So what's got him so riled up? The source of pure venom in the article — indeed, of his media blitz against Moore since 2002 — seems to stem from a confrontation in late 2002 at the Telluride Film Festival. Hitchens refers to the clash at every chance, his "smoking gun" of Moore's hypocrisy. From his account, Moore continually went after easy applause, shouting "mission not accomplished" when discussing Osama bin Laden's getaway and playing the "real American" card by insisting he was "innocent until proven guilty." Hitchens was so bold as to bring a tape of this debate with him to Joe Scarborough's MSNBC program "Scarborough Country" on June 30, and a transcript of the exchange follows:

Moore: It seems as if he and his group were the ones who did this, then they should be tracked down, captured and brought to justice.

Hitchens: Do you mind if I break in and say …

Moore: Yes.

Hitchens: … ask you, what is the "if" doing in that last sentence?

Moore: What is the who?

Hitchens: What is the "if" doing in that last sentence of yours?

Moore: Well, all people are innocent until proven guilty in this country.

Hitchens: So you have no …

(applause, crosstalk)

Moore: Even the worst piece of scum.

Hitchens: I feel I have to press you on that. You regard it as an open question, the responsibility of Osama bin Laden?

Moore: Until anyone is convicted of any crime, no matter how horrific the crime, they are innocent until proven guilty. And as Americans …

(crosstalk)

Hitchens: No, that's all I asked you.

Moore: Never leave that position.

Hitchens: I'm sorry. So bin Laden's claims of responsibility strike you as the ravings of a clowns, say?

(laughter)

Hitchens: OK. Fine.

(end video clip)

Hitchens: That's why I looked to see if I still had the tape, because I thought, now, a guy who was 100 percent opposed to the war in Afghanistan at the time — that's Michael Moore — he thought it was a war for oil, a war for pipelines, an unjust war — why is he suddenly saying he is against the Iraq war because it's the distraction from the hunt for Osama bin Laden? You follow my point here?

Scarborough: Of course.

Hitchens: Why does someone who thought that Osama was innocent and Afghanistan was no problem suddenly switch in this way? Because unless he says that he was dead wrong all along and Osama bin Laden was innocent and wronged, he can't say that everything else is a distraction from the hunt for Osama. So it's bait and switch. It's the work of a moral cretin and a political idiot.

Hitchens actually performs some Clintonian semantic gymnastics here. Moore's "if" is not intending "I think Osama is innocent and the Afghan war is unjustified;" he's trying to make an argument for American due process: "If he and his group were the ones who did this, then they should be tracked down, captured and brought to justice." Admittedly, Moore's choice of words is very awkward and possibly inappropriate given the topic, but notice the ease by which Hitchens extrapolates this verbal misstep into personal insults. In a recent interview on CNN, Moore makes his point much more clearly:

Because if you have a suspect and the suspect gets away, the police — or our military — have a right to go after and get that suspect. In fact, they should go get the suspect. And Richard Clarke's point, and my point is, is that they make a half-hearted effort. They kept our Special Forces from going in the part of Afghanistan where bin Laden was. They kept the Special Forces out of there for two months. They only sent 11,000 troops. As Richard Clarke said, there's more police here in Manhattan than the number of soldiers we sent in to get Osama bin Laden. So for all their talk about wanting to get bin Laden, they made a half-hearted attempt to do it, because they didn't want to divert resources from what their main goal was, which was to go in and invade Iraq.

Passions are obviously running high in this battle, which clouds the judgment of the combatants, and in these situations it's usually wise to bet on the more cerebral brawler. Hitchens may not have total control over his Moore bashing, but it's entirely understandable that an intellectual journalist such as he would view a film that digitally inserts the faces of the Bush administration onto the characters in the "Bonanza" credits with a bit of skepticism. More to the point, though Hitchens' remarks about Fahrenheit 9/11 blister to the point of being downright bullying ("Any time, Michael my boy"), he does make some rather salient observations about Moore's politics, and those who have dumped more than $100 million into this movie's box office would do well to take heed. At the same time, the crux of Moore's argument in Fahrenheit 9/11 catches Hitchens right in the blind spot of his support for the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

What does Hitchens have to say about Fahrenheit 9/11? After opening by restating his break from the left, Hitchens sums up Moore's movie thusly:

1) The bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group. 2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States. 3) The Unocal company in Texas [which Hitch apparently doesn't know is based in California] had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests. 4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and Al Qaeda members to escape. 5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American. 6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

To Hitchens, "it must be evident to anyone … that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point." Except that this isn't all of Moore's argument, which does cohere on the central point that Bush administration has botched the post-Sept. 11, 2001, war operations.

Hitchens notes the "rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions," and then launches into his own rapid-fire volley of either/or fallacies: "Either the Saudis run US policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not." and "Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all — the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002 — or we sent too few."

Does Hitchens, by leading his reader with his "evident to anyone" qualification, really expect us to accept these simplistic choices? Moore, however — never a champion of restraint — takes the argument to just short of accusations of treason. Both miss the point: What the many journalists who have investigated the Bush/Saudi ties are suggesting is that the Bush family's relationship with the oil industry vastly complicates American policy because of the public interests, private interests and personal relationships that are at stake. Hitchens then lambastes Moore on all the great things happening in Afghanistan right now: "an emerging Afghan army," "joint NATO responsibility," a new constitution, "preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election," "at least a million and a half of its former refugees [opting] to return," "a highway from Kabul to Kandahar … nearing completion;" Hitchens even seems to promote the idea of the Afghan pipeline.

The problem is that Hitchens' upbeat scenario is overblown itself. The Washington Post reports that NATO support is in jeopardy (calling it a "myth") and that the elections may have to be delayed. And what of the weak leadership of the Unocal-connected Hamid Karzai, the Bush administration's choice for president of Afghanistan, often called "the mayor of Kabul" because of his lack of provincial control? Or the United States' so-far failed mission to transition the Afghan economy to something other than poppy-based drug-peddling? Or initiating Pakistan into the "non-NATO ally club," with nary a word about President Pervez Musharraf's "hasty pardon" of nuclear black-marketeer AQ Khan, whom former UN weapons inspector Robert Gallucci called "'the Johnny Appleseed' of the nuclear arms race"?

Criticism of the war in Afghanistan is not an argument against going to war there. Hitchens, though, doesn't seem to appreciate the distinction, and instead paints a rose-tinted picture of Afghanistan to make Moore look like a fool. And any reference to the Bush-Saudi-Halliburton-etc. ties are part of Moore's "big lie and big misrepresentation [that] can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims." Hitchens effortlessly obliterates Moore's hyperbole, and in doing so, absolves himself of answering the larger questions about Bush's war in Afghanistan.

To Moore's discredit, the director serves up so much "hmmm?"-tenored conjecture and innuendo that his smart-alecky voice doesn't fit the gravity of his accusations — and Moore's charges are so clearly meant to topple the president that his own credibility is at a premium.

This is the gaping wound he simply can't stitch up, and Hitchens is the sort of pen-toting pugilist that will pound on it until someone stops the fight. Heck, even Roger Ebert posted a partial retraction of his positive review of Bowling for Columbine, and has since said that he's "troubled" by Moore's fudging of facts in that movie. The usually liberal-friendly New Yorker, of all publications, chastised Moore for driving around in a gas-guzzling mini-van, sending his daughter to private school, keeping a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, despite Bowling for Columbine's preaching about the culture of violence and fear, lying to an audience about having bodyguards.

He has also insinuated that the passengers aboard some of the Sept. 11 planes were "too wimpy to resist because they were white." And, it seems, that for all Moore's crusading on behalf of workers, he isn't the best boss to work for. Worse yet, Moore should never have posted this on his blog: "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win."

Hitchens notes some of these hypocrisies in his article to drive home the point that Moore's intellectual weakness has made him a flip-flopper or, more exactly, "a completely promiscuous opportunist" who gets high off cheap applause rather than doing the intellectual heavy lifting his hyperbole requires. Hitchens on the May 18 "Scarborough Country":

Now, if you remember, he sets the scene of the Columbine shooting and says, it occurred on the day that Gen. [Wesley] Clark bombed Kosovo. And he allows you for a while to think that maybe these two psychopathic kids, as we know planned the thing for a long time, were tipped into violence by American force in the Balkans. Then Gen. Clark runs for the presidency. Michael Moore thinks, why not, endorses him, throws in for good measure the accusation that president is a deserter, was a deserter, gets the Clark campaign to travel. The Clark campaign flames out. Michael Moore goes on and does something else, the next thing …

Hitchens also scores points on Moore's treatment of domestic counterterrorism policy in Fahrenheit 9/11. This is the weakest part of the film, where Moore trots out examples of the government infiltrating a Fresno peace group (soft-looking older folks who love to eat cookies at their meeting) and a feisty senior getting accosted at the gym for saying that Bush is a terrorist. He even brings in a lady who had to drink her own breast milk to prove that it wasn't terrorism-related. There's more mishmash on the theme of "the government is so stupid," but as Hitchens rightly points out, "Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?" There are some serious points to be made here about the fear-mongering campaign of the Bush administration, but Moore would rather take broad swipes at generic government stupidity than properly articulate the issue. As Hitchens says, "Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing."

Why humiliate US Attorney General John Ashcroft with a cheap shot at his singing rather than attack his real abuses, or even take the argument clear to Guantanamo Bay and the Halliburton construction contracts there? Why sensationalize that "Ashcroft and his Justice Department" ignored the Phoenix Memo when we now know that it didn't even get to the upper levels of the FBI, especially when a more sober, and more damning, anti-Patriot Act argument is to be made? Of course it's in Moore's character to read the act while driving around Capitol Hill in an ice cream truck, but to contrast, back in 2001 Hitchens created a more specific, less contradictory, and indeed funnier argument in two sentences than Moore does in 20 minutes of haphazard footage: "In the past few weeks, indeed, I have been so enthusiastic about the progress of the war that I considered taking out citizenship papers as a gesture of solidarity. But now I feel that, though America can have my body, it can't have my habeas corpus."

Hitchens is right on another point about Moore's ethos: Watching Fahrenheit 9/11, one is struck by how willing Moore is to race-bait. He interviews poor black kids at a Flint high school, asking them about the war, as if they're the only ones in Flint with relatives overseas. He brings a black sergeant with him on his quest to get congressmen to sign their kids up for the war. Moore employs race as a shorthand for class in his argument that this is a rich man's war fought by the poor. This argument holds some water, especially when Moore shows a soldier in the desert saying that it's no secret that the private contractors make three or four times what they do for "driving a truck," but he pokes holes in his own argument by insisting on exploiting race for effect. As Hitchens says in his diatribe, "Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package …. Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines?" Again, Moore undermines himself: Had he just concentrated on asking that soldiers get paid their due and not have their benefits cut, he might get by on that. But Hitchens correctly calls Moore on his use of race to prop up his broad arguments.

Curiously, though, Hitchens doesn't address the strongest part of Moore's film: that the kids in the army have little chance of success in the current conditions on the ground in Iraq. After devastating footage of the shock and awe, Moore interviews cherub-faced soldiers who treat their battle preparation like a high school basketball game, plugging in their CD players to blare rock music to get them "pumped up." After the battle, we come back to the kids, who are horrified by the death they've seen; "It's not easy to conquer a country," one says, a remark Moore daggers directly at Dick Cheney's absurd "greeted as liberators" assertion as a part of the propagandizing of the war. Perhaps Moore could have done without the Christmas Eve footage of Santa driving the streets of Baghdad bringing presents to homesick troops, but much more effective is a "COPS"-style sequence following the soldiers into an Iraqi home. The soldiers are just doing their job, trying to root out insurgents, but they bust into a home late at night, waving their machine guns around, trying to speak English to understandably hysterical Iraqi mothers. The problems are obvious: the fear and skepticism wrought by late night intrusion, the uncoordinated nature of the effort, the fact that the soldiers weren't quite sure whom they were looking for, and especially the language issue that seems to exacerbate the situation even more than the machine gun.

You must ask: Is this how these men and women were trained for this mission? Why are there no interpreters? Doesn't this set the soldiers up to be scorned by the people they're supposed to help and protect? Indeed, this is what frustrates the soldiers, as one says, "Why don't these people understand that we're trying to help them?" How can we build trust with the people, many already mistrustful of Americans since their 1991 betrayal of anti-Saddam dissidents, if this is the face-to-face contact they have? The Red Cross estimates that 70 percent to 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were arrested by mistake. Not only does this deprive these men of their liberties, but how many of these also were breadwinners whose families were thrust into poverty upon their arrest? And how quickly do these stories spread through the Iraqi street?

This is a major tragedy of the anti-insurgency campaign, and Moore's footage describes this on-the-ground difficulty as well as any filmmaker since David O. Russell in Three Kings. Yet Hitchens, who carpet bombs most every other major point in Fahrenheit 9/11, remains silent about this. He correctly says that "the 'insurgent' side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once." But why not take this opportunity to balance the view by saying that the war could be conducted better? Hitchens has said that "coalition forces in Iraq are now rapidly acquiring deadly skills that will certainly be required in other places and at other times before the war against jihad and its patrons is over," but isn't Iraq a bad place to start figuring out how to nation-build, especially for an administration that has conducted self-defeating proxy wars in the past?

Christopher Hitchens' Blind Spot on the Iraq War

The Hitchens/Moore conflict can be summed up by their respective employment of the words of George Orwell. Moore ends Fahrenheit 9/11 with what Hitchens calls a "sonorous reading" of part of Goldstein's manifesto on the Inner Party from "1984." Moore makes a superficial, out-of-context connection between the two works, using the Bush administration's manipulation of facts to back his pacifist argument. Hitchens rightly indicts Moore's artificial use of Orwell to trump up his anti-Bush rhetoric, imploring that "it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history." Indeed, Moore often seems out of his element intellectually, not just because he cultivates an unshaven, working-man, gut-and-camera routine as a prop, but because his arguments are sloppily tilted toward sensational conjecture rather than reasoned forceful dissent. Hitchens takes it step further, quoting Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism," which indicts intellectual pacifism as a "hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism," ending with the same banality so often bleated on conservative radio: that pacifist propaganda, here referring to Moore's film, is "directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States."

In many ways, Hitchens fashions himself as Orwell's intellectual successor, an anti-bullshit, tough-independent contrarian. Hitchens has virtually adopted Orwell as a father figure (Vidal did, after all, contend that 9/11 was arranged), writing a preface to a double volume of "Animal Farm" and "1984" and publishing a flattering but frank volume of criticism called "Why Orwell Matters" in which he argues that Orwell was the ultimate contrarian — in that both the left and the right incorrectly and superficially try to adopt his words as an indictment of the other's thinking. Such credentials would seem to christen Hitchens as the heir to Orwell's throne, but in his rhetoric on the Iraq War, Hitchens himself seems to have engaged in some thought that St. George might frown upon. In recent years, Hitchens himself seems so bent on defending this war against his forsaken left that he's completely lost all sense of balance, objectivity and restraint on its conduct and success.

There are two things that threaten American resolve, and thus American victory, in Iraq: the cost in casualties and taxes, and mistrust from both nations of those in charge, especially if it seems to be going badly. To win the trust of a people the American government has already betrayed twice (by arming their dictator in the '80s and then not removing that dictator in the '90s), the United States must convince the Iraqis that this time the Americans are not there to steal oil. In the United States, those permanently skeptical of the Bush administration on the left and the anti-tax working-class Bush voters on the right must believe there's no taxpayer-subsidized profiteering going on. Skepticism in both countries threatens American resolve, but what has the Bush administration done to assuage these fears? You can read about it all over the Web and in print.

Slate's Daniel Drezner tried to debunk with tables and graphs but inadvertently made the argument stronger.In his article "Fables of the Reconstruction," he runs the insanely literal argument that "If the corruption argument is true, then the size of campaign contributions should be strongly and positively correlated with the size of government contracts," and then shows how many millions of dollars Halliburton and Bechtel donated per billions of dollars awarded. On the other side is Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud," a more sober investigation that Moore shorthands and mangles in his film. Still, evidence of profiteering and the Bush administration's opacity in matters of contracting and budgeting is all there, casting doubt and suspicion all over the operation — and thus jeopardizing the effort. In Moore's big fat sloppy way, he tries to bring these arguments to light.

And Hitchens ignores them at every turn. Even if there's not massive profiteering going on, at least Hitchens could acknowledge that the mere appearance of conflicts of interest is problematic. Instead, in an exceedingly patronizing article subtitled "People Who Prefer Saddam Hussein to Halliburton," he tosses this bone: "This view, which admittedly expresses a wider concern, can stand some examination," before he launches into a red herring indictment of the horribly corrupt United Nations Oil for Food program. A paragraph later, you think Hitchens might balance his view in the introductory sentence, "I want to be the first to agree that transparency in the administration and allocation of oil revenues is of the highest importance." But there he goes again, blasting the French and the Russians.

Hitchens has to wake up to the reality that the Bush administration has a lot to answer for. The Bush administration is, after all, virtually the same group of people who used the daughter of the Kuwaiti diplomat to go in front of a congressional committee and make up a story about dead babies so they could compare Saddam to Hitler. And what about the disclosure that Halliburton is under investigation by the SEC in a $180 million bribery scandal? Or the massive overcharging on gasoline, and all the rest? Or Hitchens' dismissal of Seymour Hersh's (and others') allegations of wrongdoing at the highest levels of the military in the Abu Ghraib scandal because, hey, "There would have been sadistic dolts in the American occupation forces in Iraq, even if there had not been wavering lawyerly fools in the Tampa center that was monitoring Afghanistan."

Does it matter that Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report on Iraqi prisoner abuse says that "lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and … supervisory omission was rampant" at the prison, and yet no high-level responsibility has been taken and few assurances offered that the command structure is now fixed? All Hitchens can say is that "the administration was being arraigned from dawn until dusk for the offense of failing to take timely measures against the Taliban and Al Qaeda" and ask, as he claims to have thought to himself during Moore's "mission not accomplished!" blustering at Telluride, "Would the antiwar camp have approved the measures necessary to ensure those goals?" What does Hitchens make of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales' bizarre, labyrinthine legal arguments to absolve the United States' responsibility to the Geneva Conventions?

And it goes on. This from a man who considers Ahmed Chalabi a friend and has implored readers to "Lay Off Chalabi," despite falling from being the Bush administration's anointed leader of the new Iraq to having his office raided by the military and being accused of being a spy for Iran. Fred Kaplan has sharply criticized Chalabi's ethics, but Hitchens — that tough-minded contrarian — just turns a blind eye to the allegations: "I do not know what happened at the Petra Bank, and not even Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, who have done the most work on the subject, can be sure that Saddam Hussein's agents in Jordan were not involved in the indictment of Chalabi by a rather oddly constituted Jordanian court. It could be, for all I know, that he was both guilty and framed. The litigation and recrimination continues, and it ought at least to be noted that Chalabi still maintains he can prove his case." Hitchens may wish to maintain a forced neutrality on the matter, but evidence points to shady dealings. And what about the accusations of false intelligence, and all the rest? Is this still the man Hitchens wants running Iraq, even though polls show him with less approval than Saddam Hussein?

It's as if Hitchens refuses to discuss anything beyond the cursory that might jeopardize the case for the war. One point he has been consistent on is the moral and pragmatic reasoning against torture itself, but this stands outside the Bush administration's conduct of the war. Even their errors seem to be the fault of the left. Take this exchange with the conservative FrontPage Magazine:

The Bush administration was right on the main issue of removing Saddam as the pre-condition, but I whimper when I think of the opportunities that have since been missed. The crucial thing was obviously the empowerment of the Iraqis: I don't like this being adopted as a grudging final resort. And it seems nobody will be fired for failing to think about things — like generators for heaven's sake — that are simply an aspect of American 'can do' culture. The humiliating attempt to involve the Turkish army in Iraq — which is one of the things I flatly disagree with Wolfowitz about — should never have been permitted in the first place.

The antiwar and neutralist forces share the blame here, because there was nothing to stop them saying, very well Mr. President, let us commonly design a plan for a new Iraq and think about what will be needed. Instead, all energy had to be spent on convincing people that Iraq should no longer be run by a psychotic crime family - which if the other side had had its way, it still would be. And we could be looking forward to the Uday/Qusay succession.

Did the Bush administration not get approval for the war from Congress? And then, were there not calls to delay the war because a real coalition had not been built, the military would be dangerously overextended and no real occupation plans were in place? Did Hitchens really miss that debate, or is he so concerned with his own "contrariness" that he's determined to pronounce his break with the left at every opportunity? Also from the FrontPage interview, Hitchens describes the straw that broke the camel's back:

Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

As to the "left" I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our "national security" calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of "left" intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction."

Hitchens is probably not willing to admit, for fear of upsetting his tough-guy alliance with President Bush, that our "covert alliances" in both Afghanistan and Iraq were cultivated by the Reagan/Bush regimes in the endgame of the Cold War, and that a real "cleaning of the state" would require someone outside of the Bush regime — unless, of course, Hitchens believes the Bushies so honest as to police themselves on their own lucrative conflicts of interest. They did think, after all, that Henry Kissinger — target no. 1 on the Hitchens Hit List himself — should head the 9/11 commission. As for that "full inquiry," was it the left or the Bush administration who continually stonewalled its creation, then underfunded it and then insisted that the president and vice president be interviewed jointly? Should we bring up the blacked-out information about the Saudis (what about those "covert alliances" again?) in submitted reports? As Bill Maher correctly pointed out to Hitchens on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Aug. 1, 2003:

Maher: [overlapping] How have we put the Saudis in their place?

Hitchens: The Saudis' oil monopoly has just been broken. The reason why the Saudis were so opposed to the regime change policy in Baghdad, and they lobbied in Washington, and all their allies were opposed to it, was because they liked Saddam Hussein as their buffer state, and they … And while he was beggaring and ruining his country, they were in command of the Arab oil market … of which they're not going to be.

Tara Setmayer: The oil oligarchy has been upset in Saudi Arabia now as a result.

Hitchens: [overlapping] Now we want to make the quarrel with them a little more intense than it is, and I think the president should be getting on with that. But there's no question the Saudis have been penalized and downgraded by this intervention.

Maher: Penalized? They have been protected. They were taken out of the report that just came out last week.

[applause]

Hitchens: I know. Yes, that's true. That's why I say the president should make the quarrel more intense and more personal. But we've showed them — the bases are coming out of Saudi Arabia, you can look after yourselves from now on. They've been caught. They've been rubbled.

Certainly, Saudi Arabia has been rubbled, Mr. Hitchens — not by Bush administration hardball, mind you, but by Al Qaeda itself, killing US citizens (mostly independent contractors working in the oil industry) living in the country by carbombing their living quarters. And what of that broken Saudi oil monopoly and the position that Bush family is sticking it to the House of Saud? Hitchens might like for you to think otherwise, as when he declared that his "moment of truth about Islamic fascism arrived in 1989," but he clearly stated in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, concern for this conflict of interest before his strange bedfellowing with Bush in the run-up to Iraq:

During the cold war, it was often said that the United States faced an unsleeping foe that was 'godless'. I don't think it's sufficiently recognized how important this one word was, and how much it is missed. The holy warriors, as these seem to be, are an entirely different proposition. The United States as a country has no fixed position on Islamic fundamentalism. It has used it as an ally, as well as discovered it as an enemy. It could not bomb Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, even if it found conclusive proof that the hijackers and assassins had actually trained there. So what does the president mean when he says so portentously that 'we shall make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbour them'? It looks like a distinction without a difference, and gives a momentary impression of being decisive, while actually only confusing the issue.

And what shall we make of Hitchens' criticism that the left prompted no argument for "a resolute declaration in a favor of a fight for secular and humanist values" when he has aligned himself so unapologetically for a man whose marketing of the war is done in such expressly religious terms? As Ron Reagan said pointedly in a eulogy to his father that Reagan never "[wore] his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage." How does Hitchens reconcile this secularist argument with his support for Bush, who, when asked by Bob Woodward if he ever asked his father about Iraq, said, "You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to. I'm surely not going to justify war based on God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible." And for all Hitchens' bluster about Moore's flip-flopping on Afghanistan, how does he reconcile his personal philosophical timeline with these words from the Guardian on Sept. 13, 2001:

With cellphones still bleeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred. Indeed, the very thought, for the present, is taboo. Some senators and congressmen have spoken of the loathing felt by certain unnamed and sinister elements for the freedom and prosperity of America, as if it were only natural that such a happy and successful country should inspire envy and jealousy. But that is the limit of permissible thought.

In general, the motive and character of the perpetrators is shrouded by rhetoric about their "cowardice" and their "shadowy" character, almost as if they had not volunteered to immolate themselves in the broadest of broad blue daylight. On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.

As Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz states in his critique, "Mr. Hitchens may be a historian, but he is what George W. Bush calls a 'revisionist historian' — and in this case the history is his own. His invocation of George Orwell can at best be judged as cynical." It's as if Hitchens, the self-appointed torchbearer of the Orwell legacy, has so blinded himself to the contradictions inherent to his support for the war, and his near-refusal to deal with the relevant and damaging charges against the Bush administration in their conduct and conflicts of interest in the war, that his contrariness has become a sort of rabid ideology. As a blogger at Aspasia.com wrote in response to a debate involving Hitchens at the New School earlier this year:

In this exchange Hitchens evinced a rugged sense of moral purpose, but there was some unspoken giddiness in these last remarks that sent a shudder through the crowd. One can violently oppose fundamentalism, or the Hussein regime for that matter, without projecting that thrill for war. And what were those hedging comments about WMD? At best they were footnotes on the contrary theme, at worst outright obfuscation. Looking around the auditorium, some seemed impressed, some confused, and some outright convinced that the man was mad.

Surely Hitchens' blind spot hasn't blacked out the implications of Prince Bandar, a man he once described as "insufferable," being told of the Iraq plan before Colin Powell. In his article on Fahrenheit 9/11, Hitchens rhetorically asks why the Bush administration is so keen to topple the Saudi oil monopoly, especially if they "live in each other's pockets." This is meant not just knock down the conspiracy theorist's house of cards, but also to destroy the notion that possibly, maybe, there could be some unnecessary and compromising complications here. Again, Hitchens pushes in his chips on the ethical fidelity of the Bush administration, dismissing the fact that toppling Saddam just happened to liberate his oil fields, placing them more or less in American hands and in the hands of Bush/Cheney family friends and campaign contributors. Though a brave and noble acceptance of American responsibility for deposing an evil we helped create, it also conveniently props up Bush's billion-dollar business interests and assures contributions galore to his presidential campaign. Won't these suspicions breed mistrust in both Americans and Iraqis, thus compromising this grand humanitarian gesture, even if Bush/Cheney acted with the purest of hearts?

When Hitchens tosses such rhetorical bones as calling for "transparency" in the doling out of oil money, it indicates a consciousness of all these things. And yet, in his increasingly loud and bullying rants against the left, he operates as if none of it exists except in the paranoid imagination of Moore and his ilk.

Did Hitchens refill his soda during the part of Fahrenheit 9/11 when the smarmy yuppies say that "profits are overwhelming" in Iraq and "Whatever it costs, the government will pay you?" It's both a conscious and an unconscious act, engaged with precision and without guilt or irony. This blank-slate mentality toward the Bush administration is not just dangerous and anti-contrarian, it resembles the Orwellian concept of doublethink: Hitchens is holding two contradictory thoughts in his mind and accepting both of them. ("The left is weak for not making Bush reveal his covert alliances. Michael Moore reveals those alliances, and is a coward for doing so.") Not only that, but in Hitch-World, an administration that has sanctioned a coup to install an oil-friendly government in Venezuela is to be the trusted custodian of oil riches in Iraq. In almost every argument he makes about the war, he creates an either/or fallacy to bemoan the left's criticism of the sometimes-legitimate campaign to bully the argument into a moral relativism with the Taliban or Saddam Hussein.

For all Hitchens' Orwell stock, his postwar rhetoric seems greatly at odds with his observation in the introduction to "Animal Farm" and "1984" that "(Orwell) set '1984' in England, in order, as he put it, to show that the English were no better than anyone else and that the totalitarian danger existed everywhere," or even his own words in the anti-Moore diatribe, "if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your 'narrative' a problem and thrown in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft." (emphasis Hitchens')

The irony here, of course, is that it's Moore who lays bare Hitchens' most glaring oversights. Yes, Hitchens is mostly right about what he chooses to deal with in Moore's film, but doesn't it seem odd that such a tough, no-nonsense, anti-bullshit, dissenting contrarian would ignore some of the most egregious actions of this administration, especially after all the ink spilled on the Clintons? What about the blacking out of the Saudi documents, or the blacking out of bin Laden money manager and Bush family friend James R. Bath's name on Bush's military records and all the rest of these shady actions at the highest levels of both government, business and commerce? And if Unocal and Harken and the Carlyle Group and Halliburton all claim that having the House of Bush as a member didn't mean anything, why were they involved in the first place, why did they get all that Saudi money and why do we still allow them to harbor Wahhabi Islam?

There's most likely a more nuanced answer to such questions than Moore has to offer, and it's essential to the United States' long-term credibility — already compromised on the oil and WMD issues — to get those answers. Or we can just assume that there's nothing to, say, James Baker's law firm defending the Saudis from the 9/11 families. I'm sure Bush was only joking when he said, "Some may call you 'the elite'; I call you 'my base,'" in a moment captured in Fahrenheit 9/11. Otherwise, people might get the idea that the Bush administration would not employ scrupulous accounting procedures when doling out no-bid contracts to ensure that the American taxpayer, still trying to lift himself into the post-recession economy, is not lining the pocket of big business. This from a man who has been involved in questionable accounting practices and possible insider trading, only to be acquitted by his father's appointees. Surely Moore's points are so absurd that Hitchens doesn't have to resort to such nonsensical cheap shots as "President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?)" and straw-man arguments about Eisenhower and Clinton talking to reporters on the golf course, or further straw-manning the left by saying that they would have wanted the president to "adopt a Russell Crowe stance" in that Florida classroom where he sat in stunned silence for seven minutes.

Hitchens seems to have lost his way amid all his anti-left, anti-pacifist hectoring. He adopts a journalistic Russell Crowe stance himself by calling Moore a "coward" and challenging him to rumble: "I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that 'fact-checking' is beside the point. … But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of." If this strikes you as a little unprofessional, or maybe a bit mad, this is also the man who wrote of his intellectual hero, "There is no doubt that Orwell meant his work to put people on guard against chauvinism and regimentation and hysteria in all their forms."

Hitchens has virtually given the Bush administration a pass on economic matters, including the Halliburton/Bechtel/etc. irregularities concerning the unending war on terrorism, even though he observed that "Orwell anticipated the permanent war economy and what that meant for the masses." And what of civil liberties, which Hitchens thought were under attack in 2001, when he described the Orwellian approach of the Bush administration through Tom Ridge by saying "the whole cult of 'national security' depends upon the cultivation of national insecurity. Our new 'tsar' (and what a telling word that is) Tom Ridge gave another perfect example of this idiocy on Monday last night …" before going on to lambaste Ridge and Ashcroft. Surely Hitchens has not forgotten his observation about Orwell that "the point most often reiterated in his writing is that there should be no utilitarian trade off between freedom and security."

For all of Hitchens' pimping of Orwell — in his unabashed alliance with the Bush administration and refusal to promote a better prosecution of the war effort by taking on some of its most absurd aspects — it is he who has unwittingly betrayed his craft. As Hitchens himself wrote on the last page of "Why Orwell Matters," "It's not what you think, but how you think — 'views' don't really count, but principles do." Hitchens can call his former colleagues at the Nation, and he can even use Orwell to proclaim Moore anti-American, but Erich Fromm's words on Orwell are particularly sobering in this case: "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted '1984' as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too." Or maybe Hitchens' cable provider doesn't carry Fox News.

Forging a New Path: The Left Shouldn't Listen to Either of Them

Despite Hitchens' own tunnel-vision ravings about the left's moral pharasaism, he does offer it some advice to take to heart, the acceptance of which will require some strong-hearted contrarianism against its loudest, most Moore-ian factions. The most infuriating part of Fahrenheit 9/11, which indeed rises to the level of revisionist propaganda Hitchens ascribes to it, is Moore's laying out of the Iraq War. His sloppiness is so maddening because in his bit on the Bush administration's propagandizing of the war, he presents an effective, tidily edited sequence of Bush saying "Al Qaeda" and "Iraq" edited together so closely that the audience perceives them as the same thing — the very definition of the Bush administration's rhetorical strategy. But then we go into Iraq, "a sovereign nation," where little girls swing on swingsets and little boys fly kites. Hitchens describes best what happens next: "Then — wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism." Moore then asserts that Iraq "had never attacked or killed or even threatened any American." What is he talking about? I could exhaust at least a dozen items refuting Moore's impossible, irresponsible claim here, but Hitchens lets him have it, correctly so, in his article. Even Clinton bombed Saddam's party headquarters over the assassination attempt of President George H. W. Bush. But the way Moore tells it, America — more specifically, George W. Bush — bombed Uncle Saddam's Happy Fun Time Desert Paradise for no good reason. No gassing of Kurds, no negotiations with Kim Jong Il, no genocide, no torture prisons, no killing of thousands of children a year, no rotting infrastructure and massive unemployment, no increasing Islamist tone as Saddam neared death, no potential Uday/Qusay regime, nothing.

This is where the left must break ranks with pseudo-pacifists such as Moore. The real reason the left hates this war so much is because the Bush administration is conducting it. There are many, many good reasons for that, most of which don't even need paranoid conspiratorializing to prove. This leaves the tough left, from which Christopher Hitchens broke ranks, in a paradoxical position. Americans cannot shirk their responsibility to the Iraqi people for building their dictator into a military power, or turning a blind eye to his chemical and biological weapons while he was still being supported by the US government, or betraying anti-Saddam dissidents in 1991, or allowing the United Nations, Saddam and French and Russian interests to bleed the people of their already scant resources during the '90s. The left has to stop saying that removing Saddam Hussein from power did not make us safer, that the goal of establishing a liberal democracy in the Middle East (besides Israel, of course) is unattainable or even that breaking the Saudi oil monopoly is a bad thing. The humanitarian argument is enough to justify this war, as is the argument that such an oil-rich nation run by a "psychotic crime family" is not good for Middle East stability. Complicating matters, it's unlikely that a Democratic president would have taken the bold action Bush did, in fear of alienating his left wing. But as Clinton said himself, this showdown with Saddam was inevitable. The tough left is aware of this. Yet this war is going badly, thus diminishing support for it, because of the Bush administration's mismanagement, lack of postwar planning, arrogance, bravado, failure to assemble a powerful coalition and complete incomprehension of the on-the-ground consequences of high-level decisions, including the mis- and under-training of soldiers, lack of reinforcements, under-supplying of troops, virtual conscripting retention of soldiers past their tours — right to the cavalier attitude toward the Geneva Conventions contributing to the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

The left has to seize the opportunity to make the case to the American people that not only does this administration have to go, but that the left can fix this mess. The left is a bit flabbergasted by the sainthood thrust upon Ronald Reagan (whom Hitchens called "stupid" upon his death), and seems to be a bit perplexed by the right's bluster that "Reagan won the Cold War." The left's response, if it wants to parlay this into a positive, forward-thinking strategy for the election, should be this: Reagan didn't "win" the Cold War; it was already teetering on the brink and Reagan pushed it off the balcony. In baseball terms, those previous presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — got us to the late innings with the lead, and Reagan pitched a scoreless ninth to earn the save. The fallout of this victory were the theocratic despotism of Afghanistan, which the Reagan White House helped create by funneling taxpayer dollars to the mujahadeen through Pakistan, and the military buildup of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, facilitated by the Reagan/Bush regime to both protect Saudi Arabia and stave off a Soviet ally in Iran. And these are the same people, with cultivated financial ties to both areas of the world, that we want cleaning up the new Afghan and Iraqi messes — those who have already botched not one, but two wars with each of them? "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is a lot like "mission accomplished," and the left — specifically John Kerry and the former Clintonites who have engaged in nation-building before — has to make the case that they are the responsible leaders to see through the war on terrorism, which has come to include the war in Iraq. And that means that pseudo-pacifists such as Moore pulling the party to the extreme left are not ultimately helping the cause. It's not enough just to call Bush "Orwellian" and leave it at that.

This is where an ex-leftie like Hitchens can teach Moore a few things about dissent. In Jennifer Verner's review of "The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century," she correctly points out that author Scott Lucas' "real problem, accidentally revealed in his failed polemic, is his inability to fully understand what 'dissent' means at its core. Dissent means not only being against power, but being for truth, justice and human dignity …. There was a time when the dissenting left stood for liberation and against the police state — not for the police state and against liberation. Christopher Hitchens maintains that the antiwar movement has betrayed the left by forgetting this fundamental point. Lucas gives nothing of value to defeat Hitchens' argument. He has instead written a pathetic eulogy for those he mounted a white horse to defend." This is as it was in the early half of the 20th century, when the right were the provincial isolationists and left saw the United States' military might as a vehicle for defeating despotism and restoring human rights to oppressed and impoverished peoples. Hitchens is correct that the antiwar movement and the hawkish left cannot coexist for very long, and these differences must be reconciled if the Democrats are going to mount their white horse and save this country from the oppressive war economy and interminable quagmire stepped in by the administration. We must be able to look at people like Lila Lipscomb, who becomes the moral center of Moore's film when she travels from Flint to the White House to ask why her son is dead, and have a clear conscience when we say it's not in vain, as we also do the mothers of the millions of dead Iraqis who fought against a tyrant we helped create.

If the left wants to win this presidential election for the right reasons, it cannot let its white-hot fury for Bush incinerate its own cause. Step No. 1 is for the left to admit that Fahrenheit 9/11, as crowd-pleasing as it may be, is just a propagandist firecracker. The problem is that the movie takes it too far, which undermines its own power to persuade that middle 15 percent who are still on the fence. This is precisely what threatens the Democrats' chances to win this election. The left has to realize that it doesn't have to hyperbolize its arguments to win this debate; each time it does, it allows the mainstream and right-wing media to tie up the debate in legalistic wrangling over who did what with whom and where and when. Why should Moore and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence McAuliffe call President Bush "AWOL" and a "deserter" when the real point is that this administration is filled with theorists without nation-building experience (indeed, whose leader explicitly campaigned against it in 2000) are botching the Iraq post-conflict? Why not just make the entrenching argument that the Bush administration is overextending the military to the point that it's nearly a conscript army, whose families suffer each month they're kept past their original assignments, who weren't properly trained and equipped for their mission, whose benefits and pay are being cut, while the Bush administration has not recruited enough replacement soldiers for those who've endured one summer of 130-degree heat already, while private contractors are working beside these kids for three, four and five times the pay? Why not argue that members of the Bush administration have conducted two botched wars in Iraq because they have miscalculated the Iraqi reaction on the ground? Why not get tough on defense contractors who are overcharging the government? Why not present the case to the American people that if they want to turn this thing around, they need to elect a man with on-the-ground military service (by no means a requirement of a great president, but considering how poorly this administration's wars have been conducted, it can't hurt), who will appoint figures with NATO-led nation building experience in Kosovo, and bring back men who dealt seriously with the terrorist threat during the '90s? Why hassle over whether the president completed what Hitchens calls his "gentleman's minimum," when the rest of the less flammable facts are already aligned in your favor? Doing all this is not Moore's place, true, but given these deficits, the left shouldn't get caught watching his show too intently. Fahrenheit 9/11 is the liberals' Fourth of July fireworks spectacular: a show of brightly colored explosions to be oohed and awed at, but on July 5, the left needs to fold up its chairs and get back to the serious work of figuring out how to make the United States and the world a truly safer, more peaceful place.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)