To get a clearer picture of this fracture, I wanted to speak to Hitchens and Galloway before their clash. I wanted to visit their respective training camps and discuss at length their opposing outlooks away from the heated atmosphere of the ring – excuse me, stage. First I planned to travel to Portugal to see Galloway in his infamous holiday home. Then I would go to Washington, where Hitchens now makes a comfortable living as one of the most prolific and gifted political writers in the business.
Everything seemed set until I made a cardinal error. Just a week before the interview with Galloway, I wrote a column that questioned his views on the relationship between free speech and religion. At the Edinburgh festival, he had warned in a discussion on a television adaptation of The Satanic Verses that anyone who offended religious beliefs should be aware that they would suffer 'blowback'. 'You should do it very carefully,' he cautioned. As the comment was addressed to a panel that included Salman Rushdie, who knew all about 'blowback', it might have been construed as indelicate or even threatening. I wondered in print how Galloway could appear to be so sensitive to the issue of faith while at the same time lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union (what he called the 'biggest catastrophe of my life'), an atheist state in which many people had been imprisoned for 25 years in slave labour camps for the crime of praying. But it seems that Galloway, the tough former boxer from Dundee, can take most things in his stride, except criticism. The interview was off. 'I don't want to talk to you,' he told me on the phone, 'and that's it.'
This was a shame. I was looking forward to Portugal, and had already mentally packed my swimming trunks. With the possible exception of Robert Kilroy-Silk, a man with whom he has a number of uncanny similarities, Galloway is the most deeply tanned politician ever to step foot in Parliament. My guess was that we would have had our chat poolside. It might not have ranked alongside Galloway's midnights swims with Fidel Castro in Cuba, but it would have been a welcome break from what we workers refer to as the struggle.
There were also some questions I wanted to put to him. For instance, if he is so firmly committed to anti-imperialism that in any battle between North Korea, Kim Jong-Il's slave state, and the United States he has said that he would side with North Korea, why did he appear to support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a war that is estimated to have killed as many as 1.5 million people and also inspired a generation of jihadis? How could Galloway denounce Arab dictatorships yet toady up to Saddam in 1994, when he was well aware of his endless crimes. 'I thought the President would appreciate to know,' he told the dictator to his face, 'that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their new-born sons Saddam. I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.' How could he go to Syria and announce that the country was 'lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her president' when its people had no say in the matter. And was there any level of terrorist barbarity in Iraq and elsewhere that he would condemn, or was everything acceptable in the war against Western capitalism and democracy? The answers would have to wait. Still, I hoped to talk to him in New York before or after the debate.
IN THE meantime I flew to Washington DC to put another set of questions to Hitchens. Given that neither Hitchens nor Galloway are men who recoil from the sound of their own voice, and both have a persuasive talent with words, it would be a challenge to invent two more contrasting personalities. Hitchens is a former public schoolboy who went to Oxford, while Galloway attended grammar school in Dundee and graduated with honours from the uncompromising study that is the Scottish Labour Party. Both were drawn to the far left, Hitchens to the Trotskyist International Socialists, which he soon quit, and Galloway to what was effectively the Stalinist wing of the Labour movement. He is careful not to praise Stalin the man but rather his achievements in 'industrialising' the Soviet Union – a process that led, of course, to millions of deaths. But perhaps their most commented-upon difference is that Galloway is a teetotaller, while Hitchens, to put it at its mildest, is not.
I met up with Hitchens at a Georgetown restaurant after a White House party thrown for President Talabani of Iraq. He was with a number of Washington wonks and Kurdish supporters, and also Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair's special envoy on human rights to Iraq. Clwyd had known Talabani since his days as a Kurdish resistance leader fighting Saddam. She could recall visiting him in the mountains when the idea that he would become president seemed so fanciful as to be absurd. What she could not recall was the anti-Saddam activism that Galloway insists he once took part in. The Respect MP claims that he was a staunch opponent of Saddam, only supporting his cause after Iraq invaded Kuwait and thereby made an enemy of the US.
In that first Gulf War, Hitchens, too, took Iraq's side against the US-led coalition. 'At the time I would freely admit I really hated Bush senior,' he told me. 'But I quite soon began to feel like a dog being washed. I did know about the nature of the Saddam regime because I'd already been in Iraq. I had no excuse not to know. I suppose I have to plead guilty to thinking of Kuwait as a royal family rather than a nation, but I knew better. I was fatally irresolute about this.'
It was a visit to Kurdistan, where he saw that Bush Snr was viewed as a hero, that changed his mind. For a long time he had thought that unless the Americans created a Palestinian homeland they had no business in the Middle East. 'I still do believe in the establishment of a Palestinian homeland but I no longer think that everything else has to be postponed.'
It's this kind of analysis that has led many of his former allies to dismiss him as a neo-conservative. 'No,' he states, 'I'm not any kind of conservative.' All the same, he admires the neo-cons' willingness to confront the status quo. 'One heard people who claimed to have radical credentials say that the removal of Saddam would destabilise the Middle East. Well excuse me comrades, you like it the way it is? Destabilisation is now a bad word?'
Of course, many people surveying the instability of Iraq today do indeed question the wisdom of the intervention. In a perceptive essay he wrote on Churchill, Hitchens suggested a few years ago that the British wartime leader was too committed to war 'to turn back without risking ridicule or obloquy'.
I asked him if he ever felt aware of the same risk. 'There is no analogy to the Churchill position,' he replies. 'What would it take for me to desert [the Iraqi secular and democratic forces]? Well nothing, there is no way. It's like saying, "Oh I couldn't very well be your friend after you'd gone broke and been mugged, and after that burglary at your home."'
Nor is he any more tolerant of the argument that Iraq is another Vietnam. 'There were no fascists against the Vietnam war but every fascist group is against the war in Iraq. I was not against the Vietnam war; I was pro-the Vietnamese revolution. And I would be the same today. Galloway is not anti-war. He's pro-war on the other side. He's gone to all the trouble to make that clear and in a way I admire that. I think he is hypocritical insofar as he doesn't always say the things in London that he says in the Middle East.'
Hitchens says that he no longer has any political allegiances, and something he mentioned just before we parted – after a 4am finish at his downtown apartment – seemed to point to where the chasm had opened up between himself and his opponents. 'It's not really an argument about the facts of the matter. It's an argument about the mentality.'
Whatever patience or sympathy he once had with the outlook that sees the West only as the problem and never the solution had been exhausted. His side and Galloway's side were separated by fundamentally opposing perceptions of reality that could not be bridged by means of reason. It did not bode well for the debate.
IN NEW YORK I introduced myself to Galloway before the hostilities were under way. He smiled and said hello then turned and walked away. I was beginning to accept that he was not going to talk to me. The event had been arranged as part of his American book tour, promoting Mr Galloway Goes to Washington . Tomorrow in Chicago he is speaking with Jane Fonda, a partnership that was organised, much to Hitchens's amusement, by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues
At last Hitchens and Galloway took their positions at podiums on either side of the stage, neither looking at the other. Among the audience was Oona King, the former Labour MP defeated by Galloway in Bethnal Green. In his beard and open-necked casual blue shirt, the Englishman resembled the part-time college lecturer that he in fact is. Galloway, by fastidious contrast, was wearing a beige suit with a carefully co-ordinated tie, his bronze pate shining under the stage lights. Hitchens began his proposal – 'the war in Iraq is just and necessary' – by calling for a minute's silence for the 160 Iraqis murdered that morning in Baghdad by al-Qaeda.
There were instant boos and hails of protest from some members of the audience. In July in Syria Galloway had given a speech celebrating the '145 military operations every day' made by 'these poor Iraqis – ragged people with their sandals and their Kalashnikovs…' But the Iraqis killed on Wednesday were poor labourers looking for work and they were blown apart by sophisticated explosives. It was not clear to me at least why they were unworthy of a minute's silence.
In many ways, the level of debate never recovered from this indecency. Both speakers accused one another of sinking to the gutter and both made direct attacks on the other, though it was Galloway who was perhaps the more personal. Seeking to trump the 'drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay' remark with which he had bested Hitchens outside the Senate committee meeting back in May, he reflected on his earlier admiration for the writer. He had gone on to make natural history, said Galloway, 'by metamorphosing from a butterfly into a slug'. After that he then accused Hitchens of being 'ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood'.
These were prepared insults that may have pleased a section of the crowd but said nothing about the situation in Iraq today, much less the situation under Saddam. But the cheers that they elicited appeared to lift Galloway, or at least the volume of his voice, till he reached a pitch of finger-waving declamation that was both comical and a little frightening to behold. Even the moderator, the less than neutral anti-war broadcaster, Amy Goodman, was moved to ask Galloway to place the microphone further away from his mouth.
But it was to no avail. 'You did write like an angel,' Galloway screamed at Hitchens, 'and now you are working for the devil. Damn you and damn all your words.' At one of the more surreal moments in the evening, Galloway, his tan reddening as the veins in his neck did battle with his tie, accused Hitchens of 'cheap demagoguery'. The 'popinjay' may have his faults, but demagoguery is not his style. Instead he prefers a more urbane approach of teasing out ironies and inconsistencies. How, he wondered, after Galloway had invoked Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar protesting mother of a slain soldier, could he go to Syria and praise the murderers of the son then come here and offer support for the mother.
Yet Hitchens allowed much of the goodwill he built up to dissipate when he refused to blame George Bush for the debacle in New Orleans, and resisted the idea that racism played a part in the plight of the abandoned citizens of the Gulf coast. It seemed almost as if he had it with the bien pensants of the left and wanted to get at them any way that he could.
As the debate drew to a close, both speakers were eager to finish. Like two fighters who had no more punches to throw, they were waiting for the bell. Opinion was divided over who triumphed, though from where I sat Hitchens won on points. America may see itself as the home of democracy, but there was no vote. So it was left to the market to decide. A post-event book signing was convened and it was noticeable that the queue was almost twice as long to see Hitchens.
In the end the evening served to confirm much of what we already knew: Galloway will ally himself with anyone, no matter what their politics, against what he calls the 'two biggest rogue states in the world', America and Britain. And Hitchens has developed a steely contempt for the defeatism of his former friends. 'This is masochism,' he told the audience, 'but it's being offered to you by a sadist.'
Afterwards Amy Goodman told me that in the US it was hard 'to get a debate in which two people disagreed with each other'. I'm not sure that that's true, though it might be that to get two people who disagree with each other as much as Hitchens and Galloway you have to look to Britain, which has a more rumbustious tradition in these matters. In any case, the two sides of what was once the left – the interventionists and the anti-imperialists – have seldom seemed so far apart, nor Iraq so far away.