Herman on Hitchens/Bush

[Mark Pavlick]

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>Christopher Hitchens And The Uses Of Demagoguery
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>In his latest phase as flack for the war party, Christopher Hitchens 
>has taken on some of the qualities of his leader George W. Bush. A 
>notable similarity is in his demagogic statement of the issues "we" 
>face since 9/11--in W's words, an "evil" enemy who hates our 
>freedom, so "you are either with us or against us" in this new and 
>open-ended war of good versus evil. For Hitchens, we face a 
>"demented" enemy (bin Laden) who has made "a sort of promise" to 
>destroy the United States of America, so that "It involves no 
>exaggeration to say that everything depends, and has depended, on 
>proving bin Laden wrong." Thus we now have a "direct confrontation, 
>unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything 
>I hated. On one side the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, 
>and the cosmopolitan...On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and 
>vicious theocratic fascism." Further, "Only a complete moral idiot 
>can believe for an instant that we are fightin
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>One trick employed by both demagogues is the Manichean use of "they" 
>and "we," with "they" being bin Laden and al Qaeda and theocratic 
>fascists, and "we" the enlightened multiculturalists. 
>Understandably, Hitchens is reluctant to name the leading 
>multiculturalists in his new army, such as Bush II, John Ashcroft, 
>Richard and Lynne Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, William Bennett, Joseph 
>Lieberman and a host of others, assisted multinationally by Ariel 
>Sharon, Vladimir Putin, Pervez Musharaff, Islam Karimov, John 
>Howard, Tony Blair and the lot. The victims of "our" war include 
>vast numbers of Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, and other people who 
>may be "scum of the earth" for Hitchens and his allies, but perhaps 
>not for genuine "cosmopolitans" (I return to this later).
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>A related trick of Bush, Hitchens & Co. is to pretend that the aim 
>of the war is simply to destroy bin Laden, al Qaeda, terrorism, and 
>"theocratic fascism." On this point Bush and his associates are more 
>honest than Hitchens, as they admit to larger aims such as "regime 
>change" in Iraq, which has nothing to do with bin Laden and 
>theocratic fascism, and the preemptive removal of threats of 
>"weapons of mass destruction" anywhere on the globe, except where 
>those weapons are actually known to exist (in the hands of the 
>United States, Israel, Russia, China, Britain, France, India and 
>Pakistan).
>
>It is laughable to see Hitchens pretend that the Bush 
>administration--the decision-making arm of "we"--has no agenda 
>beyond "proving Osama bin Laden wrong." No revenge motive in 
>attacking Afghanistan; no taking advantage of 9/11 and the ensuing 
>(and continuously cultivated) patriotic orgy to project power and 
>advance oil industry interests abroad, and to pursue a regressive 
>business and Christian right agenda at home. There is no suggestion 
>by Hitchens that the pro-Israel lobby within the administration 
>might use 9/11 to help Sharon's theocratic state accelerate its 
>ethnic cleansing and repression.
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>Hitchens doesn't even mention the prospective war of aggression 
>against Iraq that now preoccupies the "we" leadership. Nothing in 
>Hitchens' Globe piece suggests that there are any larger interests 
>that drive the foreign policy of the United States. "We" operate 
>outside of history and without influence of any power structure 
>dynamic to pursue ethical ends and prove Osama wrong!
>
>Hitchens repeatedly makes the point that bin Laden can't possibly 
>win, so that we can "stop scaring ourselves to death." He never 
>stops to ask why "we" ARE scaring ourselves to death. He notes that 
>"people do not make their best decisions when they are afraid," but 
>is it possible that scaring people allows the leadership to make the 
>decisions IT sees as best? Could it be that the "we" decision- 
>makers find this a useful way to engineer consent? Since "we" are an 
>ethical multicultural unit, all in this together, this is outside 
>the orbit of Hitchens' discourse. He also fails to discuss just how 
>powerful bin Laden and al Qaeda really are and what challenge they 
>actually pose. Estimates of al Qaeda's size run from 200 to several 
>thousand individuals, not quite as well armed as the United States, 
>and therefore a challenge worthy of national mobilization only by 
>the efforts of a magnificent propaganda system. Hitchens does not 
>discuss how a National Missile Defense and huge increase in the 
>military budget acros
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>Hitchens' new role of war flack is perhaps most clearly revealed in 
>his use of sources. Early in the Afghan war he said that the 
>Pentagon was "almost pedantically" careful about civilian 
>casualties, a conclusion based solely on Pentagon claims to that 
>effect (The Nation, Dec. 17, 2001). Now he says "Many of the points 
>made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by 
>the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is 
>good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and 
>will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in 
>themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations 
>of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect."
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>Once again, the claim about conscious assimilation by the Pentagon 
>is based on Pentagon say-so, and is therefore a direct transmission 
>of propaganda issued by an interested party. The contrast with 
>Hitchens' treatment of non-Pentagon sources is dramatic. He mentions 
>an "untrustworthy figure of 3,000, which is compiled by suspect 
>pacifist sources and takes no account of the refusal of the other 
>side to identify itself." Here he raises the question of "trust" and 
>suggests that pacifists might overstate figures based on their 
>political beliefs. But he expresses not the slightest doubt about 
>Pentagon claims of a new sensitivity, nor is there any recognition 
>that the Pentagon might have a public relations interest in 
>understating civilian deaths. He also fails to mention the 
>Pentagon's admission that it has not collected data on civilian 
>casualties, as well as its efforts to prevent others from collecting 
>them (see Edward Herman, "'Tragic Errors' in U.S. Military Policy," 
>Z Magazine, Sept. 2002).
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>In his Globe article, Hitchens becomes confused at one point, when 
>he criticizes our leaders' failure to distinguish between enemies 
>and friends. He goes on to say "And why should our elite, which has 
>got everything wrong in Iran from the Shah to Oliver North's 
>hostage-trading, be trusted just because this is an emergency?" Has 
>he forgotten that we are all in this together fighting bin Laden and 
>that Pentagon assertions about its bombing policies should be 
>trusted? Is the Pentagon not run by the elite?
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>This strange portrayal of an elite that might not be part of "we" 
>and that can make serious mistakes is followed immediately by his 
>discussion of Palestine. Properly so, as he grudgingly admits that 
>in this instance Bush and the top decision-making elite has 
>performed imperfectly. His language is classic: "In case I should be 
>accused of avoiding the question of Palestine, I should simply say 
>that George W. Bush was right in making it plain to the Palestinians 
>that suicide bombing, at this time or any other, would be suicidal 
>for them. But this does not dissolve [sic] America's longstanding 
>promise to sponsor mutual recognition between equal populations--a 
>promise that has been unkept for far too long and is now made more 
>urgent rather than less."
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>We may note that he fails to mention, let alone condemn, Bush's 
>blank check to Sharon to invade the West Bank, destroy much of the 
>Palestinian infrastructure, and beggar the Palestinian people. 
>Hitchens does not tie this Bush policy in with the "war on 
>terrorism," for good reason--the policy implemented here 
>demonstrates that Bush's war is a war OF state-based terrorism and 
>is not directed solely or mainly at al Qaeda. There is also that 
>little problem of Hitchens' claim that "our" war is one of good and 
>ethical folk against the "scum of the earth"--here Ariel Sharon and 
>company, with massive U.S. aid, against the long-abused Palestinian 
>victims of the occupation. Notice also Hitchens' reference to 
>America's longstanding "promise" of equal treatment, now more 
>urgent--slippery in light of Bush's quite open siding with Israel 
>and support for the destruction of Palestine, and also dishonest in 
>claiming a promise never made and the failure to acknowledge 
>explicitly the durable U.S.-Israel alliance at the expen
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>Getting back to the Afghan war, Hitchens tells us that there was no 
>"precipitate reprisal," but only a "very well calibrated 
>international action." As it was not immediately clear who was 
>behind 9/11, and a major assault on Afghanistan could not be carried 
>out on the following day, the absence of a quick violent response 
>was not a result of patience and reasonableness. Furthermore, the 
>eventual response was an "international action" only in a 
>Hitchensian sense, as it was carried out in violation of the UN 
>Charter, and by ferocious U.S. bombing, aid to the murderous warlord 
>factions hostile to the Taliban, and bullying and bribing of allies 
>and useful neighbors of Afghanistan. It was another coward's war, 
>once again using high tech weaponry lavishly to keep U.S. casualties 
>at or near zero, while going after the enemy in a manner that would 
>cause massive civilian casualties.
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>It is difficult to avoid calling Hitchens a liar and apologist for 
>anti-civilian warfare in his analysis of U.S. warmaking in 
>Afghanistan (as in 1999 in Kosovo; see Edward Herman and David 
>Peterson, "Letter to the Editors of The Nation on Christopher 
>Hitchens' Minority Report on 'Body Count in Kosovo,'" June 11, 2001 
>[unpublished, but available at 
>http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-06/19herman.htm]). As 
>noted, Hitchens takes the Pentagon's word that they have changed 
>course, and are "pedantically" careful to avoid civilians. He has 
>obviously never looked at Marc Herold's massive documentation 
>showing that the Pentagon has targeted hundreds of inhabited towns 
>using anti-civilian weapons, with thousands of casualties. (In 
>addition to "Dossier on Civilian Victims of U.S. Aerial Bombing of 
>Afghanistan," http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.html, 
>see his "U.S. Bombing and Afghan Civilian Deaths: The Official 
>Neglect of 'Unworthy' Bodies," International Journal of Urban and 
>Regional Research, S
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>Although Hitchens mentions the "refusal of the other side to 
>identify itself" as a possible source of inflation of civilian 
>casualties, he never addresses the plentiful evidence that the 
>Pentagon has tried very hard to keep civilian casualties out of 
>sight. Nor does he mention their repeated lying and cover-ups when 
>forced to defend civilian killings. On some occasions when unable to 
>deny killing civilians, Pentagon officials have defended this on the 
>ground that the civilians were possibly Taliban supporters: 
>regarding the wedding party massacre at Kakarak, Pentagon spokesman 
>General Gregory Newbold said that "This is an area of enormous 
>sympathy for the Taliban and al Qaeda" (see my "Tragic Errors" for 
>further quotes along the same line)--which suggests that their 
>concern for civilians may be non-existent in enemy territory.
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>If the Pentagon is willing to bomb hundreds of inhabited villages 
>where al Qaeda MIGHT be hiding, and if they are especially 
>unconcerned with civilian casualties in territory sympathetic to the 
>enemy, and if the probability of civilian deaths in these raids is 
>extremely high, this is a deliberate and acceptable killing of 
>civilians. Hitchens' claim that only the "contemptible" enemy "deals 
>in death without discrimination" comes from a combination of 
>self-imposed ignorance and simple apologetics.
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>Hitchens finds precision weaponry "good in itself," independently of 
>the use to which the weapons are put. Cluster bombs are "not good in 
>themselves," but "have a heartening effect...when they are dropped 
>on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops." This from a man 
>who loves to IMAGINE how enemy forces "gloat," their "wolfish 
>smiles" and "with what delight they must have ramped up the speed of 
>their plane..." It is the hypothetical slaughter of enemy troops, 
>not civilians, that heartens Hitchens, and the Pentagon assures him 
>of their care for civilians. But Hitchens fails to acknowledge that 
>in the real world cluster bombs were frequently dropped on civilian 
>sites that MIGHT house an al Qaeda fighter, and that they are widely 
>scattered and threaten civilians who might pick up unexploded 
>canisters. He also does not mention the heavy use of depleted 
>uranium munitions, a form of "dirty bomb" warfare posing long-term 
>threats to Afghan civilians.
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>Hitchens sneers at the "pacifists'" estimate of 3,000 deaths from 
>bombs, as well as at the earlier claim of possible mass starvation 
>based on the effects of the bombing war. But the 3,000 figure was 
>only the low end of verifiable numbers killed directly by bombs and 
>missiles, and didn't take into account the much larger number 
>injured and traumatized, and the additional minimum 20,000 refugees 
>who died of hunger, disease and cold in refugee camps. These are 
>surely low estimates because "we" don't collect data on such a 
>subject, so that we will never know these totals, but Hitchens knows 
>that they were lower than pacifists claim (see Jonathan Steele, 
>"Forgotten Victims. The Full Human Cost of U.S. Air Strikes Will 
>Never Be Known, but Many More Died Than Those Directly Killed by 
>Bombs," The Guardian, May 20, 2002; Herold, "'Unworthy' Bodies").
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>Hitchens says that Afghanistan "is the first country in history to 
>be bombed out of the stone age." He fails to mention that the United 
>States played a major role in getting Afghanistan into the "stone 
>age" in the first place, and strongly supported the Taliban's 
>accession to power in 1996. In an earlier article Hitchens did note 
>this prior involvement, but magically transformed it into our 
>"responsibility"--to bomb now! We may have messed up badly way back 
>then, and abandoned the Afghans to stone age rule, but the new "we" 
>will put things right, by bombing.
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>Hitchens' lauding of the consequences of the bombing campaign is 
>outrageous nonsense. The bombing war killed, injured and traumatized 
>scores of thousands; caused the withholding of food aid from a 
>starving population for months, and was a major factor in the 
>destruction of most of the winter crop; created a vast number of 
>internal and external refugees; polluted the countryside with 
>cluster bombs and depleted uranium; and destroyed a very large 
>number of urban and rural homes, bridges, mosques, electric power 
>and water supply facilities, communications systems, and roads. The 
>Bush administration has already opted out of allocating significant 
>resources to rebuild what it destroyed, but that doesn't worry 
>Hitchens. Furthermore, Bush has put in power a different regressive 
>top leadership drawn from the war lords of the Northern Alliance, 
>with local and regional war lords still dominant throughout 
>Afghanistan, so that "stone age" politics still prevails and the 
>drug trade has taken on new life.
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>CONCLUSION
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>Christopher Hitchens is a real asset to the war party, because he is 
>a facile writer and covers over by vigorous assertion and imagery 
>his new reactionary politics and the feeble intellectual defenses he 
>musters for it. His value is enhanced by the fact that he is a 
>"straddler," that is, a man in transition from an earlier left 
>politics to apologetics for imperial wars, but with a foot still in 
>The Nation's door and a harsh critic of Kissinger and Pinochet. He 
>is therefore presentable as a member of the "rational left" or left 
>that has "seen the light." Such folks are much honored by the 
>mainstream media.
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>Edward S. Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton 
>School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor to Z 
>Magazine since its founding in 1988 and to ZNet. Herman is the 
>author of numerous books, including a number of corporate and media 
>studies. These include Corporate Control, Corporate Power (1981), 
>the two-volume Political Economy of Human Rights (1979) and 
>Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media 
>(1988), both of which he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, as well as 
>The "Terrorism" Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape 
>Our View of Terror (1989), which he co-authored with Gerry 
>O'Sullivan. Herman occasionally contributes a column to Swans.
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