‘Why don’t you say “I was wrong”’?

 

The German writer Peter Schneider and the American publicist Christopher Hitchens argue over the Iraq War

 

Was and is the Iraq War right? Reports of new horrors keep coming from the country, and in Washington President George W. Bush is under continuing pressure. More than 60 percent of Americans are against the war, and even in the Republican camp some are calling for withdrawal. Here two leftwing intellectuals argue about the invasion of US troops in Spring 2003.

 

Peter Schneider: Our intellectual biographies have much in common. We both began with the radical left – you with the British Trotskyites and I with the ’68ers in Berlin. In the 1980s and 1990s we both then offended against the leftwing consensus. We defended Solidarity against the charge of ‘endangering world peace’; we argued at an early stage for intervention against the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo; we supported the Nato intervention in Afghanistan – even though these positions brought us into conflict with our ‘leftwing identity’. Then came the Iraq War in 2003 and our ways parted. You supported the war from the beginning, I was against it. How do you explain our opposite views?

Christopher Hitchens: It may be because of our different experiences in the middle of the 1970s. At that time I was invited to Iraq by an Iraqi cultural official and Saddam Hussein was in process of consolidating his power. I had been in Poland, in Franco’s Spain, in Greece after the second coup – I knew cities which lived in fear. But what I experienced in Baghdad, the atmosphere of dread, was infinitely worse. It was hell – a rule of terror without parallel. I also remember very well how government people took it for granted that I should be introduced to the group around Abu Nidal, which at that time was being sheltered and supported in Baghdad. I’ve never forgotten this climate of dread. I belonged to a group of leftwing Labour members, trade unionists and Communists called CADRI [Committee against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq, Ed.]. It was a very efficient group, which had excellent information from Iraq and was the first to describe Saddam Hussein’s regime as a fascist regime. So for me the clash with the Baath Party and its ideology that draws on rightwing European nationalism and Fascism was nothing new.

Schneider: In the eyes of many people you’ve become the most eloquent defender of the Iraq War – one of the best weapons in the Bush government. How did you come to take on this role?

Hitchens: Had it been up to me, we would have disarmed Saddam Hussein very much earlier. A key event for me was the belated intervention of Nato in Bosnia in the middle of the 1990s – with the exception of George W. Bush, John McCain and a few others, and the neocons, practically all Republicans were against any kind of intervention. At that time, during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo (1992-1994) I began to rethink. For the first time I called on the USA to use force. Then, on the initiative of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraq Liberation Act was passed in Congress, supported by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But the two of them wanted the Nobel Peace Prize without war; they weren’t prepared to pay the full price.

Schneider: At any rate Clinton bombed factories in Baghdad after the expulsion of the UN inspectors. And at that time the Republicans jeered that he was only doing it to distract attention from his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Hitchens. True. At that time the Republicans didn’t back Clinton’s punitive action.

Schneider: But when some years later George W. Bush produced a link between the attack on the World Trade Centre and Saddam Hussein – did that convince you?

Hitchens: No one in the government ever claimed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with September 11.

Schneider: But in that case why did 70 percent of Americans before the war believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack? Even now that this myth has been refuted, many Americans believe it…

Hitchens: My dear man, 20 percent of Americans believe that Bush was behind the attack. People believe all kinds of things.

Schneider: But that’s a weak excuse now.

Hitchens: Show me that someone from the government actually made this accusation.

Schneider: Let me quote some items from BBC News: ‘The safest way of avoiding attacks on our nation is to meet the enemy where he lives and hatches his plans. Today we are fighting this enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that we do not meet him again on our streets and in our cities’ (President Bush in a television address in September 2003). ‘We know that Iraq has trained Al Qaida fighters to produce bombs and poisons and deadly gases’ (Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003). ‘We will strike a blow at the heart of the geographical base of the terrorists, who for many years, and specifically from September 11, have been carrying out attacks on us’ (Dick Cheney in an interview on the Iraq War). ‘Saddam Hussein is a risk factor in a region from which the 11 September attack came’ (Condoleezza Rice in September 2003).

Hitchens: I’m sorry, you’re losing this one. There’s no direct accusation in these quotations that the Iraqi government was behind the attacks.

Schneider: The American government didn’t make this accusation explicitly, but it gave people a mass of hints pointing to Saddam Hussein as the perpetrator. So Americans got precisely this impression.

Hitchens: You could have mentioned a far better instance of this connection. For ten years Iraq sheltered Sheikh Ahmed Jassin, one of the authors of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The American government decided not to use this case – I don’t know why. Had I been in their place I would have done so. It’s a fact that time and again Iraq has given shelter to terrorists, including the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas, who was behind the hijacking of the passenger ship Achille Lauro.

Schneider: But all that happened more than ten years ago. And they weren’t Islamic terrorists.

Hitchens: The Americans have the impression that there’s a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism because there was such a link, because time and again Iraq has been a refuge for terrorists, and because the Iraqi regime was the only regime in the world to approve the 11 September attack. No other government did so.

Schneider: In the New York Times Magazine of 29 October 2006 I read that Saddam was afraid of Islamism, indeed panicked over it. He even rejected an offer from Abdul Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, to provide him with nuclear weapons.

Hitchens: Perhaps Saddam Hussein rejected the offer because he thought it was a trap. Saddam Hussein was paranoid, he didn’t trust his own people.

Schneider: Even the ISG [Iraq Survey Group – a government commission composed of Pentagon and CIA advisers, Ed.] states in its most recent report that Saddam Hussein’s programme for weapons of mass destruction had ended as early as 1991 and that there is no indication of a link between Saddam Hussein and the terror attack on the World Trade Center.

Hitchens: I don’t believe it…

Schneider: In that case you’re the only one.

Hitchens: I’m not, but it wouldn’t disturb me if I were. I’ve better information.

Schneider: Do you mean Saddam Hussein’s alleged attempts to get tons of weapons-grade uranium, so-called yellow cake, in Niger? I know some of your articles on that and also the ones in which you defend yourself against the objections of a colleague from Time Magazine. I must say, I don’t find your defence convincing. Your argument is speculative: two highly suspicious people were in Niger at the same time and can’t have been there simultaneously by chance…

Hitchens: In the case of Saddam Hussein the government was right to start from the worst assumption.

Schneider: But if this assumption was well-founded, why didn’t the government stay with it?

Hitchens: I can’t explain why the administration abandoned its argument in the Niger question. And in any case it managed the whole business of the Iraq War very badly. It’s probably more convenient for it to forget the whole matter than to persist with it.

Schneider: A year ago I had an opportunity to talk with Hans Blix. He said: The simple truth is that the inspections worked. Saddam Hussein was disarmed.

Hitchens: That’s what he also said in the case of North Korea – and he was wrong. Moreover it wasn’t Blix who disarmed Saddam Hussein, but his predecessor, Rolf Ekeus, the greatest expert in the world on this material. And Ekeus still believes that there was no other way of guaranteeing the final disarming of Iraq than removing the regime.

Schneider: I know that he’s the witness you keep referring to…

Hitchens: Because he is in fact the best and the best informed. As for the links between the Baath apparatus and bin Laden – I have my own sources, and I trust them. For a long time I’ve noted that there’s been a kind of Hitler-Stalin cooperation between the two sides. I believe that the American administration underestimates that – ideologically these people are quite naïve. If you mentioned the Hitler-Stalin pact, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Beyond question Iraq was in process in changing into a jihad state system in which the jihadis would have access to all the privileges a state has to give: issuing passes, granting access to airports, using state accommodations, creating false papers. I know a lot about that. I know far more about it than the administration.

Schneider: Let’s talk about the present situation. Probably your views differ from mine, but aren’t we now in a far more dangerous situation than before the war, with a strengthened Iran, whose nuclear plans and capacities unfortunately need no imagining, and an Iraq which as a result of the war has in fact become a key area in fomenting international terrorism? Why can’t you simply say, ‘I was wrong’?

Hitchens: Because I wasn’t wrong. Suppose that we’d found everything in Iraq that we suspected was there. Suppose Iraq had been full of weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaida training camps. There would still more, have been an Islamist counterstrike against the occupation, even more so; there would have been movements of Islamic terrorists across borders; and there would have been torture in Abu Ghraib. In other words, we would have had the same problems that we have today. Secondly, in general I don’t believe – and this is my quarrel with the left wing – that  Islamic terrorism and its actions depend on what we do and precisely where we are.

Schneider: But there’s no doubt that the Iraq War has created a tremendous pool of new recruits for Islamic terrorism. In his new book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright writes that after the attack on the World Trade Center not only many Muslims but even many Islamists recognized the right of the USA to launch a counter strike …

Hitchens: I don’t believe that…

Schneider: … He carried out hundreds of interviews with Arabs. He goes on to claim that the war in Afghanistan was very successful to begin with, and destroyed around 80 percent of Al Qaida fighters – the organization was physically and morally on the way out. In his view only the Iraq War changed this situation in favour of an almost already beaten Al Qaida and gave it new strength.

Hitchens: I don’t believe that any opinion polls in the Muslim world - or in the United States – get us anywhere. After 11 September it looked as if the world was full of sympathy for the USA. But this sympathy didn’t last long…

Schneider: It lasted until the intervention in Afghanistan and it’s still lasting..

Hitchens: …but there were many reservations about it from the start. Even the headline in Le Monde, ‘We are all Americans’, was misleading. If you read the article carefully it is full of contempt. It may be that Al Qaida was in difficulties as a result of the war in Afghanistan. But to assume that the Islamists welcomed the removal of the Taliban – one of the few governments that they supported – is absurd. They wanted to challenge us, and they will challenge us, in Berlin, in Birmingham, in Belgrade and in Brussels. Fine, we’re challenging them in Baghdad. Do they like that? I hope not! I think that they hate this challenge and I want them to hate it. I want the same reaction here at home: I want as many people here to become as militant and furious as people are militant and furious there. But so far I haven’t seen much of this reaction among us. In fact more of our opponents are convinced that we’re at war than we are. However, I don’t accept that as an unalterable fact. I’d like a balance: I’d like the Islamists one day to regret how many people in the West they’ve mobilized and driven to offer radical resistance to them. Of course we’ve provoked their anger. But I wanted that.

Schneider: Don’t you think that the American government has made too much of the terrorists by declaring war on them? Don’t you think that it’s overreacting by attaching too much importance to a small group of fanatics within the Muslim world, allowing the group to feel that it’s enemy number one, the adversary of the greatest superpower on earth?

Hitchens: I see things quite differently. We’ve toyed too long with a policy of underreaction. For a long time underreaction was the norm. When Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for writing a novel, George Bush Sr said that this wasn’t important for the USA. From the first attack on the World Trade Center to the blowing up of American embassies in Africa with hundreds of dead, no one can claim that the policy of underreaction hasn’t been tried. It hasn’t achieved anything.

Schneider: But has the policy of overreaction worked?

Hitchens: Leaving aside all the mistakes and even crimes of the Bush policy, I believe that no policy, no strategy, would have spared us what we now have – the murderous lack of scruples of the so-called rebels; the danger of the destruction of Iraqi society which they bring about by systematically sparking off sectarian wars. A traumatized Iraq, a society unfamiliar with the idea of cohesion in solidarity, was in prospect whether we intervened or not. Would we have preferred to leave Iraq to itself had we known how bankrupt and atomized Iraqi society was? I don’t think so. My view was always that America had to perceive its responsibility in Iraq, long before 2001. We had, and still have, responsibility for restoring the Iraqi economy and society because of the first Iraq War and the American policy which led to it.

Schneider: Do you sometimes have the feeling that your position brings you close to people you can’t stand?

Hitchens: You’re quite right. But that’s nothing new for me.

 

Christopher Hitchens (58) is an American author and literary critic. He used to be a Trotskyite and made a name for himself, among other things, with texts critical of religion. In the conflict over the war in Iraq he has taken the side of the American neocons who wanted to disseminate democracy in the Middle East if need be by force.

 

Peter Schneider (67) is a German writer and essayist. In the1970s he became known as a representative of the left through his literary work on student protests. In the conflict over the involvement of the German army in military intervention in the Balkans and Afghanistan he criticized pacifist positions. However, he is against the Iraq war.

This article was published in "Die Zeit", 29/07