Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal envisions a world still blighted by the presence of Saddam Hussein:

Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi's thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West's efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?

There are two possible scenarios to weigh and I can’t tell which is worse.

The first is that Saddam would have redoubled his efforts to reconstitute his own nuclear program either by cutting a deal with North Korea or A.Q. Khan (which all evidence shows he was trying to do anyway) but with new assistance. Arab regimes now quietly entreating the United States and Israel to take care of the mullahs’s atomic ambitions for them would likely hedge their bets by helping out the one Sunni brethren who stood the best chance of becoming a "deterrent." For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the unpredictable adventurist of yesterday would suddenly appear a reliable countermeasure against Shiite predominance tomorrow.

The second grim outcome to contemplate is that Saddam might have once again become a military ally of the United States, providing us with intelligence on Tehran in exchange for a loosening of sanctions or some other material douceur to keep his dictatorship afloat. If you think such an arrangement impossible after the first Gulf War, the Anfal campaign and the No-Fly zones, you’d do well to remember the arguments that were in fact trotted out against removing Saddam from power in 2002. Mainstream war opponents took for granted that he was indeed seeking the bomb and yet they believed he was containable. Well, it's fairly easy to see the progression of this logic in light of a mounting Iranian threat: "realists" of both a right and left coloring would now make the case that only by soliciting the Baathist’s aid on this key national security challenge could we truly be able to cool his lust for a nuke of his own.

Co-written with Hussein Ibish.

Many contentious issues could bedevil the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that began Wednesday, but on one subject both sides can largely agree: The state-building program launched last year by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made measurable progress. While the terrorist group Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in the West Bank are trying to build the framework of a future state.

The West Bank economy grew by 8.5% last year (according to the International Monetary Fund), despite the global recession and regional factors inhospitable to foreign investment. Palestinian GDP for the third quarter of 2009 was $1.24 billion, up from $1.18 billion a year before.

Real estate in the West Bank is booming. Property prices in Ramallah have risen 30% in the last two years, according to local developers. In July, construction began on Ramallah's Ersal Commercial Center, a $400 million project expected to create thousands of new jobs. And a joint Palestinian-Qatari company is currently building Palestine's first planned city, Rawabi, a high-tech suburb with business and commercial districts and 5,000 homes. A further accelerant to the housing market will be a new $500 million mortgage fund, established by the Palestine Investment Fund, which will begin issuing loans later this year.

These promising trends are reflected in the Palestine Securities Exchange, especially its main Al Quds Index, which in June experienced a 5% market capitalization increase to reach $76.8 million. According to the Portland Trust, four out of the five main sectors of the PSE increased in 2009, with banking up by 30.6%. That's one reason the European Investment Bank last December made a $6.4 million "anchor" investment in Palestine's first venture capital fund. The fund will target export-oriented information and communications technology businesses, which represent the only area of the Palestinian economy that has seen almost uninterrupted growth over the past decade.

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If radicalism has had any positive value in the last century, it was to scandalize an otherwise complacent centre-left consensus on civil rights, one reason why I’ll always prefer the hardheaded wisdom of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the treacly pastiche of “I Have a Dream.”

Richard Just -- which rather sounds like the pen name someone in his position would adopt -- has authored an indignant essay in The New Republic against Barack Obama’s nonsensical views on gay marriage, which have objectively placed the Democratic president to the right of “Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.” The relevant portion is this:

Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.

By now it’s common knowledge that Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former manager of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign, prefers the company of men to women and believes in same-sex marriage legislation. Was it cynicism or prudence that impelled a high-ranking conservative not to make the most of this aspect of his “identity” when it might have made a political difference?   The Daily Show will no doubt have a sober and fair-minded discussion about this very topic in the days to come. But the DNC and those ever diminishing Obama torch-bearers are hardly in a position to score partisan points off of Mehlman’s disclosure.

In fact, the best arguments in favor of gay marriage have come from conservatives such as Jamie Kirchick and Jonathan Rauch, both of whom can’t quite fathom what’s leftist about gentrifying another ten percent of the population. (There’s also likely some forward-thinking Karl Rove in the younger crop of GOP operatives who sees expanding the party’s voter base by endorsing such a platform.)

Meanwhile, the best half-serious arguments against gay marriage come from cultural traditionalists, but not the kind you think. There are quite a few homosexuals, mostly older, who fear that by gaining admittance to mainstream institutions, they stand to forfeit the aura of camp subversiveness and bohemian affiliation that formerly clung to the "lifestyle." If you know anything about English poetry in the 1930's, you'll know exactly what this cultivated and storied aesthetic looks like: Larkin called it the oh-my-dear-ist school, best embodied by Auden and Spender. Yet this contingent is becoming a source for idiosyncratic nostalgia -- the sexual equivalent of Yiddish revivalism -- equally embarrassed by the term "partner" as it is by Bravo's reality television programming. A viable cultural movement it is not.]]> http://www.snarksmith.com/2010/08/obama_and_gay_marriage.html http://www.snarksmith.com/2010/08/obama_and_gay_marriage.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:32:29 -0500 New @ The Weekly Standard:

Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her 'crime' was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she's taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the spokeswoman for the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), Ahari was kicked out of university, whereupon her troubles really began.

She was re-arrested in June 2009 and sent to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where she spent 33 days in solitary confinement. The cells are so small that a short person can't even stretch her arms or legs. One informed observer has described them to me as 'human coffins.' Despite being verbally threatened by Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general, who told her she'd be murdered if she didn't stop working on human rights campaigns in Iran, Ahari persevered. She was released in September 2009 on $200,000 bail and promptly resumed her defense of political prisoners. A month later, she paid a visit to the gravesite of Sohrab Arabi, a nineteen year-old student who'd been arrested in June 2009 for protesting Iran's sham presidential "election" and was subsequently shot in the chest while in state custody.

In December of last year, Ahari was arrested yet again, along with two other activists, while en route to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man considered to be the clerical inspiration behind much of the Green Revolution. Ahari went on hunger strike for two days, then fell ill and was taken to Evin's prison hospital.

According to the Revolutionary Court, which is due to try her case on September 4, she stands accused of "anti-regime propaganda by working with the CHRR website" and "acts contrary to national security through participation in gatherings on November 4, 2009 and December 7, 2009." These are the dates, respectively, of the anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, which is a sanctified Iranian holiday but last year became a ferment of democratic protest, and the Student Day demonstrations, which commemorate the murder of three Iranians students killed in 1953 by the Pahlavi government. Ahari maintains she was at home on both days.

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So over-hyped is Jonathan Franzen's new novel that the British press, which devours its own enfants terribles and indulges an unseemly envy for their American counterparts, has repeatedly remarked on the over-hype. One editorial enticement peeping above the fold of yesterday's Guardian instructs that Freedom is bad for Barack Obama, whose advanced copy arrived just in time for the First Family's Martha's Vineyard holiday. So now it seems that Franzen has gone from being a mere literary liability to a political one.

Not having read Freedom, I’ve had to rely on the pornographically positive stateside reviews such as Sam Tenenhaus’ in the New York Times which labels it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” I’ll have to take Sam's word for it, but I must confess to a slight twinge of skepticism because he also thinks that Franzen’s previous attempt to explain the Way We Live Now, The Corrections, a book I have read, was “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Among the first-order merits bestowed on the present volume is the author’s hawk-eyed observatory powers despite his touted disdain for being a SIM card’s throw away from an Internet connection when he writes. Franzen knows, for instance, that college freshman are these days called “first years” and that suburban hausfraus’ all-purpose put-down is “weird.” Very nice, but what does he think of Snooki's new gorilla juicehead?

Now comes Marc Tracy at Tablet magazine (my old Hebraic haunt) with applause all around save for one minor quibble. It seems that the Great American Novelist doesn’t have much of an ear for Beltway rhetoric, at least the realistic sort that strives to exceed a Huffington Post comments thread. Featured in Freedom (the title is ironic, or “ironic,” depending on your point of view) is a resentful and brooding neoconservative intellectual who happens not to be a Gentile. The patriarch of a Virginian family coping with the aftermath of a very recent terrorist attack on U.S. soil, this dour Causabon of interventionism has got friends in high places and a comely daughter named Jenna (just like Bush!) and although the whole the whole lot of them are joined at a Thanksgiving repast, the bill of fare seems to be a mezze platter of platitudes:

Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkey-like cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how ‘we’ had been ‘leaning on’ the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for ‘the philosopher’ (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

"White, white" teeth and a Turkey neck -- at Thanksgiving, no less. Well, this man must be wickedness defined if he’s explaining Straussian methods of crowd-control to a tableful of horny eighteen year-olds who’d like nothing better than to return to “normalcy,” perhaps by figuring out why they’ve all been given first names that begin with the letter “J.”

Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of time with many sinister neocons who fancy themselves disciples of a scholar known for his esoteric allusions and in-between-the-lines manner of exegesis. One thing they do not do, even in low company such as mine, is cite Plato’s Cave, a philosophical allegory that any “first year” would grasp. How shall I put this to a masterful American fictionist? It’s considered the “The Second Coming” of political cliches.

However, I do think Franzen has got a noble intention with the cardboard prose and plasticene characterization offered above. If this set-piece is indicative of the entire novel, he is clearly trying to atone for past sins of horn-rimmed hauteur. Gone are the taut little essays about an American middlebrow grown encephalitic with celebrity culture and a superficial knowledge of everything. Not for him anymore the smug litterateur who offers left-handed compliments to Oprah. Franzen’s gone mainstream now, deigning even to appear -- as the successor novelist to Stephen King -- on the cover of Time, a magazine that, as The Onion deliciously satirized it, has Gerberized its content sufficiently to be able to launch a new version of “aimed at adults.”

I think I like this new Jonathan Franzen.

Meanwhile, Bellow’s letters are due out in November.

The sons and daughters of Eire are not generally known for their fondness of Jewish statehood. And yet the exceptions to this ignoble rule are distinguished and vocal enough to merit citation when they occur. Lord David Trimble, who won a Nobel Peace Prize that actually mattered, has written learnedly on the false analogy between the Troubles and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Conor Cruise O'Brien produced one of the best and most prescient histories of Zionism -- prescient in the sense that history, when done right, provides a useful guide to the present and future. His appetite for this strangely un-neglected subject was whetted, he claimed, whilst serving as an Irish delegate to the United Nations for many years. Because of an institutional caprice of seating diplomats in alphabetical order, the Cruiser found much to favor in the Israeli colleague seated to his right, especially when measured against the Iraqi one who was seated to his left -- that is, until the day this poor man was hanged.

I've long been a keen observer of Hibernian sympathies for Zionism because my own heritage is as much Dedalus as it is Bloom. And so now to this esteemed company we can add the name Cliona Campbell, a 19 year-old girl from Cork who was so taken with the Jewish people and their plight that she went to Israel to volunteer with an international corps of the IDF. She returned home, wrote about the experience for the Evening Echo. The unsought reverberations of this article constitute one of the blackest campaigns of national obloquy ever heaped upon a writer in Ireland. According to my friend Ben Cohen, "Grown men have walked to up to [Campbell] in the street and abused her. Browsing in a clothes store, the security guard recognized her and showered her with insults. Threats have been emailed to her." To say that this has been done in the name of Palestinian solidarity would be an insult to Palestinians.

You can dial up Campbell's original piece, which is more elegant than anything written against it, here.

Religious architecture used to yield erudite discussions about function and form. Now it leads to discussions about property rights, the First Amendment, religious bigotry and the colloquial definition of “McCarthyism.” Much like Switzerland’s silly and point-missing ban on minarets, the proposed Cordoba House mosque has turned the specific cultural urgency of combating Islamism into a general cultural complaint about Islam.

This has led to two unintended consequences. The first bolsters one of the paranoid claims made by Islamists, which is that the United States is tirelessly working to demonize and undermine Islam rather than fight a war against its most barbaric exponents. The second automatically improves the profile of Cordoba House’s chief cleric, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who, judging by his dubious statements and deeds over the past decade, deserves no such courtesy. By couching the present debate in terms of “sensitivity,” “symbolism” and “offensiveness,” certain elements on the right have taken up the uncharacteristic mantle of political correctness and, in effect, given a free hand to a subject worthy of more discriminating scrutiny. All I want to do, Rauf has been able to say, with high backing, is build a house of worship in the one country that takes confessional pluralism for granted. What could be more American than that?

For my own part, I have no problem with a mosque being built near Ground Zero and if that’s all that was at stake, I could rest comfortably in my opposition to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Abe Foxman. But I do have a few unresolved questions about this particular mosque; more pointedly, about the man behind it.

Leave aside for now Rauf’s tone-deaf statements on 60 Minutes on September 30, 2001 that American foreign policy was an “accessory” to 9/11 and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA.” Noam Chomsky with a prayer mat may not be an inviting prospect in the heartland, much less a major metropolis, but he is not necessarily an imminent danger. Let’s also ignore for the time being Rauf’s inability to state that Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization. If the good imam feels compelled to hedge his bets on what to term a genocidal, anti-Semitic gang of suicide bombers and rocketeers because he’s afraid of offending Muslims who see Hamas as something nobler, then this makes him no different from those pleading against Cordoba House on strictly emotional or populist grounds.

More troubling to me are two episodes in Rauf’s career that suggest, if not a practical alliance with Islamism, then at least a strong eagerness to earn the trust of Islamists, whether out of financial or face-saving motive. The first is Rauf’s participation in the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, which bills itself as a pacifist lobby group seeking to “criminalize war” but is really the brainchild of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a man whose greatest compliment to the Jewish people was to credit them with a methodology for world domination that he thought instructive for the forthcoming Islamic attempt at same. To get a sense of Perdana’s commitment to ending militarism, consider that it was responsible for convening a portion of the ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla, whose declared purpose was not to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians but rather to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory -- itself an act of war.

The second troubling spot on Rauf’s c.v. is his certification of Iran’s theocracy. Here he cannot excuse himself with an air of scholarly neutrality since in his own writing he takes the precepts of Khomeinism at face value and describes the clerical oligarchy of Iran as a legitimate form of government. Following Iran’s sham presidential “election” in June 2009, Rauf penned the following editorial, which anyone can dial up on Cordoba’s website:
 

After the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took the Shiite concept of the Rightly Guided Imam and created the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, which means the rule of the jurisprudent. This institutionalizes the Islamic rule of law. The Council of Guardians serves to ensure these principles.

Before the election, the Iranian government allowed an unprecedented degree of political discourse so that the election would establish a legitimate ruler.

Now, on the streets of Teheran and undoubtedly in high political circles behind the scenes, Iranians are asking themselves, has this election confirmed the legitimacy of the ruler? President Obama has rightly said that his administration will not interfere with the internal affairs of Iran, unlike what happened in 1953. Now he has an opportunity to have a greater positive impact on Iranian-American relations.

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution -- to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.

Vilayet-i-faqih in practice means that the people of Iran are possessions of the state. The Council of Guardians, Rauf neglects to mention, was responsible for vetting and approving the list of “acceptable” candidates for the wholly honorific role of president, a fact that rubbishes his boast of an “unprecedented degree of political discourse.” You can tell a lot about a government that rigs its own elections beforehand, and rigs them again once all the votes are in.

Rauf published this paean to the captive mind just as many hundreds of peaceful democratic activists were being clubbed and shot on the streets of Tehran. According to the Iranian “rule of law,” torture and rape are also permissible forms of punishment for people who exercise their right to be incensed at a pantomime of self-determination.

But how curious that Rauf, who believes that the U.S. Constitution is compatible with sharia law, should be encouraging the President of the United States to issue a statement “respecting” the guiding principles of an Islamist tyranny.

Is this really the best that moderate Islam can do?

Now here's a fascinating two-part series from the BBC on "useful idiots," a term mistakenly attributed to Lenin, who enjoyed the favor of many such examples of this species of semi-witting accomplices to tyranny. The documentary is hosted by John Sweeney and features a collection of insightful speakers, including Doris Lessing, whose voice reminds me of what the granny-tricked-out wolf in Little Red Riding Hood would sound like, but who, post-Nobel, is fiercely honest and self-critical about her pourparler with Josef Stalin: "I was taken around and shown things as a 'useful idiot'... that's what my role was. I can't understand why I was so gullible."

"I hate being taken round to be shown things," the waspish Kingsley Amis, himself an ex-Communist but one who never toured the Soviet Union, once wrote to Philip Larkin in a slightly different context, giving what I think is a covert virtue of notorious English incuriosity: a reluctance to be persuaded by people with ulterior motives. The evidence of things unseen under totalitarianism is closer to the truth than guided tours of Potemkin villages and labour camps where the guards are dressed up as inmates.

Donald Rayfield, who wrote a not-bad book about Stalin's willing executioners, also makes a not-bad point about George Bernard Shaw, who especially liked being taken round to be shown things that didn't actually exist. About the author of Man and Superman, it cannot quite be said that the sinister politics found no expression in the art. Henry Higgins, Rayfield tells Sweeney, is a "bit of a Stalin," and what he tries to do to Eliza Doolittle is nothing short of what Soviet Communism attempted to do to the proletariat. Many readers of Pygmalion may only have come away wishing that the guttersnipe flower merchant had been shot or sent to Siberia, but such are the softeners of Fabian parlor fiction.... Though it must also be claimed for Shaw, as against socialist realists, that he made no attempt to glorify the working-class even before it became a utopian work-in-progress. No indomitable, brawny builders and austere womenfolk here, comrades. One imagines that a wisp of classic English empiricism slipped out from beneath the bonnet of grim ideology.

Part one of the Sweeney documentary also includes this observation by Malcolm Muggeridge's biographer that when the one-time fellow traveler and aspiring emigre to the Soviet Union realized what a mistake he'd made and then tried to persuade his relatives, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to do the same, the Webbs were resistant. Not, you see, because they hadn't realized that people were being disappeared or murdered in Russia but because disappearing and murdering people in England was what Beatrice most wanted to do herself.

The closet bully, the fetishist of strongman politics is an ongoing feature of faux radicalism on these shores, as evidenced by Tony Benn's sad Sinology:

Benn: "Mao's role in preventing China from being permanently occupied by the Americans was, I think, a significant role, and I think China's development strategy, of going to the countryside and building it up there, has played a significant role of building China up as a major power. So I think he would have to rank as a great figure in Chinese history."

Sweeney: "Mao was a mass murderer. Surely in the balance, if he's a great man, he's also a great monster."

Benn: "I have no doubt that there were aspects of Mao's life and record that I would deeply deplore. But..."

When agricultural outreach ranks higher in your admiration than mass murder does in your reprehension, it's safe to say you aren't all that bothered by the latter.

Benn's not alone. Seamus Milne, the current politics editor of The Guardian, extols the jihadist "resistance" of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped and released by the Taliban, presents on the Iranian state-controlled propaganda organ PressTV. George Galloway, who refused to be interviewed by Sweeney, pimps for Hamas as he has done for every Middle Eastern despot of the last quarter century. And Alistair Crooke, a former British spy under the Blair government who now runs a Beirut-based public relations firm for the Islamic Republic known as Conflicts Forum, explains his sympathies with the rocketeers and human shield-warriors of Gaza like this: "As for terrorism, I hate that word...People cannot tolerate the sight of babies being killed, and that triggers an emotional response."

Not so for those who have seen the future and declare it to already be upon us.

Less than a week on, the brief but fatal skirmish that occurred along the Israel-Lebanon border on August 3 seems that rarest phenomenon of all Middle East disputes: an open-and-shut case. All but the least discriminating of partisans and conspiracists now know who did what to whom and when and how. Most surprising is that the United Nations, in the form of its 12,000-strong peacekeeping Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is to thank for swiftly settling the most contentious questions of whether or not Israel had trespassed onto Lebanese territory: it hadn't. However, there remains the broader matter of how to interpret Lebanon's unprovoked attack on an Israeli maintenance team and its military escort; was premeditated or spontaneous? And if it was premeditated, does that hint at something darker on the horizon?

Here's what we now know with some measure of certainty: On July 29, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) informed the UNIFIL Liaison Officer that it would be performing routine maintenance work at the edge of its own territory, just north of the Misgav Am kibbutz in the upper Galilee. Coordinating such clean-up operations with UNIFIL is a regular occurrence for both Israel and Lebanon as they are bound by the terms of UN Resolution 1701, which formally ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Israel said it had wanted to remove some shrubbery and a tree that were blocking the view of its security cameras. According to IDF Lt Col Avital Leibovich, who addressed a conference call with journalists and bloggers on Wednesday evening, this was exactly the kind of leafy coverage from which Hezbollah launched multiple kidnapping raids in 2006. The IDF further instructed UNIFIL that some of its own troops would be escorting an engineering crew for protection but that this escort, consisting of armored vehicles, tanks and flak-jacketed soldiers, would be positioned even further south of the 'technical fence', the barrier that physically divides Israel and Lebanon but that does not always intersect with the so-called Blue Line designating the internationally recognised boundary between the two countries. There would later be some confusion over an Associated Press photo that showed an IDF crane reaching over the fence; the caption suggested that Israel did in fact cross into Lebanese territory and violate Resolution 1701. But the crew's exact position, even north of the fence, was still about 200-300 meters south of the Blue Line, as has now been confirmed by UNIFIL. (The fence/Blue Line "gap" problem could have been easily substantiated earlier in the news cycle: When I interviewed UNIFIL deputy spokesman Andrew Tenenti on August 4, he told me that the peacekeepers have begun demarcating the real border with blue barrels to prevent any unintentional crossings.)

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Who said this?

Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election. I have told this to U.S. officials ... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land.

That would be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before an exultant crowd a few weeks ago in the city of Konya as a newly decorated defender of regional Islamism. This is the man whom David Cameron was out to please the other day when, in a speech delivered in Ankara, he referred to Gaza as a "prison camp," assailed Israel's raid on the Mavi Marmara as "completely unacceptable," and insisted that despite the aura of hopelessness now clinging to Turkey's agonized bid to join the European Union, it must join it whatever the grumblings from Germany and France. Brutal occupation of Cyprus, subjugation of a Kurdish minority in everything from politics to linguistics, and ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide are evidently Maastricht-compatible initiatives to the new British prime minister, considered even by his support base not to "do" foreign policy so terribly well.

That didn't stop a fellow Conservative, MEP Daniel Hannan, from encouraging Cameron's Obama-like overture to an increasingly hostile and subversive ally: "Cameron's reasons for backing Ankara's bid for EU membership are solidly Tory: Turkey guarded Europe's flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis."

Except that Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them--a fact which ought to have been clear to Cameron in the post-script news coverage to the flotilla crisis. The best look into Turkey's turn toward radicalism has been provided by independent Turkish journalists who have for months been arguing that Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading the country into the asphyxiating embrace of the East. The Islamist "lite" party, which won power in 2002, used to adhere to a policy of "zero problems with the neighbors;" today it prefers one of helping the neighbors cause problems with the West.

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At the heart of Israel's deadly raid of the Mavi Marmara on May 31 is the Turkish charity Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (I.H.H.), the "Free Gaza" flotilla's lead organiser. But the extent to which I.H.H. has been enabled and underwritten by the Turkish government has been increasingly scrutinized by international observers over the past several months and for good reason. In the aftermath of the violent showdown on the high seas, which left nine Turkish passengers dead and a number of Israeli commandos critically injured, Turkey's parliament passed a resolution to "reconsider economic and military relations" with the Jewish state, a decades-long ally. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, returning to Istanbul after an emergency meeting with Hillary Clinton, blamed Israel alone for the confrontation and accused it of committing a "crime against humanity." But the most incendiery rhetoric came from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.

Recent months have seen a weakening of the once assured Israeli-Turkish relationship almost to the point of dissolution and in the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara clash, Erdogan has not only depicted Israel as an anathema, worse than "bullies and pirates," but also full-throatedly endorsed its main clerical enemy in the Levant. "Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land," he told an ecstatic anti-Israel rally a few weeks ago in the Turkish city of Konya. "They have won an election. I have told this to US officials... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land."

Most of Turkey's independent political class see domestic and international calculation behind this bluster, a way for Erdogan to shore up Islamist credibility in advance of an upcoming election and reposition Ankara as a renascent power broker in the Middle East - Iran's chief competiton for that role. One writer for the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet observed that, it's "almost as if [Erodgan] was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party has been loosing over bread and butter issues at home."

But this raises the fundamental question of why a country that is both an ally of the United States and Nato as well as an aspiring member of the European Union would brazenly declare its solidarity with a terrorist group outlawed by both. The answer lies in the increasingly Islamist nature of Erodgan's regime as well as the complicated relationship his party AKP has enjoyed with I.H.H., a suddenly infamous non-governmental organisation that acts more like a governmental one. Its evolution has been from a rogue and highly suspect charity into the advance guard of a new Turkish foreign policy.

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I have a soft spot for Oliver Stone, that Pablo Neruda of the steady-cam. Never has a left-wing filmmaker matched the skill with which Stone's political lessons back-fire on him. Apart from making a Turkish prison look realistically unpleasant, just how failed has his agitprop oeuvre actually been? Let's tabulate:

1. Stone wanted to create the cautionary tale of the Eighties, a glamorous financial thriller about overnight millionaires, steak tartare and limousine sex acts that would snuff Wall Street careers before their Series 7's got going. Instead, he created a primer on self-conscious decadence that's more quoted on the floor of the Exchange than Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Yeats' "The Second Coming." So unsuccessful was Stone at de-romanticizing insider trading that he's made a sequel to Wall Street. Its working title was The Misunderstood Collateralized Mortgage Broker.

2. Stone set out to depict John F. Kennedy as the victim of a hydra-headed government conspiracy that reached all the way to the top (or all the way to the top, as it was probably transcribed in the screenplay). An overlong, inter-spliced masterdud starring Kevin Costner in his first post-apocalyptic role, JFK is probably best remembered today as the template for a cute Seinfeld bit about spitting on Keith Hernandez. And JFK himself? Almost as anticlimactic in history as Barack Obama is in real-time.

3. No easy task to make Richard Nixon look pitiable and sympathetic, but in Stone's less-than-Shakespearean telling, the disgraced president was a paranoid mama's boy who rightly wondered why when he did something naughty, it was wrong, but when a well-coiffed Democrat from Massachusetts did it, it was Camelot.

4. "Daroosh is dead and I am king / Of everywhere and everything." Alexander the Great exaggerated, but as a bi-curious bleach-blonde Oedipal case with an army, he must have also wondered where he found the time to conquer half the known world. The great Macedonian's martial and imperial legacy remains in tact on The History Channel whose DVDs of his exploits are less remaindered than one catastrophic biopic.

I haven't seen Stone's hagiographies of Castro and Chavez (although the latter "documentary" has been ably demolished by Ron Radosh and Antonio Rumbos). But rest assured, now that he's celebrated them on celluloid, their regimes can't be long for this world. Nor is Stone deterred in his Alice-in-Wonderland efforts at counterintelligence filmmaking. Evidently unsatisfied with the creep of ultraconservative patriotic sentiment in the United States, he is subtly trying to foment a Tea Party coup by offering his take on the occluded history of the nation. According to Camilla Long at the Sunday Times:

His next task, the leviathan Secret History of America, tackles received versions of events in the last century, an extension, perhaps, of what he did in 1991’s JFK, when he suggested that the president’s assassination was in fact a high-level conspiracy. The 10-part documentary will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

A cheque to Palin Headquarters would have sufficed.

When Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai last January, and his cause of death later ascribed to foul play, it didn't take long before the British press found itself the beneficiary of a troika of good copy. First, al-Mabhouh's end had been delivered by the injection of a muscle relaxant and a suffocating pillow - so clearly the result of a "wet job" performed by well-trained agents of a foreign intelligence service. Second, that service was almost certainly the Israeli Mossad. Third, the movements of the dozen or so disguised suspects throughout the corridors of the murder scene - Dubai's posh Al Bustan Rotana Hotel - were captured on closed circuit television, which inspires pride and paranoia in equal measure in Londoners who are typically invigilated on this form of technology whenever they venture outside their own homes.

International condemnation of Israel's alleged action came swiftly, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom, especially after it was discovered that twelve of the assassins had used forged British passports to enter and leave Dubai. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the time, "The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care. A British passport is an important part of being British." Brown's foreign secretary David Miliband went a step further on March 23, calling the forgery "intolerable" in an umbrageous speech before parliament. He chose not to blame Israel explicitly for al-Mabhouh's murder, but he did state that Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency had concluded that the country must have been behind the passport forgeries. (Miliband's strongest evidence being the fact that all of the identities counterfeited were of people who hold dual citizenship in the UK and Israel). Milliband then made the decision to expel the Mossad chief resident in London.

More telling than the British government's muscular response was that of the correct-thinking British media, best exemplified by The Guardian. On March 24, the newspaper's editorial on the affair carried the ominous title, "Israel and Britain: The rule of law," and described Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself" -- not just in terms of identity theft, but also land theft. Indeed, it actually devoted more than half of its column to arraigning Israel for rejecting Washington's instructions on settlement build-up in East Jerusalem and refusing to even consider that territory as the site of a future Palestinian capital. If this seemed a non sequitur, then one clearly hadn't grasped a fundamental principle of The Guardian's moral outrage: So incensed was it by an allied nation's covert toying with sensitive British documents that it felt obliged to bring up other instances of Israel's misbehavior in recent months. "Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions," The Guardian editorialized.

So it was quite expected that The Guardian would be similarly categorical when late last month the FBI arrested a 11-person Russian spy-ring in the United States, and federal prosecutors in their brief disclosed that one paid agent of Moscow, Tracey Foley, had also "travelled on a fraudulent British passport prepared for her by the SVR [Russian foreign intelligence service]." No doubt the liberal broadsheet would mention the arrogant abuse of trust that now exists between two former Cold War antagonists and devote the rest of its column inches to reviewing the evidence of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies in general, such as his nationalization of Russian television, his silencing of domestic dissidents through murder, arrest, or army conscription, and his imperialist certification of the north Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as part of the Russian demesne. The KGB's assistance in the "umbrella murder" of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov on the Waterloo Bridge in 1978 may have been a mite old to merit recapitulation, but surely there'd be a passing reference to the polonium poisoning of British citizen and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, which occurred in a Piccadilly sushi joint a mere four years ago?

Such was not the case.

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There is some justice in the fact that the renewed debate over confessed pedophile Roman Polanski, now a free man thanks to a pusillanimous Swiss legal system, should take place at exact the time in which the second bestselling book in the world is a feminist crime thriller trilogy whose main themes are violent misogyny and rape. It was the mere marketing whim of a Swedish publisher that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not titled Men Who Hate Women. And if being a brilliant filmmaker is all that stands in the way of one's responsibility to do hard time for raping a 13 year-old girl, then one wonders afresh at just what a moral and literary absence was created when Stieg Larsson died (or was killed) in 2004. His feminine hero Lisbeth Salander, now in strong competition with an all-male pantheon of super-sleuths ranging from Holmes to Poirot, did not have the benefit of being plied with wine and muscle relaxants before she was sodomized by a much older man in Larsson's debut fiction, a man upon whom she exacts a revenge that Samantha Geimer will likely not be able to exact upon the director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown.

No doubt a sigh of relief has been exhaled from Hollywood to the Left Bank over Polanski's all-clear. (Has Woody Allen been reached for comment yet?) Moral relativism being what it is in the 21st century, crimes are only as umbrageous as a criminal's ability to thank the Academy. Meanwhile, an entire generation of male and female readers are being fed real lessons on human rights and sexual depredations by a dead Scandinavian Trotskyist who never got to cash in on his storytelling talents.

[Note: The news of Christopher's illness reached me just as I was getting ready to publish this essay. I didn't feel it appropriate or necessary to alter what appears below in light of this unfortunate development. One breed of get-well benediction I've seen on the Internet instructs to think of him but not pray for him. That seems about right.]

What follows is not a review of Hitch-22  (see "Two-headed Hitchens" in the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion) or even a biographical sketch of its author, who has been chided in the press for writing a memoir that diminishes autobiography, is short on introspection and catharsis, and seems most at ease when name-dropping or mugging for posterity.  For someone so obviously self-conscious, the consensus runs, Christopher Hitchens is quite parsimonious in giving a piece of himself.  Even from laudatory reviews comes a mild clucking sound: It’s all well and good that you’re chums with Martin, Salman and Ian, but you haven’t really put yourself on the couch or “opened up,” have you? Rather hostile to psychoanalysis for a self-described “orthodox Freudian,” aren’t we?

Not long after Hitch-22's publication, a friend who's quite sympathetic to Christopher and was preparing to interview him on one of the early legs of his book tour rang me up and said that he was having some difficulty taking the full measure of the man from these pages. One of the most widely quoted and dissected public intellectuals on the planet is also one of the most inscrutable. Did I have any special insights as a former student and current friend and colleague? I did my best to oblige and the ensuing conversation led me to record some of my observations.

"One of these days I'm going to be found out" is what James Cameron (the radical journalist, not the overrated filmmaker) evidently repeated to himself every day of his career. The true jigsaw puzzle of the Hitch may never be solved, but herewith I offer my own attempt at reconstruction.

An opposing man.

The phrase “equal opportunity offender” carries with it the implication of indiscriminateness, or curmudgeonliness for its own sake. But this is self-evidently not the case with Christopher who chooses his foils carefully and does not stop assailing them even after he’s risked becoming redundant or worse: boring.  So what motivates his well-known hatred of enemies?  Though he disclaims the nexus of the personal and the political, it does in fact play a minor role for that part of his corpus which has earned him the most celebrity (and notoriety). 

Quite often the target of his invective has not just issued an assault on reason and decency in general but on Christopher in particular, or on those close to him, which amounts to the same thing. Like Nato, he interprets an attack on one to be an attack on all. “Friends are family to me,” he writes and means in Hitch-22. Don’t misunderstand me: he’d have still been very much against the Ayatollah Khomeini without a fatwah on Salman Rushdie, but he would not be as against him without it. How odd that accusations of “Islamophobia” or an atheism so “militant” it can only be seen as the inverse of evangelicalism were conspicuously absent when Christopher was still solidly on the Left and formulating sentences such as this one in 1989: “Yet Islam means surrender. The very word is like the echo of a forehead knocking repeatedly on the floor, while the buttocks are proffered to the empty, unfeeling sky in the most ancient gesture of submission and resignation.”   

For all the noises his liberal critics have made about his supposed rightward drift, it is actually remarkable to consider how intellectually consistent Christopher has been throughout the decades. The tell-tale mark of the ideologue is the code of omerta he adopts when it comes to failings and venalities of his own side.   Yet Christopher has been almost ostentatious in his repudiation of such a modus operandi, skewering Bill Clinton as a cynical triangulator in The Nation and testifying before Congress in the president’s impeachment proceedings, costing him a friendship with Sidney Blumenthal; then obituarizing Ronald Reagan as one of the dimmest and nastiest men ever to hold the presidency well after striking up a friendship with Paul Wolfowitz and many other neoconservatives. (One sometimes detects a note of careerist envy in much of the scorn heaped upon Christopher for his perceived heresies and betrayals: it’s almost as if the crux of the matter was his preternatural ability to still make a living in the aftermath of so many immolated bridges.) 

There’s another obstacle standing in the way of his smooth glide into the precincts of the intellectual Right. Despite his Daniel Deronda-like discovery of his own Jewishness, for which he provides a lengthy genealogical backstory, Christopher has never made his peace with the state of Israel and therefore will always be held in great suspicion by a goodly portion of the Commentary crowd. Many other neoconservatives have welcomed him to the fight while still upbraiding him for how long it took him to bid goodbye to all that. To understand what actuates Christopher’s independent-mindedness, one needs to know something about the radical milieu from which he emerged and still bears all the relevant scar tissue.

The International Socialists, which he joined in the late-1960s, was a Trotskyist group but Trotskyist in a deeply nostalgic fashion, being more the extenuation of a series of now-forgotten but then pivotal arguments that took place thirty years prior when Stalinism not so much an accomplished fact of history but a present danger to it. The so-called Left Opposition, which cohered in the Soviet Union in 1923 upon the publication of Trotsky’s pamphlet The New Course and was later internationalized upon the post-exile follow-up volume The Revolution Betrayed, clearly distinguished the fault-line in post-Leninist Bolshevism as being between, on the one hand, internationalists and those who feared the rise of a self-perpetuating class of Soviet bureaucrats and, on the other, isolationists and those who aspired to belong to such a class.  Trotskyism was most valuable in rooting out the fallacies that undergirded the isolationist-bureaucratist wing of the Party, exposing the Big Lie at the heart of Stalinism and offering an in-house explanation for what powered this Frankenstein system’s internal engine. One might consider Trotskyism in this light a kind of pre-Cold War Kremlinology waged by former Kremlin officials (not by accident did the American brain-trust of the movement, from Max Shachtman to James Burnham to Irving Kristol, later became prominent Cold Warriors).

Although its adherents would never have conceded this point at the time, Trotskyism was fundamentally an intellectual strategy rather than a political one. It won the war of ideas but lost the war for the Central Committee. It drew on vast reserves of pre-revolutionary virtues, with courage and clearheadedness being primary among them. According to Robert Conquest, whose seminal work The Great Terror was not coincidentally assigned reading in the International Socialists:
 

In fact, courage and clearheadedness are admirable in themselves. And if they do not rank high among the moral virtues, we can see in some of the Soviet oppositionists something rather better. It is true that those who did not confess, and were shot secretly, demonstrated not merely a higher courage, but a better sense of values. In them, however touched by the demands of Party and revolutionary loyalty, loyalty to the truth and the idea of a more humane regime prevailed. But even among those who confessed, we can often see the struggle between Party habits and the old impulses to justice which had originally, in many cases at least, been one of the motives for joining the Party.

With the advent of the New Left in the 1960s, Trotskyism was taken up, to varying degrees of seriousness and kitsch, as a banner of permanent opposition rather than permanent revolution. For the soixante-huitard disciples of the International Socialists, it represented a sophisticated and battle-hardened pedigree by which to simultaneously reject the polarities of Washington and Moscow and seek an “alternative” form of democratic socialism.  And if that alternative proved elusive, then at least an enlightened rebelliousness and critical disposition were part of the tool kit, which is why these disciples questioned authority and “broke” with the movement with greater ease than those of other self-styled Trotskyist sects (one thinks of Gerry Healy’s morbid cult in England, which managed to ensnare all the talent of the Redgrave family).

So with such a heterodox training, Christopher could take himself to Havana, see the contradiction between “spontaneous” popular opinion and the Castroite catechism, insult some low-level commissar, and come away thoroughly disenchanted with the Cuban Revolution. He could also glimpse and encourage seedlings of revolt in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, which eventually blossomed into full-scale gardens of resistance led by both a genuine proletariat, as in Poland, and by cultural revivalists with a fondness for Western cinema and rock music, as in Czechoslovakia. 

Yet even the best Trotskyist lens has got a cataract built right into it, which is to say that it often mistakes a tolerance of ethnic minorities and a sloganeered secularism and internationalism for the code signs of a worthy cause. Christopher made a major misjudgment in Mesopotamia in the 1970s, later discovering--and ferociously arguing--that in fact the Ba’ath Party of Iraq led by one Saddam Hussein was closer to an experiment in Arab National Socialism than anything else. He does his best in Hitch-22 to contextualize his early engagement with a latter-day foe as wrongheaded but for the right reasons (again, little has changed: the Kurds were the ethnic minority that looked as if it was going to thrive in Ba’aathist Iraq), citing Keynes‘ maxim that when facts change so should opinions. But Saddamism displayed its core rottenness years before the First Gulf War, which Christopher opposed out of a sense of anti-imperialism: “It had not occurred to me at the time, or not with full awareness, that if Saddam Hussein could have been so crazy as to go for broke, and to steal all of Kuwait when he could have had a lucrative chunk of it for the asking, why then he might be such a deranged megalomaniac that he could no longer discern even his own interests.”

This does count as self-criticism even if a thief is the least likely person to “go for broke” (a rare cliche that must have escaped Martin’s razor at the manuscript level).  But the point of this episode as a political miscalculation is that it was to be a fellow Trotskyist named Kanan Makiya who would persuade Christopher and much of the world of just how fundamentally reactionary Ba’athism was and how psychopathic its generalissimus. Not exactly a defeat for the epigones of Lev Davidovitch and just the sort of historical irony that causes those thistles of unconventional radicalism to cling to one's garb for a spell longer.

Indeed, one of the legacies of Trotskyism is its ability to turn its own temporal defeats into moral victories, a source for much of its romanticization by the intelligentsia, from Arthur Koestler to George Steiner to the Partisan Review masthead, whose reigning Gentile priestess Mary McCarthy gave her own anatomy of the movement’s dogged opposition in her classic essay about the Moscow Show Trials, “My Confession.”   Depending upon which tributary of this Volga of defiance one swam in, an at-odds mentality toward politics and culture was more or less pronounced. It was telling that the person who recruited Christopher to the International Socialists was Peter Sedgwick, later the elegant flame-tender of Victor Serge, the Russo-Belgian anarchist who helped the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917, then win the Russian Civil War against the fascistic Whites, before turning entirely against what he memorably called the “psychosis of absolute power” that soon overtook the new masters of the Kremlin.  Serge devoted the remainder of his life to combating that psychosis in his novels, essays and poems, all of which Christopher has at one point or another consumed and memorialized in print. And although Serge had his own falling out with the Old Man, despite finding the same exile’s respite in Cardenas’ Mexico, he offered the best description I know of Trotsky’s main debilitation as a leader, which also happens to be the foremost recommendation of his ghost to certain stubborn personalities:
 

I do not know if there were any formal deliberations on this subject among the leaders of the Left Opposition, but I do know that the question was discussed (end of 1925, beginning of 1926) and it was then that Trotsky deliberately refused power, out of respect for an unwritten law that forbade any recourse to military mutiny within a Socialist regime; for it was all too likely that power won in this way, even with the noblest intentions, would eventually finish in a military and police dictatorship, which was anti-Socialist by definition… Rarely has it been made more sharply obvious that the end, far from justifying the means, commands it own means, and that for the establishment of a Socialist democracy the old means of armed violence are inappropriate.

Such is the fortitude of the Cassandra, happier in noble defeat than in ignominious victory. Here, I would argue, you have the germ of Christopher’s limitlessly fought campaigns, from the bail-outs of Bosnia and Kosovo to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with his unwillingness to sacrifice certain ethical precepts to them. If prohibitions on warrantless wiretapping, torture and censorship of the media constitute handicaps to the struggle against Al Qaeda and Islamofascism, then these are handicaps that must be borne. 

A final note on Serge. As it happens, those lines about Trotsky are taken from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which I’m sure was one of several hovering archetypes for Christopher’s composition of Hitch-22. It certainly was for Dwight Macdonald when it came time to write his look back in hangdog radicalism. So fired was the great journalist by Serge’s in-between-ist positioning during one of the seismic events of modern history and impressed by his unstinting generosity for former comrades that he wound up titling his own Memoirs of a Revolutionist and only later experienced acute embarrassment at the implied comparison between a New York intellectual with an internationally hounded and imprisoned barricade combatant. Tragedy, as so often happens in Marxist circles, is run through the anxiety of influence and comes out looking like farce. 

Christopher very much resembles Macdonald as a literary journalist and polemicist: ill-at-ease in any “camp,” slyly attuned to his own reputation and the figure he cuts at salons and cocktail parties, and yet absolutely principled and hardheaded in his opinions.  Both men began their political journeys seeking an honorable tradition that they might renovate for application to contemporary crises. Is it mere coincidence that both once idolized an energetic and brilliant cadre of doomed Russians, then, when these gods failed, turned for sustenance to the Founding Fathers of the United States?

Parentage and parenthood.

If Hitch-22 contains a poignant section, then it must be Christopher’s moving portrait of his mother Yvonne, a woman clearly too good for her middle-class station and yet too self-sacrificing to have been born into any other:
 

What she wanted was the metropolis, with cocktail parties and theater trips and smart friends and witty conversations, such as she had once had as a young thing in prewar Liverpool, where she’d lived near Penny Lane and briefly known people like the madly gay Frank Hauser, later director of the Oxford Playhouse, and been introduced by a boyfriend to the work of the handsome Ulster poet Louise MacNeice, a contemporary of Auden and author of Autumn Journal and (her favorite) The Earth Compels. 

What she got was a failed clothing boutique, a domestic economy devoted to sending her children to public school and an austere and joyless husband, Eric Hitchens, known filially as “The Commander” because of his valiant service in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy during World War II.  Her premature decease took the form of a double-suicide with her lover in Athens: it was out of the fatal hotel room, to which Christopher was called to identify her body, that he first glimpsed the Acropolis. He hung around to file dispatches for The New Statesman on the right-wing junta then ruling Greece--either the first stage of grief for a devastated son or the last resort for a foreign correspondent quick to notice that his mother’s coroner had been an accomplice to state-perpetrated political murders.

Yvonne was “the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray” and her imprint was large and lasting, possibly even more so than the author realizes. Where her thwarted aspirations for a life of bohemian chic became reality for others you’ll have found Christopher rhapsodizing about the feminine ideal. He likes his women witty and beguiling (don’t we all) but with an added Wavian flourish that’s a hard trick to master unless one is to the manner born. Reading these reflections on what might have been for an obviously mirthful and curious woman,  I couldn’t help but think that Christopher’s longtime admiration for Jessica Mitford was a mite “overdetermined.” 

“Decca” was an endlessly entertaining English aristocrat with a talent for disappointing filial expectations in the grandest fashion.  A one-time niece-in-law to Churchill, she later married a Jew, moved to the West Coast -- where, unlike Yvonne, she stayed immune to the lures of New Age philosophy -- and penned a wildly satirical look at the American funeral industry, lending a social scientific cast to one of the darker comic themes of Waugh’s The Loved One. Mitford was also a radical through and through. When asked during her naturalization why she was choosing to become a citizen of the United States, an ordeal that Christopher recounts himself undergoing recently with a mixture of patriotic pride and nightmarish bureaucratic wrangling, it was only at the last moment that she declined to say that the Communist Party of the USA wouldn’t allow her membership otherwise. Who says women aren’t funny?

As for the Commander:
 

I had once thought that he’d helped me understand the Tory mentality, all the better to combat and repudiate it. And in that respect he was greatly if accidentally instructive. But over the longer stretch, I have come to realize that he taught me--without ever intending to--what it is to feel disappointed and betrayed by your “own” side. He had a certain idea of England, insular to a degree, and conservative for sure but not always, or not necessarily, reactionary. In this England, patient merit would take precedence over the insolence of office, and people who earned their money would be accorded more respect than people who had merely had it or “made” it. The antiquity and tranquility of the landscape and the coastline would likewise have earned their share of deference: whose who wanted to uproot or to “develop” an area would have to make a case for change rather than be permitted the glib and clever assumption that change was a good thing in itself.

This is a very handsome paragraph and contains a great deal of insight into postwar England, of which there has seldom been a more comprehending or sensitive chronicler. It also lends a great deal of relevance to what I hold as Christopher’s finest literary essay, a muscular and sober defense of Philip Larkin, which he wrote for New Left Review after the great poet, who’d been dead nearly a decade already, was subjected to a torrent of posthumous abuse for the casual bigotry, misogyny and scatological, boyo humor on display in his Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography--all of the vices, in other words, that were least expressed in his creative oeuvre (the title of Christopher’s essay, taken from a letter Larkin wrote to Julian Barnes about his first encounter with Margaret Thatcher, was “Something About the Poems.”).  

So far from being ‘quintessentially English,’ Larkin was a wry and melancholy observer of postwar English anxieties and insecurities. Resentful of how his generation had been made to foot a historic bill that in low moments could seem unworthy of the cost (though he didn’t fight in World War II), wary of the entitlement and decadence that had come to define that generation’s offspring (not that he had any kids himself), Larkin was at least disciplined in his resentment and wariness where it mattered most. His poems were ironic and wistful and in places surprisingly heartfelt. Larkin was the eulogist for a bygone England, one that had been paved over and abandoned to ‘bleak high-risers’, M1 cafes, parking lots and ‘concrete and tyres’. How curmudgeonly could a man be who apostrophized the native rabbit population, which had been cruelly reduced by means of a manmade virus called Myxomatosis: ‘I'm glad I can't explain / Just in what jaws you were to suppurate.’?

Larkin was possessed of an uncommon self-awareness that preempted even the harshest animadversions leveled against him by a smug literary commissariat after he was long gone. To uncover his supposed nastiness--the mental barks and growls--they had to rummage through his correspondence, his diary. Christopher’s plaint was that the poet demanded a proper historical study, not self-righteous condemnation. It fell to the lot of the Left to see Larkin as emblematic of a little-investigated substratum of English sociology. E.P. Thompson gave us the The Making of the English Working Class; The Making of the English Petty Bourgeoisie was still forthcoming. The failure to comprehend the fundamental seriousness behind the Larkinesque generational posture is what ultimately caused that Left to experience cataclysmic shifts -- the Falklands War and the rise of Thatcher -- as bewildering shocks. A true student of Orwell, Christopher was never so cosmopolitan as to miss the idiosyncrasies and discreet charms of his own native land. 

The “and that will be England gone” Tory provincial is perfectly caught in an anecdote Christopher relays about his father, who was once asked by a superior to co-host a party for naval officers that hadn’t been invited to the livelier dos because they were all bores. The Commander’s withering and self-abnegating reply, which nearly brought Christopher to tears, was: “I believe I have already received my invitation, sir.”  Something toad-like squatted in him, too. 

It strikes me as distinctly odd that so many reviewers of Hitch-22 have claimed that this is a memoir devoid of any real feeling or emotional depth. True, there is a near-total absence of Christopher’s wives and children (two and three, respectively), with most of the love sonnets being written for famous contemporaries. As far as the domestic situation goes, what we get instead is a bit of self-reproach from an inattentive or absentee father -- parenthood being the least recommended course of action for a man who takes boredom to be a source of perspiring trepidation.  Why do diapers, soccer matches and ballet recitals when you can dodge nail-bombs in Belfast and read lines of Kipling to Borges in Buenos Aires?  

By his own estimation, Christopher spent the early part of fatherhood waiting around for his children to become interesting. A true Paineite democrat, he opposes all forms of hereditary succession and is leery of “heirs” to anything, including himself. Solidarity, courage and cleverness are earned qualities that subsume mere legacy. However, this imbalance has happily corrected itself, too, over time. A note of authentic pride is registered when Christopher’s son Alexander, who lives in London and is rightly considered here an expert on Islamic extremism, suggests that the two of them embark beyond the pacified confines of the Green Zone and travel to chaotic Baghdad during a pre-surge tour of Iraq. A few weeks ago I saw Christopher engage with Alex on a professional level and only will remark that redemption for absentee fatherhood has taken exactly the right form: Not only are Hitch’s children profoundly interesting to him, but he is to them.

The knight’s move. 

All of Christopher’s criticism proceeds from the premise that there is an occluded irony or paradox to every novelist or poet worth knowing about and that, once excavated, that irony or paradox will not only illuminate the body of work but also help explain why it’s been so strangely misconstrued by everyone else. The process is one of reconciliation between the yin of a writer’s politics with the yang of his creative output. Much as the dire straightjacket of political correctness has fettered this tradition in recent decades, it was actually the Left that most specialized in it. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky noted of the Futurist Marxist poet Vladimir Mayakovsy that he was at his best as a poet exactly where he was at his worst as a Marxist. The Partisan Review gang, which turned this jujitsu style of critical inquiry into a high-minded metier, was famous for making an anti-Semitic royalist like T.S. Eliot both intelligible and relevant to Jewish socialists.  

Notwithstanding his own disdain for the author of “The Waste Land,” Christopher has similarly made a career out of muddling the spectrum and re-evaluating commonplace assumptions that adhere to both sides of it -- a practice he often calls the knight’s move of literary journalism. And it moves in two different directions, from left to right and from right to left. Christopher is as adept at mining a quotient of radicalism out of presumptive reactionaries as he is at exposing progressives for the core parsimony of sentiment or intellect that undergirds their reputations. Thus, P.G. Wodehouse may have been a sexless man-child besotted with the Edwardian idyll but he was also a masterful anatomist of the English class system, champion of the lower orders and underrated lampooner of fascism. Rudyard Kipling was less a jingoistic champion of Empire than its most skilled elegist and curator. Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series was not just a thrilling John Bull adventure tale set to the background of the Napoleonic Wars but also a curtain-raiser on Darwinian scientific modernity. Larkin was, as discussed, transcendent of his stature as the laureate of fish-grey, monkey-brown Blimpery. Meanwhile, Graham Greene was more influenced by the guilt complex of his adopted Catholicism than by the subversive promise of his communism. (Ditto Terry Eagleton.) Mother Teresa was no humanitarian at all, much less a saint, but rather a Balkan banshee of sanctimony and exploiter of Third World poverty. Isaiah Berlin was a charmer and a skilled judge of character but he was also a liberal hypocrite who cozied up to power, facilitated the Vietnam War and did nothing for modern philosophy except dine out on a lifelong misunderstanding of Marxism. 

A third, minor category of knight’s move criticism involves highlighting a justly celebrated literary or historical figure’s debilitations or natural handicaps which he then managed to surmount. The objective here is to unconventionally reaffirm a piece of conventional wisdom. So: George Orwell’s most admirable political triumph being the one over his own innate conservatism; Winston Churchill’s heroic grandeur persists in spite of so much revisionist history which shows him to have been a wartime fraud, an adventurist and an inventor-in-chief of his own trans-Atlantic legend. For all his camp drollery and sexual intrigue, Oscar Wilde was, in principle, a very serious Victorian socialist. 

Depending upon one’s taste, this mode of intellection indicates either a dazzling mind that can only think at 45-degree angles or a fetishist of counterintuition, in which case Christopher's weekly perch at Slate magazine seems foreordained.

Such, such were the joys. 

The current publishing season has seen fit to bestow on us two volumes with Christopher featured as a prominent character. In his most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis has turned his best friend into his alter ego’s foster brother, the reader’s introduction to whom takes the following form: “As a pupil for many years in a British boarding school, Nicholas had naturally had his gay period. But there was a political will in Nicholas now; what politicians, at least, called steel.”  

Christopher has been exceedingly candid over the years about this aspect of his biography, now the cause for much tabloid ink in the British press because it involved his bedding of two of Thatcher’s future (male) staffers. In the memoir, this promiscuous heteroflexibility is treated in a slightly gorgeous fashion: “But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any windows, in the heart of that grey city.”

OK, that’s Brideshead Revisited. Though there is no more striking reference point in these chapters, which take us from The Leys grammar school at Cambridge to Balliol College at Oxford, awash as they are with nostalgia for dreaming spires and ganymede indulgences. One might easily mistake our hero for Charles Ryder were it not for three pronounced differences. The first is that Christopher was just as comfortable being tossed into the clink for antiwar or civil rights agitation as he was being feted at swish dinners by the waistcoated element on campus who found his company charming in spite of his politics. The second is that in his youth he evidently had, then lost, a nervous stammer, the tell-tale Freudian tic worked up into lavish affectation by Anthony Blanche in Waugh’s lush bildungsroman (and it will have been Young Master Hitchens, if anyone at all, declaiming Eliot through a megaphone from a dormitory window). The third is that Christopher has not yet converted to Roman Catholicism at someone else’s deathbed. That contingency is a remote one. 

But there certainly is a welter of “literature” on British public school reminiscences and, whether by accident or design, life has done an admirable job of imitating art here. To begin with, forbidden love first presents itself as a rescuing friendship, with due allowances made for the metaphysical:
 

This duality in the life and mind of The Leys was beautifully captured for me by an incident in my first year. I was cornered in some chilly recreation room by a would-be bully named E.A.M. Smith, a brainless and cruel lad a year or so my senior. This tough and tasty dunce excelled at games and was a member of a highly exclusive Christian crackpot sect named the Glanton Brethren, which in its own disordered mind constituted an elect of god’s anointed. “Hitchens is being gassy,” he said, using the school’s argot for people like me who talked too much. “The cure for being gassy is a bit of a beating.” I wasn’t completely sure that he couldn’t deliver on this threat, and the uncertainty must have shown on my features because suddenly a voice cut in: “Oh, please, don’t give a damn about Smith.” The moron’s grin began to fade and the few who would probably have sided with him lost interest at once. My rescuer was a tall, thin boy with a certain presence to him. Who was this chap, who could make a muscular thug shrivel? His name, it turned out, was Michael Prest. He was in the next “house” to me but was a home boarder because his father was an economics don at Jesus College. I recognized him without knowing his name because every morning in chapel, when the rest of us bent forward at the call to pray, he remained sitting up and unbowed. There was nothing the prefects and teachers could do about this: the law said we had to be in chapel every day but they couldn’t force us to pray on top of that, or even compel us to pretend to do so. I admired this stand without emulating it. Within a few days I had made a new and fast friend and then one morning, as everyone else but Michael crashed lazily forward in their pews, I took a deep breath and held myself upright. It felt very lonely for a moment but soon there was nothing to it. I started bringing books to read during the sermons and the prayers, in order to improve the shining hour. R.H. Tawney on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was, I remember, an early choice.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. You’ll have guessed what happens with Prest from this leading introduction, which neatly touches upon the twin pillars of a notorious education system -- homoeroticism and sadomasochism -- that were previously mapped by two of its most distinguished graduates, Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, also self-conscious referents for the author of the present volume. 

Connolly and Orwell were, in fact, classmates together at St. Cyprian’s in East Sussex and then a year removed from each other at Eton, that easy-bake oven of the upper crust and -- as the British rags also cyclically like to remind us -- alma mater of the current Tory prime minister and the current Tory mayor of London.  Both writers bathed their pedagogical period in great retrospective importance, presenting the privileged circuit of cruelty, repression and corporal punishment as key to understanding Britain’s ruling class--and in some cases, European tyrants.  In his excellent book on Orwell, Christopher credits the author of 1984 with drawing from these formative experiences all of the relevant insights one would need to know about a totalitarian country without ever having traveled to one. (What price an audience with Stalin’s Red Court when one could be daily terrorized by Mrs. Wilkes, the Headmaster’s wife at St. Cyprian’s?)  For Connolly, the lasting effects of a public school education were couched as adult sensitivities and maladjustments. In his autobiography, Enemies of Promise, he observes:  “Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.” 

Cowardice and sentimentality never had a fighting chance with Christopher, the homosexuality was fleeting, and only the world-play and dirty limerick invention with Martin -- much reconstituted in this memoir and derided as sophomoric by mainly female critics -- rank in terms of any lingering symptoms of arrested development.  But “bawdy,” as it was loftily known to the genius syndicate of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest, is harder than it looks and requires some technical and linguistic versatility. For example,
 

When Gaugin was visiting Figi
He remarked, ‘Things are different here, e.g.,
While Tahitian skin calls for tan spread on thin,
You can splotch it on here with a squeegee.’

Or: 
 

There was a lockmaker of Lyme,
Whose balls had a very sweet chime,
And when he set his cock
For seven o’clock,
It always got up dead on time.

If this be the verse, then in some sense every major English poet of the last century was a permanent adolescent. (The person responsible for the above selections helped bring down the humorless Soviet Union.)  Auden, who exhibited all of the symptoms of Connolly's diagnosed condition, favorably reviewed Enemies of Promise for The New Republic when it appeared in 1938, and it’s perhaps worth noting that his reliquary of doggerel wound up in the hands of Tom Driberg, another public schoolboy and legendary queen whom Christopher once put in touch with Kingsley, then editing the Oxford English Book of Light Verse and in need of good material. The meeting that resulted  -- which included the company of Christopher and Martin -- is somewhat addressed in Hitch-22 but more hilariously recounted in Kingsley’s own famously unreliable Memoirs. At all events, the following contribution from the author of “Lay your sleeping head, my love” did  not make the cut for the consequent anthology, although it no doubt proved useful to Christopher whilst touring Baghdad in the 70‘s with an especially camp gay minder for the Ba’ath Party:
 

The Anglican dean of Hong Kong
Had a prick that was nine inches long;
He thought that the waiters
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the loo.
He was wrong.

There is a slightly performative aspect to Christopher’s recollections of sexual subversiveness, almost as if the permanent adolescent can only be judged in hindsight to have been parent to the political animal that later developed. The ensuing affair with Prest, for instance, is more redolent of platonic camaraderie --Christopher’s first male crush stood up for him, then stood with him on public platforms -- than it is of scandalized experimentation. A later same-sex affair resulted in his temporary suspension from The Leys, though this is told matter-of-factly. The madeleine effect Christopher seems to be aiming for here is the enormous titillation of posterity: “If you are going to sleep with Thatcher’s future ministers and toy with a future president’s lesbian girlfriend, in other words, you will not be able to savor it fully at the time and will have to content yourself with recollecting it in some kind of tranquility.” 

I intend no disrespect when I say that the true object of Christopher’s affection, and the wellspring of his nostalgia, is the surplus value of experience. His favorite Jamesian admonition is, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” which he’d be the first to tell you contains oceans of recondite self-denial coming from the virginal author of The Ambassadors. One never can know what ordeal or dust-up or test-drive might later prove useful for a Washington cocktail party or Hay-on-Wye Festival. Or, for that matter, the learned literary essay. Stolen handjobs on the quadrangles may not be the necessary preconditions for writing knowingly about Proust, Wilde, Saki, Auden, Waugh, Maugham and Vidal, but for the Hitch, they seemed to have done the trick. 

Another well-exercised and borrowed mantra is, “Try everything once except incest and Scottish dancing.” That which cannot be intuited or theorized must be discovered at first-hand, so to speak. Even as a Marxist hung up on “teleological hubris,” Christopher held old-fashioned English empiricism and go-see-for-yourself-ism in high forensic esteem; as a journalist he’d have been ill-served without it. It also explains why he boasts of having been the only foreign correspondent to travel to all three Axis of Evil countries and of having been waterboarded for the lurid enjoyment of Vanity Fair’s readership. The epigram that adorns Hitch-22 -- Caute, or “cautiously,” taken from Spinoza’s signet ring -- is therefore the most disingenuous word in the book. Christopher has never done anything cautiously.

The double agent.

Connolly’s analysis was published, and the raw data for it compiled, decades before Britain’s postwar reforms opened the public school system and Oxbridge academy to increasing numbers of middle-class students. What became known as the scholarship-or-nothing fork in the education system was part of a general cultural upheaval in the Fifties (whose attendant lowering of academic standards was well-satirized in Lucky Jim) and reached vertiginous degrees with the onset of “The Sixties.” So how might Connolly’s theory be updated to take into account these demographic changes?

What would be the definitional imprint of the bright young thing with radical leanings who is admitted into this idyll of depravity and elitism but never allowed to forget the fact that he doesn't truly belong there?  Well, he’ll have had the unnatural advantage of seeing future statesmen, captains of industry and cultural celebrities in their larval stages of brilliance or absurdity, making him accustomed to the various “types” that he'll encounter when it comes time to assess who’s running the country.  His own tincture of privilege will have instilled a confidence in him uncommon to the Left-wing defender of the underdog, whose outsider status can breed anxiety or insecurity that often transforms into a full-blown personality disorder. Such a person, in other words, may very well feel like a bit of a traitor or double agent to his own life, a sensibility that Christopher clearly discerns in himself and that furnishes both the title and leitmotif of Hitch-22.  

“The most intense wars are civil wars,” he writes, “just as the most vivid and rending personal conflicts are internal ones, and what I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.”  This penchant for having it both ways, or keeping two sets of accounts, may seem a pose to Christopher’s more literal-minded and humorless detractors, but I assure you it is not. He persists in the belief -- very English and very Oxbridge -- that a debate has not been won until the opposing view has been stated at its highest. The most generous compliment he can pay to Koestler is to indicate how Darkness at Noon actually turned some people into Communists for precisely this reason.

But double book-keeping can sometimes prove exhausting, both for the accountant as well as the customer. A few summers ago, I heard Christopher argue vigorously in favor of the execution of Saddam Hussein. He stated his case methodically and as not being in direct contravention of his opposition to capital punishment but rather a continuation of the Iraq war policy. The Republic of Fear would never even begin to recover psychologically until its architect was destroyed, putting his victims in no doubt as to his possible return. But what of the Kurdish position against Saddam’s murder founded on socialist principle and opposed to petty revenge-taking or political expediency? Or your hero Jefferson’s opposition to the beheading of Marie Antoinette? Admirable but not persuasive in light of how dire post-Saddam Iraq had shown itself to be; not least of what was demanded (and this was before the “surge”) was a symbolic severance with totalitarian past. The fitting historic analogy was with the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family at Ekaterinberg, which the Bolsheviks knew in the midst of the Russian Civil War would mark the point of no return for the October Revolution.  He argued all this as though completely committed to it in principle. Then, a month or so later, there appeared in Slate his piece... against the execution of Saddam for the very reasons he’d found wanting earlier.  He’d weighed both sides of the matter equally before arriving at the more morally satisfying. Whatever this is, it is not the style of a pot-shot polemicist.