Jeff Koopersmith

Hitchens' Secret: He's Clueless!
by Jeff Koopersmith

Nov. 18, 2002 -- Washington (APJP) -- I can't say I was howling with laughter after a colleague brought my attention to Chris Hitchens' piece in the November 7th issue of Slate -- a tiresome read in which Hitch spends a thousand words making George W. Bush's case for war in Iraq to those of you who can actually understand what Hitchens writes (due to his overuse of what must be a variety of thesauri dedicated to confusing the Pentagon with words they have to investigate).

But I can admit I was rolling on the floor about a later piece in which he lamented his position as a bucolic armchair desert warfare tactician who's not taken seriously enough by U.S. military strategists as a true "Hawk" -- a description Hitchens seems desperate to pin on himself.

I wonder why?

Hitchens writes about the thoughts on the Iranian "street" -- a term he has sadly stolen from the other three dozen journalists who overused the term as a description of "what people are thinking." I can tell him that many dirty old men in Tehran, Washington, and Baghdad are truly "chickenhawks" and their only prey is little boys. Could it be that a man like Hitchens -- so caught up in the oral manipulation of William Jefferson Clinton -- could have missed the fact that "The Street" thinks of chickenhawks in these perverse and unscrupulous terms and not in terms foisted by pseudointellectual authors like Hitchens and others who are frustrated that they are dismissed as "armchair" tacticians when, of course, that is all they are?

Besides, what credibility does Mr. Hitchens offer as a warfare wonk?

Christopher Hitchens is an unwanted right wing defector from Great Britain who came to America to make his fortune -- most notably on the backs of, and at the expense of, his friends. These include Sidney Blumenthal, whom Hitchens lied about time and again in a grotesque plot with a gaggle of ultra-right-wing prostitutes including John Fund, Matt Drudge, Lucianne Goldberg and her son Jonah, who seems too much like the SNL character "Pat" for comfort.

Hitchens is also a defender of those who would like you to believe that the Holocaust never happened while at the same time labeling Ariel Sharon "vile" for having decided to finally take on the criminal element that has subverted the movement for an independent Palestinian -- the ones who use "God" and the Qu'ran to "justify" the senseless murder of women and children on Israeli buses and street corners. These heretics to Islam have also hamstrung the majority of Palestinians who honestly seek side-by-side peace with the Israelis.

In only the first paragraph of his piece on an Iraqi "regime change," Hitchens alludes to Paul Wolfowitz, Leo Strauss, Saul Bellow, the "arcane and occluded" debate about knocking over Saddam for a new leadership -- and the "hidden meaning" of "regime change," which Hitchens instructs us is just the beginning of a war against most oil-rich Arab and non-democratic leaders. Hitchens thinks he's letting America -- at least the fraction of America that tries to make sense of what he writes -- in on a big secret: that George Bush and his right wing oil gluttons are merely picking out "the first to go" among a plethora of oil sheiks who now control "our" preferred source of energy.

I find it amusing that Hitchens can uncover the "hidden agenda" of the Bush Administration -- with which he appears to agree, but not see the irony in his own failure to recognize the street definition of "chickenhawk" as a sexually deviant man who seeks sexual liaison with underage boys.

I hate to surprise Hitchens, a self-styled conservative when he needs to be and a liberal when he needs asylum, but there are many liberals who do not, as he writes, ask "Why Saddam?" when other juicier targets such as the House of Saud exist.

I for one am a liberal who doesn't mind which Islamic ultra-extremist -- or harborer of criminal Islamic fundamentalist organizations that engage in crimes against humanity -- Bush chooses to toss into the Dispoz-All of history. And I will admit that in my anger there are many days when I catch myself thinking it might be a grand idea to simply eliminate every last one of them -- drop our hypocrisy in exchange for open and honest greed -- and simply send all oil-rich nations a message: "Resign. Move to Lausanne. Your oil is now ours." The alternative to the Sheiks remaining in power? Turning their desert empires into a sheet of glass.

Yes, it has crossed my mind.

Of course, the sense in me -- whatever of it is left -- remembers that I have friends in that region, good people whom I respect, and I shudder at my own indifference to the death of others after September 11, 2001 including Arabs and Muslims.

While demonstrating that even conservatives love the Saudis and financed Saddam's war machine, Hitchens fails to make the complete and truthful case that Bush Senior not only embraces at least half of those who harbor and feed these fundamentalist terrorists, but also feeds off them.

And this may be the crux of the present dilemma. George Dumb-Bell-You is smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds his father, who is earning millions from Middle Eastern deals he makes on behalf on some of America's and Britain's most suspect characters.

You heard it here first: Saddam is not one of those who pays the Yalie Piper, so to the Bush family he is ripe for elimination, and perhaps the next Iraqi despot will "pay to play."

Hitchens, of course, whines about the Kurds, as does Bush every chance he gets.

But tell me this: when was the last time you heard a right wing leader in America worry about some poor, filthy, uneducated crowd of "furriners" except when being disingenuous? Hitchens, like Newt Gingrich, is a master of deceit, and his pretense that Saddam is "a bad guy's bad guy" is only as ugly as his failure to wonder whether this nation's ignoring the plight of the American Indian or the black families in crisis might be akin or even far worse than Saddam's anger at the Kurds.

Hitchens goes further, claiming by that which he pens that he is now also an expert on middle east policy. He tells us that Saddam Hussein will not survive anyway because his regime is on the verge of "implosion." Hitch heard that spin on Fox News, I am certain. I saw that same program, and think it was Oliver North, Fox's favorite resurrected felon, who said it.

What Hitchens doesn't tell us is when. It's easy to say Saddam's regime will kill itself off -- much as it's easy to say that Bush's will as well. The when however is less obvious in Hussein's case.

The mind-boggling thing about Hitchens' illogic is that he actually thinks that whether we bomb and occupy Iraq or not, the world will suffer immensely over Kurdistan, meddling by Turkey and Iran, the Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, even "social chaos," as he puts them. The fact is, of course, that although these elements could play a role in a naturally disintegrating Saddam regime, the power of these negative potentials will skyrocket when propelled by the American and allied war machine.

Hitchens' naiveté that it's going to happen one way or another, so let's bomb 'em now, is simply schoolboy babble. I prefer my generals to be starched and fit -- not slovenly an unshaven.

Hitchens offers that Saddam's destruction -- one way or the other -- is a self-evident fact. If that were true, however, why has he survived for the past decades -- and nearly a dozen years after Bush the Elder cunningly (and with, I believe, malice aforethought) pulled the troops before finishing Saddam off?

Hitchens, as always, misses the point -- lost instead in wordsmanship, much as our senile friend William Safire is each week in the New York Times and on various television entertainment programs disguised as news or "public affairs" programming.

The point, Mr. Hitchens, is that George Bush and his henchman have not, now nor ever, demonstrated in any adult manner what it is that Saddam Hussein has done to the United States that now implores us to travel to the ends of the earth to destroy him.

That's the only underlying principal that need be considered.

Old Man Bush, in a futile effort to save his pathetic presidency, used Saddam's anger at being denied a port and being held up for absurdly high pipeline tariffs by the despicable Kuwaiti slave holders (our friends) as his reason for the death of some of our sons -- but Bush the younger cannot even find this excuse at his table! So instead, he rants on about the Kurds -- whom his father cruelly abandoned to die at the hands of Saddam after Desert Storm -- and claims that Saddam "gassed his own people" even as we all know that Kurds are NOT Saddam's people and that Saddam views them much as Bush Jr. views Mexicans illegally crossing our borders.

A more laughable Hitchens conclusion is that the fall of Saddam will somehow "encourage" democracy in the region. In fact, the fall of Saddam might very well discourage it and even end it in nations like Bahrain and Qatar. I have yet to see a history where dictators and potentates simply "moved on" because another in their midst was struck down.

To shore up his ludicrous arguments, Hitchens characteristically claims that he has had "conversations" in Washington on these subjects with certain parties who (secretly, I suppose) revealed that after September 11, 2001, several "conservative" policymakers decided the entire region from Riyadh to Islamabad was the "root cause" of the attacks on Washington and New York. He calls this "fascinating" when any tourist who had the money and wherewithal to travel in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, or Saudi Arabia came home and told their kids the same thing.

And this is why I ask whether one can trust Hitchens -- a self-proclaimed expert on everything from Oval Office fellatio to George Orwell -- to illuminate us, or anyone about much at all.

Instead of letting us in on what he imagines is his little secret about the Middle East, perhaps Hitchens should have had the fortitude and intellectual honesty to admit he hasn't a clue about this deeply complex arena and leave the editorializing to others far better prepared to do so.

Hitchens claims it is "idle" to argue that the Administration's policies regarding Iraq may make more enemies for the United States. He claims he dislikes this argument -- viscerally -- from the gut, because it somehow challenges his manhood. After all, he claims parenthetically, he is allowed to disapprove of those who hate him. The ego is astounding. Not a single person on the planet who counts for anything really cares all that much about what Hitchens writes or thinks.

That goes for this writer as well.

The only difference is that I know it.

By the way, Mr. Hitchens, it is you who are the theocrat and a despotic patron in one not-too-attractive package.