The Guardian - October 28, 2006

War of words

Christopher Hitchens - like Tom Paine, the subject of his new book - has made enemies by supporting American internationalism, but he will not rest until he wins them over

Oliver Burkeman
Saturday October 28, 2006
The Guardian

In 2001, a few months before he went mad, or sold out, or finally succumbed to the effects of alcohol, or whichever of his former allies' theories you wish to insert here, Christopher Hitchens published a slim work entitled Letters to a Young Contrarian. In it, he often gives the impression of feeling patronised for his dissenting opinions - smilingly indulged, as if he were just a rebellious teenager. Reviews of his books, he writes with annoyance, always feature an early paragraph that says "Hitchens, whose previous targets have even included Mother Teresa and Princess Diana ..." It's the same condescension he feels each morning when he picks up the New York Times, with its front-page slogan, All The News That's Fit To Print. "I check to make sure it still irritates me," he writes. "If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know that I still have a pulse."

Five years later, the slogan is still there, and Hitchens still has a pulse. But smiling indulgence of his views has largely been replaced by something much icier. Since 9/11, the former Trotskyist has parted company spectacularly with the anti-war left, supporting military action in Iraq with a zeal that has outstripped many on the right. The verdict from old friends has been unsparing. Tariq Ali wrote that among the unreported casualties of the terrorist attacks had been "a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again. The vile replica currently on offer is a double." The iciness is mutual: Hitchens quivers with rage at his new enemies, whom he accuses of historic levels of bad faith over Iraq. If there were ever any suspicion that it was all just a jolly argumentative game, this should, by now, have been dispelled.

Some say that Hitchens is no longer in control of his mental faculties. The flaw with this argument is that the 57-year-old has kept up his prolific output as a literary critic and historian, filing polished monthly dispatches to the Atlantic magazine on Nabokov and Burke and Greene and Borges; and he has just published a typically assured book on Thomas Paine. Hitchens praises Paine as "the greatest Englishman, and in some ways the greatest American". When the British monarchy falls, Hitchens has a plan to redesign Westminster Abbey to get rid of "Poets' Corner" - "the most appalling phrase in the English language" - and replace it with a boneyard called Monarchs' Corner. The rest of the space will be devoted to true national heroes, Paine among the most prominent.

Paine's radical liberalism, his leftishness on social welfare and strong support for American internationalism, makes him the kind of person Hitchens might adopt as a role model - like George Orwell, his hero among writers - were he willing to accept the concept of role models. He isn't. It gives him "the most acute pang of embarrassment" when people accuse him of claiming Orwell's mantle, he explains over lunch in a New York pub (he drinks three whiskies and a glass of Merlot, "because if I didn't, you might think I was deliberately downplaying it"). Besides, role models are a fraud: history doesn't necessarily provide us with the opportunity to emulate those we admire. Soon after Diana died, on the steps of the British embassy in his home town of Washington, Hitchens got talking to a young man laying flowers. "I said: 'What did she mean to you?' And he said she was a role model. It was spoken as if he was using someone else's words. In the case of Diana, that was cruel. Because you can't be a princess. It's a con in a psychobabble guise."

Our conversation soon returns to Iraq. Hitchens's arguments on it have evolved (or contradicted themselves, according to his opponents), but the gist of his case is this. Islamist extremists, "the violators of women and the cheerful murderers of children", cannot be compromised with, and loyalty to humane leftwing principles requires that they be fiercely fought. Iraq was heading for bloody implosion, whether or not the US and UK got involved. Indeed, the west had an obligation to get involved, having helped create the quagmire and made it worse in the 1991 war. Sanctions were devastating Iraq - but ending them without ending the regime would have boosted Saddam's murderous government. And yet much of the British and American left, abandoning the Iraqi people, came to believe instead that George Bush is the definition of evil, and that the forces of jihadism inside Iraq were nobly anti-imperialist. Leading critics of the invasion have become "not an anti-war movement, but pro-war on the other side".

"It's very important to these people that they still have their oppositionalist credentials," Hitchens fumes. "I think it's narcissistic. I try not to let it take me over, the bad faith of the left, but it's become a real subject with me. It really is a historical disgrace."

Hitchens's own position is not that he left the left, but that the left deserted him. (He no longer gives himself any label on the political spectrum.) In his own characterisation of his life's journey, there's an unbroken line connecting his time as a Trotskyist at Balliol College, Oxford, to his campaigning on behalf of Salman Rushdie, against Henry Kissinger, against Bill Clinton, against religion, and in favour of the Bush administration's foreign policy. One underlying theme is the importance of loyalty to those with whom one has pledged solidarity - and in Iraq, Hitchens insists, his stance is simply a matter of what he owes to "Iraqi communists, secularists, human rights people, heroic individuals". He would not support withdrawal of troops until they did so too. "There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: 'Look guys, it's been real, but I'm going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.' Do I see myself doing this? No I do not!"

Loyalty can blind, though. Is it not possible to accept that the anti-war left acted in bad faith yet turned out to be right? Does there not come a point when numbers of civilian deaths force one to reconsider an argument based on hypothetical numbers of civilian deaths had Saddam's regime survived? Hitchens responds: "I think most Iraqis have made a political judgment that, in spite of innumerable blunders, and worse, they are determined to see the coalition keep its promises."

Many of Hitchens's critics dismiss him as a lackey of the Bush administration, but this obscures the breadth and duration of his love affair with America. In the 1960s, the US was "the only country that was in the throes of a revolution", and that suited his politics. In 1970, having graduated with a third (studying took a back seat to politics), he made his first trip. But it took him the best part of a decade, during which he worked for the New Statesman and the Times Higher Education Supplement, before he made the move permanently - encouraged at first by a relationship with the New York-based future Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The period before he uprooted was overshadowed by the suicide of his mother, in a hotel in Cyprus. Hitchens flew there alone and discovered a suicide note, along with a hotel bill indicating that she had been trying to call him in the days before her death. He speaks of the incident only reluctantly. "I have to wonder what would have happened if she'd gotten through," he once said. "Maybe I could have said something that made her decide not to do it."

Arriving in America for good, Hitchens - born in Portsmouth, raised in Malta, then educated in Cambridge and Oxford - finally felt at home. "I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country," he says. "I now know it was completely bound up with the idea of becoming a professional writer. I somehow felt I couldn't do this unless I was able to emancipate myself from living in England. The two yearnings were the same." He married his first wife, Eleni Meleagrou, with whom he had two children, before abruptly leaving her in 1981 for the writer Carol Blue, with whom he had a third. And he began a long association with the Nation. This did not end until 2002, when he quit, accusing it of becoming "the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden".

His feuds of the 1980s and 90s now seem trivial in comparison to his wholesale divergence from most of the left on Iraq. But they were fierce at the time. He is still not on speaking terms with the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, whom in testimony to a congressional committee he accused of smearing Monica Lewinksy, earning himself the soubriquet Hitch the Snitch. And he only recently reached a détente with his brother, Peter Hitchens, following years of disagreement over a dinner-table remark about the Red Army. "There is no longer any official froideur," he says of their relationship. "But there's no official - what's the word? - chaleur, either."

Since the parting of ways on Iraq, though, Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker "because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem". He drinks, he says, "because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur."

Hitchens swears that if he attacked his critics on the same level, the details he knows about their personal lives might ruin them. But he gives little indication of wanting to ruin them. Instead he exhibits an almost desperate need to persuade them to agree with him. No debating opponent is too inconsequential to escape his efforts. At a debate on the war in New York the week we met, he responded one by one to a mainly hostile audience, then followed them outside to continue the conversation. He stayed glued to the sidewalk, deep in argument, until only a handful remained. Forty-five minutes later, the number outside the debating hall had shrunk to five, not including me: a janitor who seemed about to lock up, three students and Hitchens - enshrouded in cigarette smoke, arguing and insisting and asserting into the night.