interview | Remembering Christopher Hitchens
Iraq
photo: Staff
forehand, the invasion of Iraq allowed the very Islamist groups that Hitchens so despised to gain a stronghold in that country, seeping in from neighboring Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. As a result, life was made catastrophically worse, albeit temporarily, for Iraqis: according to journalist Chris Pepus, an “Iraqi was 3.6 times more likely to die in 2006 [than in the previous decade]– and the cause of death was 120 times more likely to be violence.” 98
EMPIRICAL | JUNE 2013
Sgt. Jason T. Bailey, U.S. Air Force
In his highly respected book on radical Islam, “Al Qaeda”, investigative journalist and terrorism expert Jason Burke concludes that support for Islamist militants increased massively in the aftermath of Clinton’s 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (an act that may have destroyed scores of thousands of lives) and further skyrocketed during the recent Bush era. Many in the affected region who previously shared no sympathy with,
or even disliked, radical Jihadi movements were mobilized to support them in their role as perceived defenders of Islam against hostile western aggression. This status was often enhanced by the way that Islamist groups offered various kinds of relief to traumatized communities, by contrast to the western governments which had- as all Arabs remember even if we don’t–pursued its own self-serving agendas in the Muslim world over the last few centuries, with disastrous effects. “A first line of defence” therefore, Burke reflectively writes, “is to understand and act on the root causes of terrorism to reduce drastically the receptivity of potential recruits to the message and methods of terror-sponsoring organizations, mostly through political, economic, and social programs…The basis of community support for organizations that sponsor terrorism needs to be the prime longterm focus of US foreign policymakers and others who are interested in combating the threat such organizations pose.” Hitchens and his new co-thinkers expressed contempt for such arguments, despite their cogency. Those who con-
demned Islamist crimes, but nonetheless proffered such considered views, were labeled as apologists and capitulators, or worse. But the arguments remain legitimate, as does the necessity to approach complex foreign policy issues with a determination to adhere to wisdom in seeking noble ends, not creating hell in the name of ideologicallyrooted intransigence. The above is an all-too-brief treatment of a man who, like his politics, resists easy categorization. Human beings are messy creatures, and gifted intellectuals of the caliber of Hitchens are often even more so. No-one can sum-up a life in a couple of paragraphs, nor even a whole dedicated library. I have only touched on some of his recorded opinions and late proclivities and, due to the confinements of wordcount, have been unable to fully express my qualified appreciation of this much-missed, inimitable and fascinatingly multi-faceted public figure. The criticisms above, are leveled with a deep respect for the things that Hitchens, in my view, “got right”- balanced against the need to take engage honestly with the faults of a too-idolized public intellectual. JUNE 2013 | EMPIRICAL
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