i wish i didn't have to do this, but every once in a while i get some stupid right-winger try to go after me about my comments about hitchens being misunderstood, and just prove my point in the process. there's a general argument and a specific one, and i try to argue at the level of the general because the level of the specific is so dubious, given that much of what hitchens published at the time was factually wrong and from dubious sources, indicating he kind of lost his mind. it's also frustrating to see how aggressive the right has become in trying to claim hitchens, given how upsetting his position at the time was. 

i distinctly recall watching amy goodman outright balling and sobbing after listening to him speak c. 2002/2003. i was only barely old enough to really get it, but it must have been devastating to experience.

so, there is a specific argument that hitchens picked up from some bad sources, parrots the propaganda on the issue and isn't really very important. i don't want to argue about that 20 years later; it doesn't matter. what's more important is to try to argue why hitchens took this extreme shift, and to do that you have to really understand his underlying ideology, which was trostkyism.

i've pointed this out repeatedly: you don't get hitchens because you don't get that he was trots. in response, they tell me to read some bullshit article he published at world net daily or something, and i can't get through to the retards. why did he do that? because he was trots.

"but read this article that has this specific factoid that says...."

no. why did he write the fucking article? he was a fucking communist.

if you really hold to trotskyism, seriously, honestly, you want to support worldwide revolution at all times, and that is what it was about. hitchens decided that the worldwide revolution meant supporting the overthrow of saddam hussein. now, that wasn't thought through - not through a filter of engels and not via an analysis of reality on the ground - but that's what he did, and when pushed on it, as he was, he retreated to arguments along the lines of "well, democracy is messy. they need to figure it out.", which...

my argument is that he would have been right about iran. but, anybody and everybody saw this was not a correct analysis of iraq.

it is true the hitchens then published a lot of bullshit, most of which i did read but no longer remember, and most of which has no real historical value and should be and will be forgotten as a mistake at the end of his life. that doesn't matter. it doesn't matter where zarqawi slept in the years before 9/11, and it doesn't mater if there was yellow cake. hitchens was just in solidarity with his side and willing to jump on what advanced his argument, because he needed to be on a team.

his actual argument, and the actual reason he supported this, had nothing to do with that, it was about the perpetual revolution, and what he saw as a regime that, if overthrown, would allow for iraqi self-determination, because he was not a racist at all but in fact gave the arabs far more credit than they deserved, and far more credit than anybody else, including myself did. and he was wrong to give them that much credit, as they promptly proved him wrong.

he might not have been wrong and, in 100 years, maybe events will unfold in an unpredictable way that suggests he was on to something.

right now it looks like he was wrong and that iraq needed and still needs somebody to fill the vacuum left by saddam hussein and come in and mop up the islamists in the name of arab secularism, then hold the state like a leviathan until the iraq people are ready to move to the next stage. 

the correct lesson from hitchens' great mistake is this: don't put your engels away so quickly.