calling hitchens a neo-con, or suggesting he aligned with the right later in life, is a smear. he adamantly denied all such accusations, repeatedly. but, he found himself cut-off - and dealing with a right that was more open to his statements than the left was.
it is closer to the truth to suggest that the neo-cons were taking ideas from hitchens than that hitchens toook ideas from the neo-cons.
i have been clear that i'm not defending hitchens' arguments, but it's just not true. at all.
so, you can take little pieces of text out of context all you want and try and warp the record with them, but you're just continuing the smear campaign past his death. let's have an honest debate about a dead man that died lost in naivete - but honestly so. the fact that i have to have this debate with people that don't even know that michael parenti was an apologist for the worst kinds of stalinist atrocities (i have a soft spot for parenti, because he was less bad than a lot of the other people he aligned with, so i was generous, but this is a guy that stands up for the worst communist bullshit, and then slams hitchens for being naive on iraq. it's a farce.) is just a reflection of the mass ignorance out there.
again.
so, i will state this again clearly, and you can take it upon yourself to look it up: while hitchens' arguments on iraq ended up aligned with the neo-cons, and he consequently found himself faced with the fact that they seems to be a more revolutionary force than the left (a true realization encompassed in the term 'radical right'), he consistently argued from the left, and was consistently driven by leftist impulses, even as he ended up aligned with the worst kinds of imperialist policy. his arguments for supporting this war were thoroughly ideologically trotskyist, and only overlapped with the neocons by a combination of chance and shared trotskyist influence.
this is a matter of the historical record, and is easily verified by people that actually understand what they're talking about - as are the neocon smears, by a pacifist left that, around this time, merged with the isolationist right.