Pug's quote of Hitchen's distortion of Galloway's and his own [i.e. Hitchens'] view at the time:
"But mark the sequel. It must have been in full knowledge, then, of that repression, and that genocide, and of the invasion of Kuwait and all that ensued from it, that George Galloway shifted his position and became an outright partisan of the Iraqi Baath. There can be only two explanations for this, and they do not by any means exclude one another. The first explanation, which would apply to many leftists of different stripes, is that anti-Americanism simply trumps everything, and that once Saddam Hussein became an official enemy of Washington the whole case was altered."
---Here's Dennis Perrin on the reliability of Hitch's memory of the early 1990's:
http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2005/06/punchy.html
"As for Hitchens, ducking battles has become routine. I've had people ask me why Hitchens refuses to debate me. I've already offered my view on this, but there's something else to consider. Unlike a lot of his opponents, I remember many of Hitchens's opinions and positions which he's conveniently forgotten. Take his recent commentary on BBC Radio. Hitchens was asked if 9/11 was the catalyst for his supporting the US invasion and occupation of Iraq:
"Oh, by no means, no. It starts for me at the end of the first Gulf War, the one in 1991, which I was very critical of until the closing stages, when I was in Northern Iraq bouncing around in a jeep with some Kurdish guerrillas. They taped a picture of George Bush senior to their windshield, on my side, so that I couldn’t see out. And after a bit I complained. I said 'look do we have to have this, I can’t see' (and also it would be awfully embarrassing if I ran into anyone I knew). I remember that the Iran-Contra business was very vivid in my mind. They said 'the fact of the matter is we can move it to a side window if you like, but we think that without his intervention, without the umbrella in Northern Iraq, that we, and all our families, would be dead'. And I realised that I didn’t have a clever answer to that. And I began to re-work back to the origins of the war and realised that co-existence with the Saddam Hussein regime was no longer possible. And that was in 1991. Anyway, if you hadn’t concluded it by then you were obviously not going to be persuaded - as since we have found out."
He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the bold quote is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush's "mad contest" with Saddam, much less opined that "co-existence" with Saddam was "no longer possible." I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he's still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on "about a zillion fronts" before he could sign on.
But that wouldn't make for good drama, nor would it bolster his public image as Stout Warrior. So he tells the above tale, and does so without shame. When I first heard him do this on Don Imus's radio show (Hitchens is no racist but he has no problem using one for exposure), I emailed him and reminded him of his history. He didn't deny it, said that perhaps his memory wasn't as sharp as he would like, but in the end it didn't matter. Who cares what he said in 1993 or 2002 -- this is what he's saying now and if I didn't like it, tough.
Also, his decade-long equivocation regarding a US overthrow of Saddam apparently didn't make him soft on Ba'athist fascism. But for everyone else . . .
It's understandable that the Kurds would embrace whoever helped them out, however indirectly and for whatever real reason. That's realpolitik. They took what they could get. But Hitchens is hiding behind these people not only because he thinks it makes him look tough, too, but in order to mask his political and social ambition. If the Kurdish left loves the Bush family, then why shouldn't he? It's a form of solidarity that cannot hurt when cruising the DC power circuit and making the media rounds.
(Of course, when Turkish Kurds were getting massacred by US weapons and displaced by a NATO state, there was no call from Hitchens for direct US intervention to save them. Indeed, when Turkish pilots took a break from their anti-Kurd duties to drop bombs on Serbia, Hitchens overlooked their massive ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan since they were helping to fight a smaller instance of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Besides, the European Union would handle Turkey's Kurd killing, he told me.)
I'm one of the last people Hitchens wants to see across a stage. He knows what I know, and he's not about to risk blowing his present cover in order to debate me. Which makes sense. It's one of the few deft moves he has left."
Stephen Philion Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology St. Olaf College http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/sociology/People/faculty-staff/steve.html