Hitchens' war pitted his comrades in the democratic Kurdish resistance and the Iraqi secular left against the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein -- and today, against the murderous savagery of the Baath Party holdouts and Islamic fundamentalists. Were this the only aspect of the conflict, who on the left would not join Hitchens in his embrace of the war? To this analysis, Hitchens has appended what critic Irving Howe once called "the infatuation with History" through which some Marxists justified their support for numerous flawed causes. In Hitchens' Iraq, modernity and self-determination duel with primitivism and thugocracy, and History has ordained the outcome.
This Marxistic certitude can, though, lead to a certain indifference to the small stuff. "The thing is to realize that the other side is going to lose," Hitchens said on MSNBC's Hardball in November 2003. "The point is that the United States is on the right side of history in the region … . When Bush said, 'Bring it on,' I completely agreed with him … . They will be doing the dying in the long run [emphasis added]. They will rue the day they tried."
In addition to History, there's history -- that is, Hitchens' own, on the left, from which he grows more and more willfully remote. Iraq is the third war, after Kosovo and Afghanistan, that Hitchens has defended against the far left. He is rightly repelled by that left's a priori anti-Americanism (two decades at The Nation can do that to more sober sensibilities than Hitchens'). But he then pulls a sleight of hand that many war hawks use: He magnifies the left's influence to the whole of liberal America, so that any liberal who opposed the Iraq War is suddenly in league with Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark. "I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist," he wrote in The Washington Post, as though he were bravely taking on a genuine force in American politics.
If you're not with Hitchens, Bush, and History, you're against them -- and probably a dupe of bin Laden's. "[Senator John] Kerry adds something else that annoys me very much," Hitchens told Tim Russert in a September 2004 interview in which he endorsed Bush for re-election. "He gives the impression, sometimes overtly, that our policy has maddened people against us and … incited hatred in the Muslim world and so on, in which, again, there is an element of truth." Kerry, of course, was overtly right; but when Hitchens finished twisting the senator's words, he was objectively on the side of evil: "If people say, 'Let's have a foreign policy that does not anger the bin Ladenists' … what are they asking for?"
Kerry, evidently, can't see the broad sweep of History, whose verdict makes right even the bad things that happen to good people. What are a few American lives if they serve History's purposes? "The U.S. armed forces are learning every day how to fight in extreme conditions, in post-rogue-state and post-failed-state surroundings, and with the forces of medieval tyranny," Hitchens wrote in the Los Angeles Times last October. "Does anyone think this is not an experience worth having, or that it will not be needed again?"