Those who respect Christopher Hitchens need not be ‘neo-cons’

I was once the prisoner of a tiresome online exchange on Lebanese politics in which my interlocutor, to score a point, suggested I was a neo-conservative. I dismissed the allegation, only to have the writer reply that I was indeed a neo-con, because I had approved of Christopher Hitchens’s movement from political left to right on the Middle East.

Mr Hitchens has just published a memoir, titled Hitch-22, which, among many other things, explains why the author broke with many of his comrades on the left in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. In retrospect, however, I regret having written that Mr Hitchens shifted from left to right, for he has always regarded his political stands as reaffirming the fundamental values of the left, which many on the left have abandoned. So, to apply Mr Hitchens as a yardstick for neo-conservatism is to misinterpret his trajectory entirely, and to betray a misunderstanding of what the left itself stands for.

In his book, Mr Hitchens describes his disillusionment with the American left after the mass murders in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Caught between their dislike of George W Bush, their anti-capitalism, and a tendency to blame America for all that is wrong in the world, the left remained painfully ambiguous toward crimes that, Mr Hitchens believed, demanded precisely the contrary reaction. “What an opportunity for the Left to miss, there” Mr Hitchens writes, “and what an overbred and gutless Left it had proved to be”.

Mr Hitchens’ disgust with the left’s hand-wringing was matched by his antipathy for paladins of the right as well – particularly of the religious right – who interpreted the atrocities as retribution for American sexual promiscuity. Mr Hitchens writes scathingly of the “Reverends”, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell: “Here was an unexampled case of seeing all one’s worst enemies in plain view: the clerical freaks and bigots of all persuasions and the old Charles Lindberg isolationist Right, the latter sometimes masquerading as a corny and folksy version of a Grassy Knoll conspiracist ‘Left’”.

That overburdened passage yet contains a vital expression of Mr Hitchens’s sensibilities. The image of seeing one’s enemies in plain view is borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen, in a passage where the main character, Guy Crouchback, learns of the Soviet-German alliance of 1939, the momentary partnership between Europe’s two major totalitarianisms: “[A] decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason … the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms.”

It is clarity of purpose, the pleasure in realising who the enemy really is, that has defined Mr Hitchens's approach to politics. Last year he spoke at the American University of Beirut, his talk titled “Who are the revolutionaries in today’s Middle East?” The answer, in short, was that they were those who stood against the region’s autocrats. Revolution and radicalism are powerful words in Mr Hitchens’s lexicon, words of the left incidentally, and they were not diminished at all when most members of the audience loudly condemned him for having supported America’s war in Iraq. However, in their fixation on America, when Mr Hitchens sought to draw attention to regional agents of change, they implicitly condoned stalemate.

While Mr Hitchens welcomed Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, he never did so from the standpoint of the neo-cons, for whom the Iraqi conflict served above all to affirm American military power and dominance. Mr Hitchens’s internationalist solidarities, his sympathy for the Kurds, but also his anti-Stalinism and lucidity as to the malevolence of Middle Eastern dictators all contributed to his alignment with the Bush administration, without ever swallowing its menu whole.

Those of us who supported the war can easily commiserate. Endorsing the removal of a genocidal thug in Baghdad did not make us neo-cons. Among the more prominent foes of the Baath regime in 2003 were men and women of the left, both Arabs and Westerners. They knew the American right, like the American left, could make no intellectual or historical claim to defending democracy and human rights in the Middle East. But they also saw that Washington was willing to rid the world of a foul organism indeed, their own cherished desire, therefore they saw no good reason to oppose Saddam Hussein’s ouster simply because America was the instrument.

The journey of the left has been a thorny one in the Arab world. By allowing hostility toward Israel and America to shape their outlook, rather than the pursuit of programmes for national amelioration or revival, many on the left have come to support groups whose ideology is antithetical to everything that they themselves stand for, or should. In much of the Arab world a majority of old-line Arab nationalists, communists, and Baathists (alongside an alarming number of westernised liberals) have come to embrace groups such as Hizbollah and Hamas, whose reliance on the perpetuation of violence, anti-secularism, and contempt for the values of the Enlightenment draw much from the principles and idiom of the extreme right.

The Arab left has decades of post-colonial failure as its balance sheet, ceding to Islamists the role of spokespersons for their anti-Americanism and commitment to the Palestinians. The western left, particularly in the anti-globalisation movement, has largely followed suit, helping sustain the Middle East’s most intolerant forces. Applaud Mr Hitchens for insisting that this is not the natural place of the left, at least one that is liberal and humanistic. But you might be branded a neo-con if you do.