MATTHEWS: "Vanity Fair" columnist and author Christopher Hitchens latest book is called "Why Orwell Matters." Celebrating his departure from "The Nation," the "New York Observer" columnist Ron Roosevelt recently announced he too was disillusioned with the left, writing quote, good bye to a culture of blindness that tolerates this part of peace marches, women wearing suicide bomber belts as bikinis. Good bye to paralysis by moral equivalence.
Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put HIV suffers in concentration camps. First, that`s all sarcasm. It`s directed at the old left. Why have you departed from the left Chris Hitchens?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR, "WHY ORWELL MATTERS": Well, I couldn`t stand the kind of effectless neutralism that so much of the left showed last year about Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden. There was a lot of stuff published saying Mr. bin Laden was really a revolutionary or at least partly one that he sort of had a point. To the extent that he was bad the United States was also bad.
This kind of dreary moral equivalent`s got me down badly and I see a version of it coming up again now in the confrontation with Saddam Hussein where people are simply refusing to discuss whether or not the left has any stake or the values that used to be the left have...
MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you this, because Chris, you are a renowned iconoclast. Some of your best writing is taking down Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, people like that that other people love so what`s wrong with an iconoclastic left wing culture? What`s wrong with people questioning our foreign policy as part of our literary dialogue in this country?
HITCHENS: Well, I`m glad you`ve written the Orwell book if only for one reason which is I now have an answer to the question people used to ask me which is don`t you like anybody? And I sort of say the sort of person I do like or the sort of moral example...
MATTHEWS: Yes, but back to my point, what is wrong with questioning foreign policy if you`re on the left?
HITCHENS: Not at all. It`s certainly not with this administration. I have enormous numbers of criticisms of the Bush administration of indeed the Ashcroft policy and of the state craft (ph) that got us into this in the first place going all the way back to our latest Nobel prize winner Jimmy Carter who was the man who encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran.
MATTHEWS: OK, let`s deconstruct this thing. A lot of people in this country live in the heartland mentally and culturally, feel that in New York and Los Angeles, Hollywood and New York, literary crowds, cultural elite they look down on America. They just don`t like America.
In fact when America gets involved in a dispute they assume we`re the bad guys. It`s the hate American crowd. You might call it as Jean Kirkpatrick very ungraciously called it the San Francisco Democrats. I don`t buy that but you think that`s true now, don`t you?
HITCHENS: No, I don`t and I remember hating her for saying that. was a kind of Philistine populist bid.
MATTHEWS: It was kind of anti (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
HITCHENS: It certainly had an (UNINTELLIGIBLE) effect. There was a sneer involved there. And I remember the Reagan people also loved to pound on the intellectuals and Dan Quayle saying (UNINTELLIGIBLE) cultural elite for quite a long time just to make Dan Quayle look silly, because that`s what he thought was America`s big enemy. No.
Look, there were a lot of other people on the right, don`t forget. The Pat Buchanan forces who call themselves populists and the Scowcroft, Kissinger, Eagleburger forces who are Tories and many others are very strongly opposed to this intervention in Iraq because they don`t want to destabilize their (UNINTELLIGIBLE) system in the Middle East.
MATTHEWS: It seems to me -- let me ask you. I want you to (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
HITCHENS: The most serious opposition to the war comes at the moment from the right. The left is just making its usual noise. What I really object to the liberal left past this babble is that it doesn`t matter anymore. Nobody cares what they say. It is of no further relevance. It has no principle to it. It doesn`t take any risks. It isn`t embarking on anything dangerous or analytical.
MATTHEWS: Do you think the anti-war left is going after this war in Iraq way too late so that they won`t in any way stop it. They`ll just get moral credit for having opposed it. I`m very suspicious of all the rallies in San Francisco. What do you think about all this?
HITCHENS: The terrible suspicion you have to have about that kind of thing is yes, people are thinking well, I can only be proved right if the whole operation is a failure. So they`re putting down their marker for a defeat. It could all go very badly wrong. I don`t think the misgivings...
MATTHEWS: There`s nobody laying down in front of troop trains. There`s nobody trying to stop this war.
HITCHENS: No one`s taking any risk at all. For example if they were, the oldest cause of the left in the Middle East is the Kurds. I`ve been at this for a long time more than three decades. The Kurds were always the cause of the left. The long struggle, historical struggle for the largest people without a homeland. Many more of them than there are Palestinians. You wouldn`t know they existed now from reading the left stuff.
MATTHEWS: Do you really think that people are...
HITCHENS: They`re embarrassed because the Kurds are more anti-Hussein than (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
MATTHEWS: You hang around New York in the literary circles. I do once in a while. You do it a lot. Do you think there is anybody in the New York in the American society that matters in terms of running magazine articles who believes that John Ashcroft is more of a danger to American society than Osama bin Laden?
HITCHENS: More of, no. But there are a lot of people who like to split the difference and say that the rhetoric that really worries them is that of George Bush and that they know enough to say -- they`re so smart they know enough to say how dumb the president is.
But the rhetoric of Saddam Hussein, saying I`ll blow up all the oil wells in the Middle East and I`ll massacre anyone who comes near me and his vice president`s most recent statement Mr. Ramadan (ph) saying we claim the right to hit anywhere, any time preemptively, anyone who`s even a friend of the United States. That doesn`t bother them in the same way.
No, it doesn`t. And they say, they`re embarrassed to mention the Kurds, our old comrades, because the Kurds hate Saddam Hussein more than anything else does and they`ve already, no one notices this, they`ve already started fighting him. The war in northern Iraq has already begun.
MATTHEWS: Why do think in the gut the left you describe as the awful left. Why do think they hate America? Do they hate their parents or what? What`s driving this hatred?
HITCHENS: I don`t think it`s psychological. I think it`s partly it`s honorable. The people who learned a lot from the lying of the government during Indochina, Iran-Contra. They know the government lies.
MATTHEWS: More with Chris and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) coming back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: We`re back with more with Christopher Hitchens. You said something fascinating as often happens here between the breaks. If you had to put a national debate together on this program or anywhere in the country between President Bush or one of his people like Wolfowitz, who supports this war, who would you put on the other side?
HITCHENS: Either Pat Buchanan or Brent Scowcroft.
MATTHEWS: Men of the right?
HITCHENS: People, the real conservatives who think America shouldn`t be remaking the Middle East, shouldn`t be involved in revolutionary intervention, people who defend this...
MATTHEWS: Conditional isolationists are relatively isolationist point of view.
HITCHENS: What are you going to have otherwise, Ramsey Clark? I mean it`s ridiculous. Ramsey Clark is a member of the international committee to defend Slobodan Milosevic. He`s a sinister clown. He doesn`t represent the left either I would like to think but he doesn`t have an real critique. The hard arguments against this are from the conservatives and for good reason because what the administration is doing, without claiming to do so, without admitting it really, it`s dumping the Nixon doctrine.
It`s dumping the idea we rule through client states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the client states that betrayed us, that shot us in the front of the 11th of September, that incubated al Qaeda, that resent their client status.
MATTHEWS: Where did this new Wilsonian (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
HITCHENS: It`s betting that the Iraqi people could produce something better if they were allowed to, if they were emancipated.
MATTHEWS: That`s if the United States had 100,000 troops in there.
HITCHENS: It`s betting with Iraqi oil on our side, we could pull a (ph) few things, too. I mean it`s not completely idealistic, but with Iraqi oil back on stream and anything like an open society there, you don`t have to depend on Saudi Arabians anymore. You can finally say to the Saudi, your monopoly means nothing to me.
MATTHEWS: You`re still some kind of liberal Chris and it seems to me, I want to ask you this, open question. Are you a little fearful that this new policy, not towards Iraq, some people say that`s a unique case, it`s uniquely evil. We have to deal with it.
But what about this new sort of administration doctrine which was going to each country in the world and preemptively attack any country that might cause us a threat down the road and turn them into democracies? Starting with Iraq, and then Iran and other countries.
HITCHENS: That wouldn`t be the only misgiving. There are many more, but I don`t by the way think the doctrine of preemptive action is a new one.
MATTHEWS: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) smack of the British empire or just going at it and stabilizing regimes?
HITCHENS: The idea of saying in it public and having it out for debate as it is being done is a new thing. As I began by saying, President Carter paid and encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in a deliberate act of aggression. The beginning of all our troubles actually was that at covert action, aggression remaking the region but not telling anyone about it, indeed, lying about it.
MATTHEWS: Who started the fight between us and Iraq? Iraq or us?
HITCHENS: Well, I think that we encouraged Saddam Hussein to become an overly mighty subject. He`s another of the clients who turned upon us like Noriega, like Milosevic, like all these other people. They`ve ruined our first cold war era.
MATTHEWS: It`s blow back.
HITCHENS: It`s blow back, sure, but I think most people on the left use that as a copout saying we were so wrong then, we are bound to be wrong again. I would say first, it doubles our responsibility to the Iraqis and the Kurds and the people who we let down in that time. It means we`ve inherited a responsibility to them.
MATTHEWS: So the same way we created the Taliban or the Mujahadim (ph), we created this guy. He`s a Frankenstein`s monster.
HITCHENS: If we are going to intervene in Iraq, I would rather we intervene, since we`re doing it anyway, against Mr. Hussein than in favor of him.
So it seems to me that`s the usual answer to the usual bleats that you get among liberals who really only put in these arguments in order to do subject change instead of regime change. They basically wish this couldn`t come up and hadn`t come up. They wish they could get on with their domestic agenda, which as far as I can see is redoing the Florida council.
MATTHEWS: From what I`ve seen of the organized Democrats, the professional Democrats, they don`t want to talk about anything serious except they`re getting back in control of the House of Representatives. That`s their main goal.
HITCHENS: They think, why are we talking about Iraq when we could be doing Al Gore`s grievances? This is unbelievably contemptible.
MATTHEWS: I think they are clinging to office. I think that`s what they`re (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
HITCHENS: ... clinging to the wreckage.
MATTHEWS: Anyway, thank you very much, Christopher Hitchens. You`re the greatest. The name of the book Orwell...
HITCHENS: "Why Orwell Matters."
MATTHEWS: "Why Orwell Matters." Tomorrow night at 9 Eastern the HARDBALL "College Tour" goes to Fordham, a great Jesuit university in the Bronx with Senator John McCain. He wants to go there. We`re going there to Fordham tomorrow night and up next, a special presentation of "MSNBC INVESTIGATES," the sniper attacks with John Siegenthaler. We`ll see you tomorrow night at Fordham.