James W. Carden, a contributing editor at The Nation, is the author of The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became the Party of War.
Like many of the brightest minds of his generation (not least Bill Clinton), Christopher Hitchens was seduced by the prospects of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, after spending his formative years protesting the Vietnam War. Hitchens’ turn toward neocon militancy attracted notice among certain of his colleagues well before the war in Iraq.
The esteemed journalist Diana Johnstone recalls in her memoir that when she submitted her dispatches from the Balkans to The Nation, where Hitchens had a long-running column, she never got an answer.
Johnstone recalls that, “In a telephone conversation concerning an earlier article, a friendly fact-checker warned that there was opposition to my articles in the staff of The Nation. Apparently, the vehemently anti-Serb line of Christopher Hitchens triumphed.”
Hitchens’ erstwhile colleague, the legendary Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, felt that Hitchens “craved to be an insider. “It was a trait, wrote Cockburn, “which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a US citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.”
Yet there were other expressions of this craving, equally ripe. At a 2003 lunch at the Pentagon, Hitchens told the man widely credited as the architect of the Iraq fiasco, Paul Wolfowitz, that he was trying to “signal” him through his pro-war columns in Slate and Vanity Fair. Wolfowitz replied, “I wondered.” By the time lunch ended, the two were so enamored of each other they were finishing each other's sentences.
Soon after the tête-à-tête at the Defense Department, Hitchens accompanied Wolfowitz on a propaganda tour of Iraq. Upon returning, Hitchens appeared on Fox News and informed viewers that he thought it “quite extraordinary to see the way that American soldiers are welcomed…to see the work that they’re doing not just rolling up these filthy networks of Ba’athists and jihadis, but building schools, opening soccer stadiums, helping people connect to the Internet.”
Hitchens took to calling his new friend “Wolfie,” and went so far as to tell a reporter from The New Yorker that Wolfowitz was in fact “a bleeding heart,” and among the very few in Washington who “lie awake at night worrying about what’s happening to the Palestinians.”
Hitchens was hardly alone in his enthusiasm for war in Iraq.
The rogues’ gallery of liberal pundits and Democratic operatives who made common cause with Bush and Cheney over Iraq ought not to be forgotten to history and include: George Packer, Jacob Weisberg, Leon Wieseltier, Martin Peretz, Franklin Foer, Jonathan Chait,Thomas Friedman, Bill Keller, Michael Kelly, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Ezra Klein, Kenneth Pollack, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Matthew Yglesias, Anne Applebaum, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, in the pages of the New Yorker and during numerous appearances on CNN, repeatedly lied about the existence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The Bulwark’s Stephen Hayes (who became, like Goldberg, a leading figure of the #Resistance) wrote an entire book about it. As for Samantha Power, the most generous interpretation of her public statements in the run-up to the war was that she straddled the fence.
What was it about the war in Iraq that the Democratic elite found so seductive? Among the few high-profile liberals who were not seduced was Tony Judt, the noted historian of modern Europe.
Judt thought that thanks to Iraq, “America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.” The self-righteousness that today characterizes the liberal enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine—the yellow and blue flags everywhere, the moral hectoring, the utter lack of nuance, or any real idea of what is going on—first reared its head during Iraq. The underlying motives certainly have not changed. In Judt’s estimation, Bush’s liberal supporters saw in Iraq, a “Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism.”
Plus ca change…
"Like many of the brightest minds of his generation (not least Bill Clinton), Christopher Hitchens was seduced by the prospects of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, after spending his formative years protesting the Vietnam War."
I believe your statement needs clarification. What is meant by 'brightest minds'?
Major kudos, and well timed. Our miltary has vacated the premises and is on its way home...or so we are being told anyway. It prompts the reflection "What was it all about, Wolfie"? Meanwhile, The Donald, who rode to political relevance as a Republican by calling that disaster for what it was, blunders into an even more promising disaster just as the troops are readying to pack their gear for the flight home. Is it hopeless? Yeah, pretty much. Can't wait for the book!