Newly published Christopher Hitchens interview on Iraq, the Left, and the Islamic Caliphate

In 2005, I interviewed the controversial journalist and polemicist about his turn to neoconservatism after 9/11.

Do you believe the left in Britain and America have abandoned their natural allies in Iraq?

Well, I believe that your question answers itself. Wherever I go and whatever platform on which I speak, I attempt to make two points. First, that the intervention in Iraq is opposed by conservative forces all over the world, and not just Muslim conservatives but reactionary isolationists in America, Haider-type parties in Western Europe, xenophobes and chauvinists in Russia, Greece and Serbia, and of course by all the fascist and anti-Jewish fringe. I mention this not in order to suggest guilt by association but to challenge the lazy Left/Right antithesis that is so commonplace.

I then point out that one place in the world where the Left definitely DOES support regime-change is in Iraq itself. Jalal Talabani’s PUK is the corresponding member of the Socialist International, the Communist Party may have formally opposed the war but hailed the liberation and takes part in the political and even the governmental process, and Kanan Makiya is the foremost dissident intellectual to expose the nature of Ba’athism. This means that Social Democrats, Communists and Trotskyists all have brothers and sisters fighting in Iraq against former-regime elements and their jihadist allies.

Yet one would never know this. And I have never, ever, even once had anyone take me up on the point. (Actually, that’s not quite true. Tariq Ali once responded that the Iraqi CP had been wrong before, in its tactical alliance with Ba’athism in the 1970s, in which I quite agree that he is pedantically correct. And Alexander Cockburn in The Nation predicted a “resistance” to the Coalition just after the fall of Saddam, saying that this resistance would be led by the Iraqi Communists. He seems now to have settled for a fascist resistance as being better than none at all!).

In general, I interpret this silence as very sordid. It is a repression of useful knowledge and principle, in order that the wider “project” of a global anti-American alliance may go forward without any scruple as to aims or allies. When I am with Iraqis and Kurds I can be quite cheerful as we discuss our own leftist evolutions and records, because this is very common among them and I feel myself among friends. When I am among what now passes for the left in Britain and the USA, I feel an urgent need to move away and seek better company, which I am glad to say I have found.

But how much hard knowledge is there about the make-up of the resistance in Iraq?

First, it was well known in advance that the Iraqi Left – broadly defined as the periphery of the Communist Party, certain prominent secular intellectuals, the majority of the old Kurdish resistance – was either positively in favor of an intervention or strongly opposed to the continuation of the Saddam regime. So, to that extent, one had the necessary assurances.

Second – a point I make at greater length in my essay in the collection “A Matter of Principle” – the case against the Saddam regime was or was not, in terms of international law, essentially complete. This would have held true if all conditions about WMD and Al Quaeda had been demonstrated to everyone’s complete satisfaction, and would have held true even if the results of Saddam’s 100% referendum had in fact been genuine. In the case that the resolutions of the UN are deemed essential to hold and enforce, the subjective opinions of the inhabitants of Iraq become – at least in the terms of those who value UN resolutions – as irrelevant as the mass support enjoyed by “Hutu Power” in Rwanda, or Serbian “national socialism” under Milosevic. It was very fortunate that we knew in advance that a probable majority of Iraq would for their own reasons welcome Saddam’s removal as a deliverance, but that could not of itself constitute a casus belli. One must be able to distinguish between what is done for Iraq’s sake, and what is done for the sake of the international community.

Third, the performance of the local Left cannot, alas, be the decisive measure in a time of international nihilism and rogue WMD. Most of the Iranian left made the historic mistake of thinking that Khomeini’s revolution would benefit them, and they are not the only ones who paid with their lives and freedoms for this appalling miscalculation. Nor are they the only ones to be listened to, in an epoch where the “internal affairs” of states are the concern of all.

These three points are not quite congruent with each other, but I think they make a solid case, taken together, for any Iraqi or Kurdish or international “leftist” to have supported the removal of Saddam Hussein as a matter of principle as well as of self-interest.

I went to the anti-war demonstration in London a few days ago. There were some banners that said, “Calling for the Caliphate is not a crime”.

“Calling for the Caliphate” is not a crime in itself, but anyone making the call is giving a warning that he or she is prepared to use any measures to coerce non-believers and apostates into becoming subjects not just of a new imperialism but an old one. We can be indifferent to this if we choose, or we can choose to think of it as one among many multicultural chords being struck in the gorgeous symphony of pluralism. I do not choose to regard it in either light, and I too can be “offended” by aggression being boasted of, and planned, in plain sight, against secular democracy.

The incompatibility of this imperialism with any project remotely recognisable as “Left” should be very plain. First, the proposed empire would be governed by an extreme form of shari’a, which would enslave women, stultify scientific inquiry and forbid most forms of art, literature and music. Second, this empire would – to the extent that it could be achieved – result in failure, famine, poverty, ignorance and superstition. It is certain in advance that it would not employ the methods of self-criticism to explain this failure, but would seek to lay the blame on Jews, Crusaders, apostates and other ills. It would thus, in both senses of the term, “mean” war. (And Jews and Christians enjoy a certain indulgence from the pages of the Koran itself, while Hindus and other non-monotheists, together with Shi’a, are regarded as beneath all contempt or respect. The war, therefore, would not be between East and West or North and South, but would be most savage in former colonial dependencies like India and Malaysia, or former Soviet colonies in the Caucasus)

“Restoration” is in any event a fantasy: the most reactionary appeal currently on offer. The doomed effort to accomplish it will be almost as horrible and disastrous as its actual success would be. Coexistence with its advocates is neither possible nor desirable. We can be grateful, however, that they have explained their intentions in advance. And we should do the same, by announcing that we will bar the road to fascism and obscurantism by any means necessary.