[| I, CWAS |]

I know the hard left has considered him a traitor. but I must admit he didn'nt pull a d.h. or dennis miller. Christopher hitchens actually talks with sense so far. Although I will always side with chomsky in thier logomachy, Hitch is what the intellectual Left needs. When you look at his support for the war, i can agree with him, in a sense that now Iraq can Have a leftist movement openly. And I dare say, we need to impose democracy somewhere in the middle east. That is why i support france banning religious symbols in schools, the majority of muslims that flee to europe fail to assimlate, and they corrupt the secularism of europe. Look at america where muslims overwhelmingly vote republican because of opposition to gay rights etc.

The following is an interview with Christopher Hitchens following his appearance at a symposium on the war in Iraq at New School University in New York City, concerning his support of the war and the rift it has caused between himself and the left.

Hitchens is the author of several books, including "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," "Letters To a Young Contrarian" and "Why Orwell Matters." His writings appear in Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, Slate and the Washington Post.

In 2002, following a highly publicized guerre de plume with author Noam Chomsky over American culpability for the Sept. 11 attacks, Hitchens left the weekly liberal magazine The Nation, where his bi-weekly column the "Minority Report" had appeared since 1982.

This and Hitchens' subsequent support for the Iraq war have made him a virtual pariah among the left for whom only a few years before, he was a leading spokesman.

In recent months, Hitchens has defended his views on Iraq in a series of debates with New Yorker staff writer Mark Danner, himself an opponent of the war, of which Friday's was the latest.


Whitney: I wanted to ask you about your so-called apostasy from the left and, as a part of that, your motivations for supporting the war in Iraq. Do you have any qualms about allying yourself with Bush as a result of that?

Hitchens: The president, or some of his advisers, are right on the main point, which is "if you try and change our regime, we'll change yours. We can do it and you can't, and your people will be better off and ours wouldn't have been." This is a no-brainer to me. I believed that before Bush did, as a matter-of-fact. Bush ran against Gore, against nation-building and for isolationism, for point-of-fact. I welcome Mr. Bush's adherence, really. But for the left, so-called, if they had been listened to in their majority, Bosnia would be part of greater Serbia, Kosovo would be a wilderness with ethnic cleansing, the Taliban would still be in charge of Afghanistan, Iraq would still be the private property of Saddam Hussein's family. This is a record not to be proud of. It's a very conservative record; it's a reactionary record. And they would take that as fine, by the way, as long as it was a status quo that denied credit to George Bush.

Whitney: So you would consider then supporting the war in Iraq a properly leftist position?

Hitchens: Yes, I think it's the only one. The leftist position is that co-existence with totalitarian dictatorship is undesirable and impossible. That's the principle position. That is, or should be the left position. It used to be.

Whitney: I know that you said following the Sept. 11 attacks that you realized you were very excited because it was going to be "a war of everything you loved against everything you hated."

Hitchens: Yes, more or less that's it. That's exactly what I said. I'll tell you what are the things I like and what are the things I hate if you like.

Whitney: I'd be very curious to hear but...

Hitchens: You could guess I bet.

Whitney: I'm sure I could. Earlier in your life you were much more radically leftist, I guess you could call it, being involved with the Trotskyist elements at Oxford. Do you feel that in any way you've moved away from that? Is your current position on the war in Iraq a part of that, or would you say you've revised your earlier views?

Hitchens: Well, you know I was actually a strong critic of the [1991] war in Iraq, and I got a quite good criticism in print of my position from Kanan Makiya, who I mentioned this evening, who wrote the Republic of Fear, who actually wrote a very generous and fair-minded attack on me, urging me to kind of reconsider. And he, among other people, did change my mind. But Kanan was, and is, the most important Trotskyist in the Middle East. He's a credit to the left opposition.

Whitney: Where did that appear in?

Hitchens: That's in his book "Cruelty and Silence," which is a wonderful book. His books on Iraq are the best Marxist analysis of the Ba'ath Party and its system, and of American foreign policy, that have been published. And this is from a guy who I knew only because he had been a very leading Trotskyist, left-opposition Marxist for a long time; a very brilliant one, too. So, you know, the other day you could see it on the TV and in the papers, though the captions were often very misleading. When Saddam Hussein was arrested there were these huge demonstrations in Baghdad of enthusiasm, with red flags and slogans... This was the Iraqi communist and labor movement saying, "To hell with fascism, workers of the world unite against terrorism." Now that works for me. The American left, you would think they didn't give a sh-- what happened to their comrades in Iraq as long as George Bush didn't benefit from it. This is parochial, petty, provincial thinking. You see it all over the place.

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