Mar 22 2008
A horror of facing
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? - J.M. Keynes
There are times when brute stubbornness, an unwillingness to concede defeat and to plough on regardless, can be a virtue: attempting to give up smoking, completing a particularly interminable Resident Evil game or arguing with racists over on politics.ie. On most occasions, though, it’s a character flaw, demonstrating a lack of self-confidence and an inability to look at oneself critically. We see this ably demonstrated in Christopher Hitchens’ piece in today’s Irish Times entitled ‘Invading Iraq was a just cause, and much good has come of it’. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The article is a reprint of Hitchens’ contribution to the ongoing series in Slate various pro-invasion writers reflect on the Iraq war five years on entitled ‘How did I get Iraq wrong’ (Hitchens’ response is the wonderfully blunt ‘I didn’t'). It’s, in many ways, a rehash of many of the arguments he made in the run-up to the invasion and in the early stages of the occupation that can be found in his (in retrospect, rather unfortunately named) collection A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.
While he goes some way to acknowledging the already well-documented incompetence, arrogance and short-sightedness that typified the occupation, he still makes the case that, on balance, the decision to invade was the correct one. He writes:
A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.
Some of these are obviously true, others are far more arguable. More complicated though is the question he poses in asking ”What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?”, a question well worth the asking. Where his argument is most seriously flawed is in his failure to seriously address it, or to look in any detail at the negative consequences of the occupation, other than to say:
None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves.
One could be generous and assume that Hitchens is using the Abu Ghraib abuses as a metaphor for the wider failure of the occupation forces rather than just the scandal itself. Even then, however, there’s no acknowledgement of the full scale of the disaster that has befallen the Iraqi people, no indication that Hitchens fully appreciates the full extent of the tragedy. Perhaps most damningly, there’s not a single direct reference to the Iraqis who have been killed since the invasion, even leaving aside the question of whether the invasion caused those deaths. Instead, reference is made to a more vague “chaos, misery and fragmentation”.
Fragmentation is a term that might well be used to describe the current state of the so-called ‘Cruise Missile Left’. The pre-invasion consensus in support of the war has been shattered. Some, like Nick Cohen and (as splintered aptly calls him) Oliver Kampf are at one with Hitchens in sticking to their guns. Others, like Norman Geras or the Traitor Hari have, to greater or lesser extents, repudiated their previous positions. Even those who now view their initial support for the war as misguided tend to remain convinced that their moral judgement was correct, and that their primary mistake was in misreading how badly the coalition forces would handle the occupation (a judgement which, by its very nature, can ony rendered in hindsight). None, to the best of my knowledge, has ever seriously tackled the question of whether a pro-invasion position was the correct moral one at the time. Certainly no one has addressed this point as Andrew Sullivan (not even a leftist) in his own piece of self-criticism from the same ‘How did I get Iraq wrong?’ Slate series. Sullivan writes:
I recall very clearly one night before the war began. I made myself write down the reasons for and against the war and realized that if there were question marks on both sides (the one point in favor I did not put a question mark over was the existence of stockpiles of WMD!), the deciding factor for me in the end was that I could never be ashamed of removing someone as evil as Saddam from power. I became enamored of my own morality and the righteousness of this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn’t really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war’s unknowable consequences far too glibly.
This is the kind of clear-thinking and honest assessment that one would like to be able to associate with Hitchens, who remains a far better writer than any of the others listed above. Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn’t appear to be able - or, more likely, willing - to honestly ask himself the same kinds of questions. It may well be that he’s just too arrogant and egotistical to do so, and refuses to admit where he’s wrong. It’s also possible - on a more generous reading - that he feels that it’s precisely because of the disastrousness of consequences of the invasion that he feels the need to continue to justify his original position. If Hitchens was wrong in the first place, then all the lives lost since 2003 have been completely wasted. If, however, overthrowing Saddam remains the right thing to have done, then they can be seen to have been sacrificed in the name of a higher good.
One event, in particular, may be key to this. The most affecting thing Hitchens’ has written on the invasion is this piece in Vanity Fair, where he describes his discovery that a young U.S. soldier killed in Iraq was heavily influenced by Hitchens’ writing to enlist and serve. It’s the only piece by Hitchens on this subject that I’m aware of that shows a genuine humanity and something approaching an emotional honesty (although one notes, of course, that again there’s no acknowledgement of the suffering of Iraqis - the only victims of the war in this are American). Just as Gore Vidal has stated that, in his view, the Second World War wasn’t worth the life of Jimmie Trimble, his boyhood love, could it be that Hitchens somehow has to believe that the Iraq War must be worth the life of Mark Daily?
In the introduction to his short book on George Orwell, Hitchens writes:
‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’. It’s oddly well put. A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoublying of efforts to overcome the obvious. The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.
If this is the test of the great writer, it’s one that Hitchens in this case unfortunately fails. While he undoubtedly retains his facility with words, it’s his horror of facing the unpleasant facts about his support for the invasion which continues to undermine his credibility. One can only hope that this is something he might overcome as he completes the memoirs he is apparently working on at present.
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