Sunday 19 October 2008

Christopher Hitchens is Wrong on Obama


Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant political commentator. I identify completely with his migration away from the political left, which had long been his political home, and I've learned a good deal by reading his observations on the decay of the left. After losing the close identification I myself had with the left, I am nonetheless unable to make a new home on the right, and I thus find myself a sort of political loner (maverick?). More often than not, I support the policies of the right in international affairs, and on domestic and social issues I often agree with the thought patterns, if not always the conclusions, of conservatives. But when I support the political right wing, I do so more or less from the outside and without sharing their ideological foundations. I think that this is also a fair description of Christopher Hitchens. The great cause which largely defined my relationship to the American right was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Over the past five years, my support for the invasion has logically developed into a determination to defeat the terrorists and the totalitarians in Iraq, a determination which is based both on strategic necessity and on moral imperative. This is another point of agreement I believe I share with Hitchens. I differ from him, however, in that I am a Zionist and am happy to identify myself as a Jew. But I consider these differences to be relatively minor, in the scheme of things.

I am therefore used to agreeing emphatically with Hitchens on nearly everything, easily passing over points on when I disagree with him, and always trusting his judgment. I am therefore somewhat disappointed to have to say that I have recently found his judgment of the US presidential campaign to be uncharacteristically poor. I have recently read four articles by Hitchens about the election published on slate.com. They show Hitchens suffering from severe indecision. The articles zigzag between a series of contradictory positions, and when the last one finally settles on support for Obama, Hitchens' arguments in favour of Obama are weak by any standard, let alone Hitchens' own, and in their ensemble they display a grasping which betrays Hitchens' own efforts to convince himself.

The first article, "The Best Woman? Don’t Patronize Sarah Palin" from September 8th, is a limited defence of Sarah Palin generally taking the form of a warning not to take for granted, as the American liberal do, that she is an obviously inferior candidate. The second article, "Pakistan is the Problem" from September 15th, praises Obama for clearly perceiving the threat posed by Pakistan, while others shy away from such a recognition. The third article, "Is Obama another Dukakis?" from September 22nd, is a harsh criticism of Obama. The subtitle, "Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?", says it all. The fourth article, entitled "Vote For Obama" from October 13th, praises Obama's character and, though with very little ammunition, attacks McCain's.

In "Vote for Obama," Hitchens writes:
"I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience."


I am the same kind of "single-issue voter" as Hitchens claims formerly to have been (I’d like to know what kind of voter he is now), and if Hitchens can say outright that the ‘Obiden’ ticket is not a capitulationist one, I take him seriously, because I already know that I agree with Hitchens on what capitulationism is. But a closer look at Hitchens' formulation reveals a tremendous amount of equivocation. Obama is "greatly overrated"—but not capitulationist—but the capitulationists support him—but his ticket "does show some signs" of being able to take advice. In fact, there's little more here but equivocation. All this back and forth in a single sentence.

In "Pakistan is the Problem," Hitchens beats up on the Pakistani state, finding fault with it in every period since its inception and praises Obama for his tough talk against Pakistan. This is fair enough as far as it goes. But although I would like to take Hitchens at his word and share his trust of Obama, I am nonetheless reticent, given that I see Obama's tough talk on Pakistan is being the price electoral politics has demanded from him in exchange for his capitulationist talk on Iraq, this capitulationism having been the central foreign policy platform of his campaign from the beginning. Hitchens himself says as much: "[Obama] began using this [anti-Pakistan] rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the ‘good’ war in Afghanistan with the ‘bad’ one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy." There are a lot of elements in this sentence the reader is asked to swallow whole: 'never mind that now'? 'He is committed'? Hitchens does not even back up these statements with Obama’s words. Furthermore, Hitchens carefully avoids mentioning Obama's Iraq policy. Is Hitchens willing to sacrifice Iraq for the sake of confronting Pakistan? If Hitchens has any actual reasoning in mind here—for example I could imagine the argument being made that Iraq is in relatively good shape now, so an Obama retreat there won't do much damage—he does not express it.

Immediately after the brash statement that Obama is "committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy," he continues:
"And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less."

Hitchens is working hard here to set up distinctions between Obama and his constituency of American liberals whom Hitchens so scorns. It looks as if Hitchens, unable (with justification) to stomach the idea of making common cause the American liberals, is mentally prying Obama away from them in order to make his own support for Obama more palatable to himself. But this prying is a touchy business. We already saw Hitchens, above, noting that, yes, the capitulationists support Obama, but that Obama is not one of them. Now he's taking another stab at drawing this distinction by saying that Obama's constituency supports him despite his position on Pakistan.

But this contradicts what Hitchens wrote in the very preceding sentence, which I have already discussed. In the previous sentence Hitchens writes: "[Obama] began using this [anti-Pakistani] rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq." In other words Obama's toughness on Pakistan (and Afghanistan) is merely a symptom of his weakness on Iraq. Then in the next sentence, Hitchens radically overplays Obama's hawkishness. No doubt Hitchens pay closer attention to American politics than I do, but I certainly have never heard Obama say anything that commits him so unequivocally to "war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less." I have only heard Obama say things like, and I paraphrase, "if we receive actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida are in Pakistan and Pakistan is unwilling or unable to act on it, I will order strikes in Pakistani territory." All this really commits Obama to is launching a few missiles from a Predator drone, if he chooses to. And the US has already been doing this recently, under Bush. Another development that has taken place under Bush's tenure, as Hitchens himself is happy to point out, is a reorientation of the US away from Pakistan towards India (I am still quoting from “Pakistan is the Problem”):
"One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign-policy shifts of the Bush administration after 9/11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and toward a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic, and multiethnic state."

If Hitchens' basis for supporting Obama, while avoiding falling in with Obama's capitulationist constituency, is that Obama has promised war with Pakistan, then Hitchens has no basis at all.

What Hitchens fails to acknowledge, though he gives some small indications that he knows it, is that Obama's tough talk on Afghanistan and Pakistan is a cover for his defeatism in Iraq. His defeatism in Iraq, in turn, is the prerequisite for gaining the support of the American liberals. The way Obama has found to make his Iraqi defeatism appear principled is to play up the importance of the Afghanistan–Pakistan theatre and characterise Iraq as a diversion from it. Yet, the very idea that Iraq, the cradle of civilization, lying at the centre of the Middle East, having the potential to dominate the region, sitting on expansionist Iran's border, could be a diversion from anything is shocking. In the 1970s Iraq was poised to become the leader of the Arab world. It had the culture, the population, the location, the oil, and a diversified economy beyond the oil sector. Unfortunately Saddam's strategy for holding onto power was to destroy the country through successive wars of aggression, as much against his neighbours as against his own people, and Iraq did not know more than a year or two of peace during the twenty-four years of Saddam’s rule. A new Iraq, with even a semblance of stable and responsible government, could bring unheard-of advancement to the Middle East, in all areas. But to Obama, this is a diversion.

From what, then, is the war in Iraq a diversion? Obama's unambiguous answer to this question has been that the true and proper mission is pursuing Al Qaida, with special emphasis on killing or capturing Osama bin Laden himself.

Apart from the question of what sort of intellectual contortions are needed to distinguish neatly between the threat posed by failure in Iraq and the threat posed by Al Qaida, Obama makes the small-minded mistake of conceiving of the totality of the American global military strategy against terror as mission for retribution against bin Laden and Al Qaida for the attacks of September 11th. But the global strategy of the US cannot be based on something so backwards-looking, so contingent, so ad hoc as hunting down and punishing criminals. Global military strategy on this scale seeks to shape the international system as a whole; it seeks to mould the political world according to certain pre-determined goals and according to carefully planned strategy. That is its nature. It is far more than chasing one gang of criminals after another.

The pettiness of Obama's conception of the war on terror was on full display during his speech at the end of the Democratic Party national convention in Denver (the speech in the stadium with the Greek columns). He said (and I quote from memory): "John McCain says he'll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives!" This phrase was so nonsensical that it is burned into my memory. Note the emphasis on the words 'cave' and 'lives.' Note also that this question of catching Osama in his cave is just a version of the weak-on-Iraq, tough-on-Pakistan policy that Hitchens is suddenly so keen on. But what could it possibly mean to accuse McCain of not being willing to follow bin Laden to the cave where he lives? Does he really mean that McCain is somehow opposed to killing or capturing bin Laden? And what of this emphasis on those two words, 'cave' and 'lives'? Obama's emphasis on 'cave' seems to express scorn for McCain: 'it's only a darned cave, John, why are you afraid of going there?' Meanwhile, Obama's emphasis on 'lives' expresses scorn for bin Laden: 'the man has sunk so low as to be living in a cave!' What utterly meaningless drivel!

So here is Obama's foreign policy prescription: (a) run away from Iraq, even when victory is within sight, because that's what electoral politics requires; (b) get, or at least talk, tough on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but not because we harbour a special sympathy for the people of these countries which we apparently deigned to show the people of Iraq when we left them to their fate; rather, we'll be tough in the Stans because we're after Osama, and we're after him because he was behind the attacks of September 11th, and retribution for that is really all that matters. Global military strategy of the sole remaining superpower is thus reduced to a manhunt. Obama will wrap up the manhunt (incidentally, his way of assuring us that he actually will get it done is to accuse the republicans of being unwilling to get it done; this way, it becomes a matter of will, not capability), and then we'll all come home and that'll be that. What perfectly amoral, and short-sighted, isolationism.

I'm sorry to say that Christopher Hitchens has dropped the ball on this one. Since it looks more and more like Obama will be the next president, I also sometimes catch myself trying to find the bright side to an Obama presidency, and there certainly are some positive things to look forward to. But Hitchens’ support for Obama is an exercise in self-consolement, not serious political argument.

No comments: