Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

The controversial pundit dishes out and takes punishment in this anthology of rancorous essays by him and the leftist comrades he abandoned to embrace the invasion of Iraq. The editors laud Hitchens as a “morally courageous,” “indispensable” thinker whose elegant polemics sparkle under fire; sadly, this selection hardly supports such glowing tributes. Hitchens’s post-9/11 pieces rehearse themes that he considers too self-evident to bother justifying: the irreconcilability of Islamist “fascism” with humane liberal values; the mortal peril posed by Saddam’s dictatorship; the imperative to destroy both and the left’s “moral cretinism” in questioning the rationale or methods for doing so. Hitchens’s arguments rely on debater’s tactics—stiffened with muscular rhetoric (“When [cluster bombs] are dropped on... Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect”), personal vitriol (“fat sluts,” he dubs the Dixie Chicks) and school-yard taunts (“Well, ha ha ha and yah, boo”). His detractors sometimes reciprocate (Richard Seymour calls him a “tumescent cadaver”), but Gary Malone, Juan Cole and George Scialabba offer poised rebuttals. There’s red meat aplenty for pro- and anti-Hitchens readers, but more blood than light is shed on the underlying issues. (June)