the United States should. This is especially true since Saddam is the single most serious violator of U.N. resolutions.”

Hitchens also said that the French had built a nuclear reactor for Hussein, and that Iraq was closer to having nuclear weapons at the time of the First Gulf War than most people realized—something he charges to the promiscuity of French policy.

Whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and if he did, what happened to them, is still an open question, Hitchens said.

“There is the inference that because they have not been found by any of our specialists, they were not there,” Hitchens said. “That cannot be the case, because we know they were there, and the inference that they were destroyed by a panicked Iraqi regime makes the reputation of Saddam’s regime even more toxic than it already is, because other U.N. resolutions specifically forbade Iraq to destroy those weapons.”

Hitchens said that in every scenario, the Bush administration would have been delinquent if it did not make the worst assumption of Iraq’s failure to account for its weapons of mass destruction.

“No president could responsibly face the U.S. public, nor could any unimpeachable president after 9/11 face the public and say, ‘We did have some evidence involving Saddam Hussein, but we did not think it was worth fighting over,’” Hitchens said. “I think that on this matter the United States has put itself on the right side of history.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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