Andrew Sullivan comes down off his high horse long enough to answer my recent blog on Christopher Hitchens’ 1976 article, recently unearthed and posted by the New Statesman, valorizing Saddam Hussein as “perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.” Sullivan quotes only that snippet from the entire article, which goes on to present the Butcher of Baghdad as a model of socialist idealism and ideological “fervor.” Says Sullivan of his warmongering and perpetually tipsy friend:
“Look, we all have a right to change our minds. I see no reason to believe that Christopher’s evolution has not been completely genuine. And he noted the torture and barbarism at the time.”
Yes, change is possible: witness Sullivan’s own transformation from the Savonarola of the War Party to the avowed enemy of the neoconservative project (although when it comes to Iran, he seems quite prepared to go along with the neocons just as he did in the case of Iraq). Yet no one is saying that the evolution of Hitchens, from “third camp” Trotskyist to left-neocon-with-a-flaming-sword, isn’t “genuine,” whatever that may mean. This history is pretty common in neocon circles. What Sullivan doesn’t address is the real point I was trying to make: that intellectuals of Hitchens’ sort — ideologues — tend to be seduced by power, and are quite willing to overlook all those pesky little atrocities that “leaders” make when they think they’re making History with a capital “H”.
I even cited Sullivan’s favorite writer, George Orwell, whose essay on James Burnham (actually, two essays) is the definitive take-down of this type. So, yes, Hitchens did note the torture and repression carried out by the Ba’athists, but this didn’t deter him from painting Saddam as a towering, heroic figure: it just added to Saddam’s mystique as a powerful leader, at least in Hitchens’ eyes.
In 1976, when Hitchens’ piece was published, Saddam had yet to formally assume the office of Iraqi president, although he had already acquired a fearsome reputation. The future Iraqi dictator had spearheaded Iraq’s literacy campaign, promoted modernization, and done all the things a militantly secular socialist like Hitchens would (and did) admire, including playing a key role in the nationalization of major industries and handing out land to peasants during the Ba’athist “land reform” program. Hitchens saw a man on the move, a man of power who was leading the charge against Muslim religious obscurantism and holding high the banner of socialism. That he was also setting up a police state didn’t concern Hitchens in the least.
I expect Sullivan refuses to confront these issues — the tendency of intellectuals to excuse the worst abuses in order to score ideological points — because they bring into focus his own motivations for helping to lead the charge for a war he now abhors.