August 26, 2007
WRITING IN today's Observer, Christopher Hitchens bemoans the "crass comparison" between Vietnam and Iraq made by President George W. Bush last week. It seems beyond dispute that Hitchens has been trying, of late, to head off charges that he has become "Bush's cheerleader". He did offer support for Bush during the President's re-election campaign. It was, Hitchens said, a single-issue election and Bush's opponent, John Kerry, promised to withdraw from Iraq, but by now it seems our favourite Trotskyist popinjay is finally trying to distance himself from the neo-cons.
Hitchens has been trying to stress his consistency, as anyone would, and in order to reaffirm his youthful radicalism, Vietnam obviously becomes a crucial reference point. A vociferous opponent of the United States’ Indochinese interventions has somehow become a supporter of the Iraq invasion in 2003, and he naturally has to stress the discontinuities between the two wars in order to emphasize the continuities in his own beliefs.
But this leads him into a rather odd (though not entirely untenable) position in which he focuses on the progressive and liberational aspects of the Vietcong, on Ho Chi Minh's apparent agreement with the ideas of George Washington, on Vietnam's decision to remove the destructive Khmer Rouge from Cambodia and (subsequently) resist Chinese hegemonism in the region. He also stresses that Vietnam was essentially a unified state battling against imperialism, rather than a bitterly contested square on the chessboard of the Cold War. It is certainly easy to argue that Saddam Hussein was no Ho Chi Minh.
It seems obvious from recent articles that Hitchens already regards the Iraq invasion as a failure. At first, he was gleefully putting forward the idea that the invasion could be successful, and - echoing the more optimistic voices in the U.S. government - that the violence of the insurgency proved how desperate and defeated the scum of the ancien regime had become. He was also drawing attention to the normalization of Iraqi politics and the emergence of political parties. In 2003, he was noting that Moqtada Sadr had no chance of gaining influence because of the unpopularity of Iranian-style theocracy.
However, after years of worsening conflict and chaos, he - like many others in a similar position - has become defensive, arguing that the essential morality of the idea was correct, but that the arrogant Bush-Rumsfeld elite had failed to plan properly, or indeed at all, assuming instead that the oppressed Iraqi masses would run enthusiastically into the U.S. camp as soon as the Baathists had been toppled.
The U.S. administration did not allow for the possibility that the instability of Iraq and a quite natural antagonism towards occupying forces would create a "breeding ground" for terror, and that astute, well-financed Muslim zealots from Saudi Arabia to Syria to Afghanistan - playing not for minor political gains but for everything - would foment as much mayhem as possible. For them, the policy has always been one of scorched earth. The lack of infrastructure or meaningful economic activity presumably made it easier for them to win support for a vicious, backward theocracy of the sort we saw in Afghanistan. Fanaticism can justify all kinds of suffering.
Most opponents of the conflict - after accusing Blair and Bush of breaching international law in the name of oil or “Zionism” or simply wanton warmongering - would say that the whole invasion began with the Big Lie of WMD. The administrations of the U.S. and the U.K. browbeat their lawmakers, media institutions and members of the public into believing that Saddam was on the verge of creating a superweapon capable of unleashing terror on Tel Aviv.
It still seems odd that no weapons systems were developed, and that no chemical weapons, uranium or other radioactive materials were accumulated in the last few years of Saddam's rule. It seems stranger still that no plans to do so have yet been uncovered in the four years since the regime was overturned. The implications are that (a) Saddam had somehow learned his lesson from the first Gulf War and/or (b) that the sanctions and inspections regime was effective. On the other hand, some of the more strident opponents of the occupation - including John Pilger - were also among the most vicious critics of sanctions, which had punished the poorest.
Hitchens' remaining consolation is Kurdistan, which - as a "possible Iraqi future" - is arguably the main reason why he supported the Iraq War in the first place. The suggestion at the beginning of the invasion that the fragmentation of the country could lead to an opportunistic invasion of Kurdistan by Turkey has proved to be nonsense. Most of the other nightmare predictions seem to have come true, however. It has created a "quagmire" of insurgency and civil war, countless cultural and human desecrations, various modes of Islamification, a nice earner for the cronies of the Bush-Cheney administration, and a convenient hunting ground for foreign targets by Muslim "martyrs". Liberation: what is it good for?
