The Trial of Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens Lies About Bush Lies and Smears Antiwar Movement – Again

Hitchens, drunk like the drunk that only comes from snuggling with Power, and from what else who knows, defends Bush’s Big Lies and his prodigal lie-peddler Ahmad Chalabi. Having gone over to the Dark (i.e., Kissenger, Perle, Neocon, et al.) Side on the Iraq war matter, it is no surprise I suppose that he is still defending Bush’s case for war - he’s all in now; what would the Empire think of him if he re-defected, and would the Rebels take him back? It is also no surprise that he comes to the defense of Neocon/Pentagon darling, convicted bank fraudster, double (triple?)-agent Ahmad Chalabi and his crowd of useful Iraqi defectors, who are once again in the graces of the Terror Agents at the White House, Hitchens new friends.

I say useful defectors because those defectors who weren’t coached by front organizations for U.S. intelligence agencies and offered evidence that Iraq had in fact disarmed were roundly ignored (and Hitchens certainly ignores them). Such defectors were useless to Bush’s agenda of fixing the intelligence around the policy, as the Downing Street memo put it. The Most Useless Defector, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s relative Hussein Kamal, the high-ranking Iraqi military official who defected in 1995 and told the story of how Iraq had in fact disarmed  [.pdf] (and the evidence now makes quite clear this was the case). Of course this was ignored by the U.S., which even under Clinton was more interested in the usefulness of the fake Iraqi threat than the facts – no matter how many Iraqi children had to die, as Clintonoid Secretary of State Madeleine Albright felt. Kamal was so ignored that he made the mistake of returning to Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s government promptly executed him for telling this story - likely because Hussein’s government was trying to disarm while still appearing strong and macho to his subjects and friends. Or just because that’s how tyrants react to insubordination. In any event, ignoring Kamal meant the U.S. continued killing Iraqis, eventually to the tune of hundreds of thousands (and continuing).

Hitchens laughs at the Democrats’ claim the country was fooled by the little old Chalabi puppet, and doesn’t mention the puppeteers in the U.S. government and private propaganda ministries like the Rendon Group

Hitchens’ main attack point is the idea that the small, impoverished exile group Iraqi National Congress (then-funded by the Pentagon) and headed up by Neoconman Ahmad Chalabi couldn’t possibly have fooled the huge, lavishly financed U.S. intelligence community. About that, he would be right. Unless... Yes, it is highly unlikely any intelligence agencies, much less the huge, lavishly financed U.S. intelligence agencies, would have been fooled by such a small, impoverished independent deception operation. But that is the point. It wasn’t an independent deception operation. It was dependent, financially, logistically, and politically, first on the CIA, and then after the failed 1996 coup in Iraq, on the Pentagon and tied to an Administration bent on war! It is also very important to note that the Iraqi National Congress was as much a creation of a U.S. government deception campaign as anything. It was in fact more or less created by the Rendon Group, a sort of privatized Ministry of Propaganda, employed by the government for years to sell war. While the CIA and the Pentagon was paying the INC $320,000 a month for years on end, a paltry sum to the nouveau riche Hitchens, I guess, it is very important to note the organization’s activities were also being coordinated by the Rendon Group, as reported by James Bamford in the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine. The intelligence community, first the CIA and then the Pentagon, were paying Chalabi and the INC to lie to them! This sounds crazy. Why would someone pay someone to lie to him or her? The idea is to create an echo chamber, a sort of buzz, an environment of belief. Also, it should be remembered that one of the main lies peddled by the Chalabi crowd, and presented by Colin Powell during his February 5, 2003 before the U.N., was the story by the Most Useful of the Useful Defectors, brother of a Chalabi lieutenant nicknamed “Curveball,” about mobile chemical weapons labs. Well, the story was completely bogus and not a shred of evidence has ever been found to substantiate that such mobile labs ever existed. That explains why Colin Powell had only “artists renderings” for his little show-and-tell program before the U.N. There were other lies, dutifully paraded before the public by the likes of New York Times, um, “journalist”, Judith Miller. God knows who she was really working for! (It should be noted that Chalabi is back!!)

Hitchens’ secondary point seems to be to narrow the case for believing Bush lied to this, the supposed deceptions of this small, impoverished, if Pentagon-sponsored, group. He wants to downplay Chalabi and the INC and disguise the U.S. government hand behind it, and then laugh because, hey, “Are you sure you want to keep saying we were fooled by Ahmad Chalabi and the INC?” In addition to these deceptions and manipulations though, Hitchens compounds it by leaving out the rest of the story. For, as he well knows, there are plenty of other reasons to believe his buddies in the Bush Administration were engaged in a campaign of deception in order to start a war. From the dodgy dossier  peddled by the Brits (the lackiest of the U.S. lackeys in Europe), to the Downing Street memo (revealing Brit knowledge the U.S. was lying up a war), to Niger yellowcake fraud (the uncovering of which led to the outing of a CIA agents identity to punish the uncoverer, her husband). The last of course was the pulp (fiction) of the infamous “16 words” included in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech even after being repeatedly told the information was flaky. The reasons for believing Bush and Co. lied add up daily. Hitchens takes them on, badly, one by one, acting as if they individually are all that have been revealed and therefore paltry evidence for the supposed crime.

Hitchens is at his most poetic when he is smearing those who object to the kind of U.S. government criminality he once objected to himself

Christopher Hitchens’ latest attack on the increasingly popular and (incidentally) long-correct (no WMDs, just like many of us said) anti-Iraq war movement entails, unsurprisingly, as his new GOP alignment would require, attacking the once-pro-war liberal Democrats who have now turned against the war, largely, I’d bet, only because of its increasing unpopularity. He chides Democrats who voted for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (so-called) and the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to do...something.

But Hitchens is careful and clever enough not to just belittle the antiwar movement based on one aspect (as he perceives it). Even though he has slandered the antiwar movement, equating it solely with the Stalinists and LaRouchies just like his new rightwing kindred always have, he deploys a subtler technique now. Rather than merely ridiculing the antiwar movements’ wackier elements (as he perceives them), he instead brackets it with, on the one end, the once-pro-war Democrats who have just now come to object to a policy pattern they should have opposed even before 1998 and , on the other, the (wrongly-abused) 9-11 skeptics and the sort of protesters he chooses to call “moth-eaten and shabby”. Democrats who voted for authorization for war in 1998 and 2002 and now oppose the war are just stupid, Hitchens implies, and so therefore is the entire anti-war movement, even those parts of it that never supported U.S. bellicosity against Iraq!

Equating Shifting War-Excuses with Continuing Revelations of Bush War-Related Scandals

Apparently still smarting over the fact that no WMDs were ever found in Iraq, an illusion Hitchens latched to as he defected towards the Powerful, he clings to the few decrepit scraps of former and possible weapons systems in Iraq like a man in a desert scooping up sand believing it to be the water he so desperately seeks. But, to continue the metaphor, if facts are water to this thirsty man, he’s insisting on looking precisely where it isn’t. At least he’s smart enough not to peddle Bush’s fraud about the Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal! Though he has tried to muddy the waters on this issue by ignoring the relevant fraud and putting the spotlight on the suspected illegal trade of yellowcake out of Niger. He’s even had the nerve to say the Niger forgeries are irrelevant because they are probably replacements for actual documents (though he has no idea where such documents are and none of them have ever been made public anywhere – but somehow they must exist!) But even after all of these questions have been answered (the question of Iraqi WMD has been answered, in the negative) we are still faced with the fact that it is an illusion that Saddam’s Iraq was unique in seeking such weapons and that post-Saddam Iraq, even if democratized, will not also seek such weapons. Israel is sort of a democracy and it is bristling with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The irony of a democratized Iraq, if it happens to become so to  any meaningful extent, is that the tyrannies on its borders (many of them U.S. allies, including Kuwait!) may look a lot like threats! To disguise this real possibility, the warbloggers simply say Iraq will never have Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction! As Mark Noonan (any relation to Peggy?) over at Blogs for Bush put it last year: “In the end it doesn't matter if Saddam was ten days from building a nuke or ten years - by liberating Iraq from Saddam, we have forever ended the possibility that Saddam would acquire nuclear weapons, and other WMD.”  Yeah, we’ve ended forever the possibility that Saddam (I love when they personify an entire country) will have “nuclear weapons, and other WMD”! But not the possibility that present Iraqi prime minister Al-Jafari or Ahmad Chalabi or some Shi’ite of Sunni theocrat will have them! We better overthrow our puppet government in Iraq immediately!

But I digress...

Hitchens throws back the anti-war movements objection to the shifting and disposable pro-war rationales of Bush and his warblogger sheep, claiming the anti-war movement’s focus on the manipulative Iraqi defectors and their Manipulator-In-Chief, Ahmad Chalabi is somehow a new or singular rationale for believing Bush lied. In this Hitchens confuses the many things that point to manipulation on the part of the Bush crowd with the many things the Bushies have tried to forward as an excuse for their war as their previous excuses come unraveled. Multiple scandalous facts discovered about something after the fact are not of the same low quality as multiple excuses for the same thing invented after the fact. It’s like saying a battered woman who starts revealing numerous abuses on her ex’s part is the same as the ex offering more and more reasons for his abuses.

Hitchens Used to Get It

Those who have brought so much suffering upon Iraqis (as well as those in their armchairs, like Hitchens, who have so nonchalantly supported visiting so much suffering on Iraqis) now toss aside the used-up lies. The lies they defended so vociferously are now to be obliviously set aside to make room for new deceptions even as the pro-warriors call the discovery of these lies “politics”. The same people that lied us into war now say simply the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, whatever the facts. This is a Globocop version of the right-wing view that even if a criminal is innocent of the crime he has been accused of, rotting in prison is okay because he probably did something, sometime. But its even worse than that because Saddam, even if he is put to death by the Kangaroo court organized by the U.S. puppet government in Bagdad, will never suffer from U.S.-instigated punishment as much as the Iraqi people have and are. After all, what those lies mean, in addition to an unjust war and occupation, is that years of sanctions and bombings were unjustified too and that tens upon hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives were thrown away for nothing - deaths that were often preceded by tremendous suffering. What the war defenders, therefore, cannot see and would not say even if they could see it, is that it is a sad if unspeakable fact that Iraq and countless other parts of the would also be better off without a United States government (creator of the Saddam Frankenstein) with such a global reach. The evidence is out there. But the lies that are supporting this war have been deployed before to pretty-up other U.S. crimes and blind much of the U.S. public to such evidence. Saddam’s substantial criminality pales in comparison.

At least now that the Iraq war is so very unpopular, and daily more so, Hitchens can have the booby-prize of feeling like the voice in the wilderness again, a position Hitchens once could more reasonably have claimed – and something the his pro-war kindred spirit, war criminal Kissinger likely has long felt.

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Comments

[Randy]

Good coverage of the journey into darkness of the peculiar Mr. Hitchens. This pompous ex-Trot has devolved into an errand boy for Empire, a prattling fool at the Imperial Court of the Texas Caligula.

Remember early on when this mendacious sophist claimed that Kissinger and Ariel Sharon were against the invasion of Iraq--and that was a good reason to support it! Not only was the logic absurd, it wasn't even factually correct. He's only gotten more bizarre and twisted since.

[Ron Leighton]

Hello again,

Very eloquently put, Randy. "Texas Caligula", I like that. I had forgotten Hitchens claims about Kissinger and Sharon, but they seem logically unsound in any event. Kissinger and Sharon opposing a U.S. invasion of Iraq? Yeah, maybe in Opposite World!! Haha.

Hitchens is writing like he wants to become like countless other Neocon and Con pundits, and be a part of their way: By repeating BS often enough, their message will stick in people's minds, no matter what the facts are.

Take care,

[Glenn Condell]

They must have something on Hitchens; whatever it is it couldn't be pretty.

[Ron Leighton]

That is certainly possible, Glenn. It would explain a lot. Except, it seems Hitchens' transformation has been slow and long - dating back 10 years or more. I think if it was a case of political blackmail, which certainly occurs, I think his transformation would have been more dramatic and quick. He started schmoozing with the Clinton-bashers and the Serb-bombers a long time ago. I think that is the genesis of who Hitchens is now.