Galloway and Hitchens get down and very dirty
From James Bone of The Times, in New York
George Galloway, the anti-war Respect Party MP from Bethnal Green, is guilty of "sinister piffle". Christopher Hitchens, the pro-intervention polemicist who writes a column for Vanity Fair, practises "Goebbellian tricks".
The two rival titans of the raging row over Iraq engaged in an intellectual prize fight in New York last night that quickly degenerated into knock-down, drag-out bar-room brawl.
Before a jeering crowd of more than 1,000 in a college auditorium, the two men - once allies on the Left - hurled invective at each other for almost two hours, until exhaustion set in.
A scruffy, sweating Mr Hitchens accused Mr Galloway of being an apologist for dictators, fresh from Damascus where he had praised the 145 attacks a day by Iraqi insurgents on coalition troops.
"The man's hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends," Mr Hitchens said. "The Soviet Union let him down, Albania's gone ... Saddam's been overthrown... But on to the next, in Damascus."
In an apparent Freudian slip, Mr Hitchens confused the Dundee-born politician at one point with Libyan leader "Mr Gaddafi".
Mr Galloway, inexplicably tanned and looking worthy of the nickname "Gorgeous George" in a well-pressed biege suit, denounced Mr Hitchens as a former-Trotskyist stooge for a reactionary government in Washington bent on dominating the Iraqi people.
"People like Mr Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, " the MP said to wild applause."How I wish he would put on a tin hat and pick up a gun and go and fight himself."
Mr Galloway argued that the war in Iraq had made the world less safe and that Islamic fundamentalism was now on the rise with "10,000 new bin Ladens".
The show-down grew out of a clash between the two when Mr Galloway testified in May before a United States Senate sub-committee that had accused him of profiting from the oil-for-food scandal. At that chaotic meeting, Mr Galloway extravagantly dismissed the exiled British journalist as a "drink-soaked, former-Trotskyist popinjay". Mr Hitchens responded by challenging the MP to a proper debate. Mr Galloway accepted the challenge while on an anti-war speaking tour of America and promoting his new book about the Senate hearings, Mr Galloway Goes to Washington.
For the Americans in the audience, the debate offered a airing of differences by two British proxies for arguments over Iraq that are seldom articulated so vigorously in the United States. Though a vote was never taken, the motion before the audience was: "The war in Iraq was necessary and just."
Combat began on the pavement outside with Mr Hitchens handing out leaflets noting Mr Galloway's more egregious tributes to Saddam, including the infamous 1994 speech in Baghdad in which he told the Iraqi strongman: "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."
Once inside, Mr Galloway cleverly contrasted his opponent's past record of support for Palestinian fighters and opposition to the 1991 war in Iraq to his current pro-war stance.
"What you have witnessed is something unique in natural history - the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug," Mr Galloway informed the appreciative crowd. "I do not know what it was," he said. "I do not know if it was Vanity Fair or the lucrative contracts you have landed since. Maybe it was the whisky. Somehow, you decided in 2002/3 to take a line that was in complete opposition to the line you used to take. Were you wrong in '91 or are you wrong now?"
Unabashed, Mr Hitchens conceded that his views had changed since 1991. "I have not repudiated them. It's just that I no longer hold to them," he said to hoots of derison from the audience. He explained that the transformation took place when he found himself among the Kurds of northern Iraq at the end of the war in Iraq in 1991. He vowed to support their secular, leftist opposition to the "fascism" of Saddam.
Even as accomplished a demagogue as Mr Galloway eventually overstepped the mark. To boos from the audience, he suggested that American foreign policy was to blame for the September 11 attacks - particularly Washington's support for Israel.
"Some believe that those aeroplanes on September 11 came out of a clear blue sky. I believe they came out of a swamp of hatred created by us," he proclaimed. "I believe that because the total, complete unending and bottomless support for General Sharon's crimes against the Palestinian people."
Mr Hitchens also blundered by issuing an unpopular defence of the Bush administration's handling of the flooding of New Orleans. "This is where it ends," Mr Galloway crowed. "You start off being the liberal mouthpiece for one of the most reactionary governments this country has ever known and you end up a mouthpiece and apologist for these miserable malevolent incompetents who cannot even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans. You know, Mr Hitchens, you are a court jester - not in Camelot like other miserable liberals before you, but in the court of the Bourbon Bushes."
For a college audience in New York, opinion was fairly evenly divided. Although Mr Galloway had student anti-war sentiment on his side, Mr Hitchens held on to supporters of Israel and the Kurds.
"I think it was a tie," said Michael Thompson, a political science professor at William Patterson University in New Jersey. "It was more rhetorical than it was substantive. There was just too much ad hominem oratory."
"The outcome of this debate is going to be seen in ten years time. History will tell," said Pepe Lopez, an anti-war advertising executive. "Hitchens was wrong."
Among those watching was Oona King, the Labour MP defeated by Mr Galloway at the last election. "I think Galloway won in terms of oratory skills," she said."I think it's great to see Britons bringing the tradition of debate to the United States. But at the end of the day, they are two very arrogant men who both have very flawed arguments."