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> From the issue dated May 3, 2002
> Ali vs. Hitchens: Battle on the Left
>
> By MICHAEL BERUBE
>
> Over the past five years, I've begun to catalog and dissect
> all the myriad divisions on the left -- between intellectuals
> and labor, identity politicians and aging New Leftists, Judith
> Butler and Martha Nussbaum, In These Times and Social Text. In
> fact, just as I was deciding that I had to write my next book
> on the topic, the endgame of the 2000 presidential election
> pitted Naderites against Goreans, and I began to hope that
> Nader would pull 5 percent of the national vote and qualify
> for matching funds in 2004. Not because I supported Nader, but
> because I wanted to see the Green Party hold a national
> convention, so I could watch the vegan-macrobiotic wing and
> the Mumia Abu-Jamal wing tear each other apart over health
> benefits for same-sex partners of replacement workers or some
> such thing.
>
> Then, while most of the left was still assessing the damage
> wrought by 2000, the terrorist attacks of September 11 divided
> the anti-imperialists on ZNet from the liberal
> internationalists at Dissent -- and from pretty much the rest
> of the country. So, when I heard that Tariq Ali and
> Christopher Hitchens would be debating "The Left and the War"
> at Georgetown University in mid-April, I dropped everything
> and made the four-hour drive from State College.
>
> The Ali-Hitchens Fight! In this corner, the prolific Vanity
> Fair and Nation columnist and sometime CNN welterweight,
> Hitchens, notorious among liberals for his attacks on Bill
> Clinton, notorious among leftists for his support of the war
> in Afghanistan; in this corner, Ali, the renowned New Left
> Review editor, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker from Lahore
> via England, weighing in with a new book, The Clash of
> Fundamentalisms, soon to be notorious for its disturbing
> jacket images of George W. Bush as a mullah and Osama bin
> Laden as a U.S. president. What better occasion to take the
> pulse of the left?
>
> The battle lines were clear from the outset: The Hitchens left
> is soft on American imperialism, and the Ali left is soft on
> Islamist radicalism. Ali argued that the United States should
> have devised "a measured and essentially police response" to
> the September 11 attacks, centered on apprehending bin Laden
> and the Al Qaeda leadership, but avoiding wider U.S. military
> action. The current war against terrorism is really a "war to
> promote terror," he said: It won't "stop the flow of young
> people to terrorism," especially among the volatile middle
> classes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It will produce blowback
> for decades to come, and American leftists must protest. "What
> you do matters," Ali urged. "There is no other countervailing
> force." A stirring conclusion, I thought, to a
> not-quite-convincing speech.
>
> Hitchens began by citing the Ayatollah Khomeini's infamous
> fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and argued that American
> imperialism cannot be portrayed as morally equivalent to such
> Islamist radicalism; that the victims of September 11 were
> killed not by "subjects of empire," as Ali had written in his
> book, but by "henchmen of the advocates of Shariah law"; that
> there is a civil war in Islam between moderates and those who
> would visit the dictates of Shariah on Muslims and non-Muslims
> alike; that the left can make no compromises with the latter.
> In response, Ali demanded that the left support "the power of
> the people to overthrow their own oppressors."
>
> The opening statements, complete with insults, took an hour.
> At one point, Hitchens insisted that there could be "no
> intelligent and no principled way" to oppose the struggle
> against Al Qaeda, whereupon Ali replied, "If we are talking
> about intelligent and principled debate, I don't intend to
> learn any lessons from you." On to the questions.
>
> One young man asked Ali an incisive two-parter. First, what
> about his claim that nothing had changed in Afghanistan as a
> result of U.S. actions? Would he stand by that even with
> regard to Afghan schoolgirls? Second, if the United States had
> responded to the September 11 attacks with police action, and
> failed to capture Al Qaeda's leaders, at what point, if any,
> would a military response have been justified? Ali replied
> that the military response has failed, so it would seem
> appropriate to try other means. That didn't quite answer the
> second question, but the lacuna was overshadowed by the fact
> that it also never addressed the Afghan schoolgirl issue.
>
> Twice, Hitchens was challenged for slandering Islam. He made a
> halfhearted appeal to the golden age of Islam, but mostly he
> took such criticisms as opportunities to call the Koran a
> "10th-rate penal code" and to suggest that, if the book indeed
> represents the word of God, "then it was a very bad day for
> Him." As if to reassure everyone that he was engaged in an
> equal-opportunity offend-a-thon, Hitchens opined that God was
> also having a bad day when He dictated the Pentateuch and most
> of the New Testament.
>
> As the evening wore on, and Hitchens combined aggressive
> secularism with sublime disdain, I asked one of his friends
> whether Christopher might not consider hiring media
> consultants from Al-Jazeera to help him with his
> self-presentation. "And I say this," I whispered, "as a
> lifelong agnostic."
>
> Much of the support Hitchens lost over religion, he regained
> when he asked one questioner whether anyone involved in the
> liberation struggles in South Africa or Chile would crash
> planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians.
> "Can you imagine," he queried, picking up speed and heat as he
> went, "can you imagine Nelson Mandela or Salvador Allende
> giving that order?" It was easily his best moment. Then he
> followed it with a biting contrast between Arab support for
> Palestinian suicide bombers and Desmond Tutu's personally
> preventing members of the African National Congress from
> "necklacing" an informer -- and suddenly, just like that,
> there was a split between Hitchens and Ali on Palestine.
>
> Hitchens condemned suicide bombers and Ali asked him
> incredulously how he could support U.S. bombings in
> Afghanistan but not the Palestinian resistance. Ali then
> worked himself into a remarkably tangled position, first
> declaring that Palestinians have the right to resist Israel by
> any means necessary, then insisting that he does not
> necessarily support the right of Palestinians to resist Israel
> by any means necessary, and finally proclaiming that the
> principle of resistance must be that the oppressed seek to win
> over the population against whose government and army they are
> fighting. Ali thus moved from Malcolm X to Mahatma Gandhi in
> less than five minutes, offering in his final argument the
> grounds for condemning the suicide bombers he had refused to
> condemn in the first argument.
>
> An hour later, at a postdebate dinner, I ran into a similar
> impasse. Ali had just finished summarizing his recent essay
> "Who Really Killed Daniel Pearl?," and arguing, quite
> compellingly, that it was never plausible that Pakistan's
> Inter-Services Intelligence Agency did not know who had done
> so. Outraged that the United States had already exonerated
> both General Pervez Musharraf and the intelligence agency, he
> implied that we were once again bedding down with a corrupt
> client state.
>
> I was sitting across from Ali and could not waste the
> opportunity. "I've read your essay, which was terrific, and
> I've followed your critiques of U.S. complicity with this and
> that -- most but not all of which I sympathize with," I said.
> "But I wonder what would constitute an appropriate response to
> Pearl's murder on the part of the United States?"
>
> "Well," he replied, looking keenly at me, "I'm certainly not
> calling for sending in fighter jets." I said I hadn't thought
> he was. He suggested more U.S. pressure on Musharraf, then
> added the proviso that the many Taliban sympathizers in the
> intelligence agency are waiting to dispose of Musharraf the
> minute U.S. support is gone.
>
> By that point in the evening, however, I had decided that the
> problem with Tariq Ali's anti-imperialist left is not a lack,
> but a surfeit, of principles. An oppressed people must
> overthrow its own dictators; the Palestinians have a right to
> resist oppression, even though we may not support specific
> uses of that right; the aim of resistance is to appeal to the
> people whose government and army you are fighting; U.S.
> intervention produces blowback, particularly when it is, as in
> the case of Daniel Pearl, not interventionist enough.
>
> Hitchens's arguments were systemically more coherent, and yet
> problematic in their own way. His troubles are the troubles of
> the liberal internationalist who doesn't say where his
> commitment to foreign intervention might end, and on what
> grounds. There is no question, for example, that liberal
> internationalists can find a plausible moral basis for action
> against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. But then, there is no
> question that arguments about Milosevic can also be deployed
> with regard to Saddam Hussein's treatment of his nation's
> Kurds. Surely that is why an otherwise decent leftist like
> Michael Walzer would sign up for Bush's planned invasion of
> Iraq? Having set out to dispense justice around the world,
> American interventionists are on a dark and unpaved road trod
> by many leftists, progressives, and liberals before who
> believed, every step of the way, that this time, the Force
> would be used for good.
>
> Although Christopher Hitchens is not likely to do an
> about-face and support Star Wars, liberal internationalism
> will have to think more clearly and speak more loudly about
> its own limits, and its opposition to imperialism. For if Ali
> is burdened by a surfeit of principles, Hitchens is burdened
> by a principle without a braking system. Ali does not tell us
> how to proceed when the "organic opposition" to a despotic
> regime turns out to be composed of Islamist radicals; Hitchens
> does not tell us how to proceed when a secular democracy turns
> into a unilateral global cop.
>
> The after-debate dinner, billed as a bacchanal of loquacious
> leftists, turned out to be rather a sober affair. Hitchens and
> Ali left shortly after midnight, in good trim and with
> faculties intact; the only people left at closing were me and
> three or four writers and editors -- and even we were talking
> more like color commentators than combatants. But then again,
> I thought as I wended my way back to my hotel, these are
> sobering times. After September 11, Daniel Pearl, the Passover
> Massacre, and the siege of Jenin, no one on the left feels
> like ordering another round of the same.
>
> Michael Berube is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State
> University at University Park.
>
>
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> Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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