CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS died just one day after the Iraq war, which he ardently supported, came to an official close. One thinks of other historical figures who've died on days of symbolic significance to their careers; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the Fourth of July. Curiously, so did Jesse Helms, a deed for which Mr Hitchens reproached him in one of those blistering obituaries he was so good at writing. (Mr Hitchens felt Mr Helms hadn't earned it.) Mr Hitchens's editor at Slate, June Thomas, writes that his obituaries "were particularly refreshing, because he refused to moderate his opinion of the subject simply because he or she had died." I think it's worth doing him the same favour he extended to others, so while most of the commentary on Mr Hitchens seems to have tiptoed around his enthusiastic support for the invasion of Iraq, I'm going to put it front and centre.
Mr Hitchens's support for the invasion of Iraq largely ruined his writing for me, for most of the last decade. He was viewing things in the Mideast through the lens of these rigid poltiical categories derived from European political conflicts of the 1920s-70s, and he couldn't seem to see how ill-fitting the conclusions often were. He'd then pursue the line of attack in maximalist language, making it even more awkward. I thought his columns made for tedious reading. I also thought they positively obscured what was going on. Even after many of those who had supported the invasion had given up on it, Mr Hitchens refused to admit any error. In a March 2007 column that will most likely not be on anyone's list of favourites, he constructs a tortuous labyrinth of questions which allow him to present the illusion that not only was the decision to invade correct on the basis of what we knew in 2003, but that even in retrospect, the world would not be any better off had the invasion never taken place. Nowhere in this weird syllogism do the words "casualties", "torture", or "dollars" appear.
It may seem petty to belabour these old arguments now. The bitterly divisive war is, after all, over (an argument Mr Hitchens never let get in the way of his decades-long pursuit of Henry Kissinger for his crimes in Vietnam). And in the late 2000s, as America's attention turned away from its humiliating mistakes in Iraq, I began to be able to appreciate Christopher Hitchens again. I enjoyed the merciless swagger he displayed in his scabrous writing on religion. And I was awed by his performances as a television pundit. The same facility for ridicule and stony-faced refusal to grant his adversary even the slightest toehold that I found infuriating in print became, on television, the skill and polish of a true virtuoso. If I ever have to face an ideological adversary on TV, I remember thinking, that is how I want to do it. I remember wondering whether any such performance would even be possible without a British accent.
I understand from the writings of those who knew him that Mr Hitchens was a wonderful if sometimes difficult friend, a brilliant and hardworking columnist, and an emotional and intellectual inspiration. And even without having known him, I find the tales of his productivity inspiring. But as a figure in political history, I think of Mr Hitchens as something of a warning. In a terrific 2003 essay in the London Review of Books, Stefan Collini wrote that Mr Hitchens had exalted, as the greatest of all struggles, a "united front against bullshit". His allergy to one kind of bullshit, that propounded by some of his erstwhile left-wing allies, blinded him to other, ultimately more pungent varieties. As a result, on the most consequential political issue of the last decade of his life, the bullshit got him.
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