Well, the last two Slate columns have been two of Our Boy's worst with the endorsement of eternal war and of extending it to Pakistan. But as we all know, Hitchens always tops himself. In honor of this inevitability, let's consult with one of Hollywood's most noted political scientists in a recent video I took on my last visit to Hollywood.
As Hitchens is telling his Slate readers that it's his role to help them "not ignore the obvious," we should take the solemn anniversary of 9-11 to remind him of a few things which the rest of the media, in self charity, are sure not to mention.
In the summer of 2001 a small skirmish on ethics was taking place in the Press over the coverage of the murder of Chandra Levy. The mild mannered, tit-for-tat Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen had rightfully dubbed the coverage "pornographic." Levy was a young woman who had worked in the office of and perhaps had intimate relations with Congressman Gary Condit. No connection to her killing (later proved a random act of violence by a chronic sex offender) and the Congressman ever existed or was presented. He later went back and won judgements of defamation from major news outlets, settled quietly out of court.
The Press had good reason to be leaning this way. After holding their thumb down on the scale for Bush in the 2000 election and it's shameful aftermath, they were stuck with an unelected President with unpopular polices. They had all the reason in the world to obsess on a non scandal with Monicagate overtones. Many progressives, stupidly, played along.
Which brings us to Hitchens. He reveled in Levygate, and used it as shamelessly as any right wing radio hate jock to continue his endless assault on Bill Clinton's filthy penis. This cause was his life, his love, his obsession in those days, and his last two Nation pieces before 9-11 were on what he called "Clindut", perhaps the ultimate example of Hitch's titanically overrated "wit." Hitch's has often told readers back in those days one could afford to be more footloose and fancy free (meaning, I guess, he could go on chat shows and endlessly present "truths" about the political scene that were true because he believed them) because I guess, 9-11 hadn't happened yet.
Consider: what would have happened in that summer before 9-11 had Hitch and the footloose press devoted half of the ink they spilled on the Levy case to matters of potential terrorism? Clinton certainly had tried to raise these issues, and was met jeering about his sex life, based on matters real and imagined, for his trouble. It should also not be ignored that these were the days that made Hitchens a very wealthy man.
So, when you read Hitchens in his new Slate piece defending poor George Bush (the tactic here, as it's always been, is to build straw men of the worst conspiracy stuff to distract us from W's actual performance) remember that Hitchens and HIS side, had no problem sticking Bill Clinton, eight months out of office, with the blame for the catastrophe. They did this for years, until emerging facts made it a non-starter. Remember also that Hitch's Man for most of campaign 2008 was Rudy Giuliani, whose political exploitation of 9-11 went so far over the top it finally wrecked his ambition.
Finally, as Hitch desperately tries to salvage his reputation on the matter of torture, recall that he crudely endorsed the torture of John Walker Lindh, and dismisses any call for accountability for the Bush Crowd as "politics."
First we should note that Christopher Hitchens's New York Times Review of David Mamet's The Secret History ("David Mamet's Right Wing Conversion" New York Times, 6/17/11) will do in a pinch, and he adequately conveys that we are dealing with, first and foremost, a rotten book. Hitchens's has the integrity to cite the book at its embarrassing worst; a comparison of the leaks in the BP disaster and the matter of Julian Assange.
One could quibble that Hitchens does not mention that the book is fairly ugly, racist swill (Mamet, in the now familiar tradition of the right, craps on the philosophy and accomplishments of MLK and then hypocritically praises him at book's end), though this might have been tricky, since the book draws a blurb from Shellby Steel, who is also Hitchens's go-to guy for reverse discrimination blather. Since Mamet and Hitchens are both, more or less, amazing grace babies of Bush II, the seasoned Htich watcher might take a moment to examine Hitch's equivocations.
After the now obligatory spanking of Chomsky, Hitchens writes approvingly, "Once or twice, when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton's sleazy sex life." Well, sleazy being a relative term, I am rather thankful for the feminists of the 90s being basically a lone, mostly ignored voice on the issues of human rights in Afghanistan, while the likes of Hitchens ignored them. Yet let's examine what Mamet actually puts down on page 140: "And where was the Left, and where were the Feminists, during President Clinton's savaging of Janita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky?"
Well, I could take this apart at length, but to be generous to Mamet, he has probably mixed up Susan McDougal with Kathleen Willey, who's name I had forgotten myself. If Mamet has an editor, he or she has yet to discover the magic of Google. One wonders if Hitch took note, however, of what a considerable blunder it was to insert McDougal's name here. The woman in question was put in jail by Ken Starr for refusing to manufacture evidence against Clinton, whom she claims she never met. Though she had essentially won her case through Jury nullification, Clinton later savagely awarded her a Presidential Pardon. Her story is ignored in Hitchens's stupid book on the subject, No One Left To Lie To.
A modestly imaginative biographer is likely to conclude that the impetus for Htichens big swing to the right was hardly 9-11, but rather the Bluementhal affair. After all, he had tired to get a personal friend arrested (one who had, by all accounts, had been generous and supportive to him) on false grounds in a political case. Once the nature of Monica Lewinsky became apparent (or the fact that she would be of no use in getting Clinton), Hitchens threw her under the bus himself. In terms that harked back to his his social climbing schooldays, he told Dennis Miller, "he diddles the help."
Yet after lying and bulling his way though all this (See Cockburn, the only one who called him out) the left took him back, and all was forgiven. Knowing in his heart what he had done, how could he ever again respect the left? Liberals, always possessing a healthy dose of battered wife syndrome, made Hitchens the man of the house for a few years before he left for the younger, sexier woman that was 9-11. That fun couple would of course go on to debauchery that made Hitchens's 90s shenanigans look pretty small time in comparison.
When I wrote my first essay on Christopher Hitchens and the former Yugoslavia, I wondered if I would ever find any neoconservatives who had committed themselves to the Bosnian cause. Then, I discovered a 2004 article by British journalist Johann Hari. In his interview with Hari, Hitchens indicated that the neoconservative position on the Bosnian War had impressed him:
“I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That war in the early 1990’s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy…That’s when I first began to find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favor of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there’s Richard Perle. There’s Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act.”
At the time of the interview, Paul Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense, and Richard Perle was an important member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. Hitchens, who was friendly with the deputy defense secretary, had particularly kind words for him: “The thing that would surprise most people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he’s a real bleeding heart.” http://johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens/
Was the moral stature of Perle and Wolfowitz profound enough to have inspired Hitchens’s conversion to neoconservatism?
Richard Perle had served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. By the time of the Bosnian War, Richard Perle had left government service to work as a lobbyist and consultant for the defense industry. A frequent lecturer on foreign policy, he had strong views on the Bosnian War:
“We have become a party, in a very real sense, to attacks on civilians that approach genocidal proportions because we are enforcing an embargo that prevents Bosnians from defending themselves…We simply do not want to be a party to limiting the ability of people to defend themselves against these vicious attacks on civilians, and if things are worse, they will be worse in a different way, then if we can be said to have contributed to that genocide.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
In spite of this bold opinion, Perle spoke with far more enthusiasm about the necessity of weapons development and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Whenever he spoke about Bosnia, he used the conflict to promote a neoconservative agenda, which rests on unilateralism. In 1996, he had nothing good to say about cooperation with Europe:
“The West got into a great deal of trouble in Bosnia after the Bush administration, wrongly in my view, decided that this was an issue for the Europeans. And without appearing in any way condescending, the fact is that the Europeans, perhaps because they became accustomed to it during nearly half a century of Cold War, find it very difficult to act in concert and sensibly without American leadership.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol
He also made plain his disdain for the United Nations:
“As I indicated, I am afraid that Bosnia is one example of what we can expect from international peacekeeping operations. If the administration has its way, it will begin to institutionalize peacekeeping within the United Nations, building it up in the name of efficiency, reducing American influence over peacekeeping operations, and we will see more in future of what we are seeing, sad as it is, in Bosnia today.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
Above all, Perle feared that unchecked Serbian aggression against a weakly armed Bosnia would draw the United States more deeply into the conflict:
“Our interest, it seems to me, lies in achieving an outcome that can be defended the Bosnians themselves, and that is not dependent on an American presence, an American peacekeeping presence, to try to hold together what is bound to be an indefensible situation…the U.S. will go in as peacekeepers, and we will find ourselves involved in a chain of mini Lebanons, there without a clear purpose or a clear mission, without any realistic prospect of defending territory against warring factions on all sides.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ClintonFo
At the same time, something beyond neoconservative principles seemed to propel Perle. Several months after the signing of the Dayton Accords, he indicated some anxiety about the Bosnians:
“They were promised that in exchange for the conclusion of an agreement at Dayton, they would be equipped and trained by the United States, so that the remaining half of their territory could be defended by the Bosnians themselves, so that they could end the situation of dependency in which they found themselves during the war. I’ve been very much involved in trying to help in a variety of ways to see that this promise is kept, but as a private individual it’s not very easy to do that. The responsibility lies with the government, which made the promise in the first place.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/BosniaPol
Time magazine reported that Perle was closely involved with the Dayton negotiations: “The Bosnians have even hired Richard Perle, a top Reagan administration official, to be in Dayton as a consultant.” As a consultant to the Bosnians, Perle arranged for Military Professional Resources, Inc. to train the Bosnians. Employees at MPRI tend to be former U.S. military officers. According to Alan Weisman’s biography of Perle, which was ironically but fittingly titled Prince of Darkness, MPRI directly benefited from Washington’s financial largesse to the Bosnians. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983728,00.html
I have not come across any evidence that Perle personally profited from the policies that he advocated for the Bosnians, but it is certain that they benefited the defense industry to which he belonged. If Perle’s interest in the Bosnians was solely humanitarian, it is difficult to explain his inconsistent defense of continued military aid to the Turks, despite their atrocities against the Kurds. At a panel, an audience member brought up the destruction of 1500 villages, which left two million Kurds without homes. He also called attention to the Turkish aerial bombardment of the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq. In response, Perle had this to say:
“I wonder if I might just add that it seems to me there’s a very important distinction to be drawn between the Kurds of Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq because I believe that the Turkish democracy, the Turkish parliamentary democracy, is robust enough to solve whatever Kurdish problem exists in Turkey if there is no terrorist component to it. And the unhappy spiral of violence in which terrorism elicits military action could be dealt with easily if the terrorism didn’t exist and the democratic process could work in Turkey.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb (1:20:20)
Thanks to Perle, I now understand that women and children who were left homeless deserved their plight because they were terrorists.
At the panel, Perle neglected to mention that he was a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government through his own company, International Advisors, Inc. Weisman found that International Advisors collected approximately $600,000 to $800,000 from the Turkish government on an annual basis between 1989 and 1994. Perle’s own take was a yearly consultancy fee of about $48,000.
Moreover, Perle probably played a role in discouraging Congress from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which took place during the First World War. To Weisman, he denied lobbying Congress directly on Turkish interests. I find this denial incredible, given his past experience as a Senate staffer. Evidently, his connection to Turkey has affected his judgment. When speaking to his biographer, Perle committed his own version of Holocaust denial: “As for the Armenian issue, I don’t believe that what happened is akin to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. It was not a final solution and to the best of my knowledge there was never an occasion in which the Turkish government sat down and said, ‘Here’s a plan for the destruction of the Armenians’.” While Perle willingly classified the murder of 200,000 Bosnians as genocide, he could not do the same for one and one-half million Armenian victims. http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030327Koop.html
Even when Perle has held a government position, he seems to have mistaken public service for the opportunity to make a buck. Shortly before the Iraq War began, Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, where he endorsed the supposed advantages of regime change. At the same time, Perle was a managing partner at Trireme Partners, a venture-capital company with key investments in companies that supported homeland security and defense. In February of 2003, Perle met with Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. In the March 17, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Trireme had enticed the Saudi industrialist with a letter advertising Perle’s political influence. Hersh quoted directly from the letter: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of the Board.”
Perle and his colleagues hoped that Zuhair and the notorious arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a fellow Saudi who had set up the meeting, would invest in their enterprise. The approaching war with Iraq created an ideal investment climate. “If there is no war,” Khashoggi rhetorically questioned Hersh, “why is there need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent. You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.”
Additionally, Perle and his cronies anticipated that Zuhair and Khashoggi would persuade the Saudi government to grant homeland-security contracts to companies in which Trireme had investments. Perle’s business agenda directly contradicted his public criticism of former colleagues who had relationships with Saudi-financed foundations and think tanks: “I think it’s a disgrace. They’re the people who appear on television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people if it weren’t for this community of former diplomats effectively working for this foreign government.”
Out of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11, fifteen came from Saudi Arabia. Of course, so did Osama bin Laden. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi ambassador in Washington at the time, analyzed Perle’s motives for Hersh: “There is a split personality to Perle. Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail – ‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’ – as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”
Perle’s dealings with Global Crossings, a communications company, further compromised his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board. The Defense Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarded the potential sale of Global Crossings to Chinese investors as a security risk. Perle promised Global Crossings that he would try to persuade the federal government to drop its opposition to the sale. If he got results, Global Crossings would supplement his $125,000 fee with an extra $600,000. The exposure of Perle’s arrangements with Global Crossings and the Chinese ultimately led to his resignation from the chairmanship. He left the board completely in 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/business/technology-after-disclosures-pentagon-adviser-quits-a-post.html
Wolfowitz was not as deviously interesting as Perle, but he also had extensive government experience. During his tenure as ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980’s, the neoconservative displayed little concern about the human rights violations there. Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, an Indonesian human rights activist, noted Wolfowitz’s warm relationship with the dictator Suharto, “but he never showed interest in issues regarding democratization or respect for human rights. Wolfowitz never once visited our offices.” At the time, Indonesia was continuing its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Bunny Buchori, the director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development, recalled: “He went to East Timor and saw the abuses going on, but then kept quiet.” http://www.asiademocracy.org/content_view.php?section_id=1&content_id=430
I was curious to see if Wolfowitz had experienced a change of heart after his departure from Indonesia. Did the Bosinian War awaken his conscience? I have watched Wolfowitz’s appearances on two panels in 1994 that reviewed Clinton’s foreign policy, where one would have expected him to discuss matters of pressing importance to him. Although he addressed Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and trade issues, he never brought up Bosnia.http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/PolicyMi
Later that year, Wolfowitz finally commented on Bosnia while serving on a panel on foreign aid:
“In fact, as I look at the world today, and I look at Bosnia, it seems to me that there is a case where, in fact, we ought to be making much use of military assistance. But I think the Bosnian case is not only important in its own right, it’s important as a kind of generalization that in facing a number of the potentially messy conflicts that the world is likely to be beset with at the end of the Cold War, I think it’s a far better instrument of policy to help people defend themselves that to think about sending in foreign peacekeepers to fight both sides and to preserve some futile attempt to impose peace”
Although his comments were perfectly sensible, they came rather late in the war. Furthermore, contradictions in his arguments made his humanitarianism extremely suspect. In his advocacy of military aid to Turkey, for example, he expressed the same indifference to the Turkish Kurds as Perle did:
“I didn’t say necessarily that aid to Turkey should increase, but I think that aid to Turkey remains important, and I think when the United States is involved, we have some ability to influence how that military assistance is used, and how the military performs.”
Blah, blah, blah. Of course, the Turkish military used U.S. military assistance directly in its persecution of the Kurds, and Wolfowitz surely comprehended that. As readers of Hitchens Watch already know, Hitchens exploited the suffering of the Kurds to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Yet, Perle and Wolfowitz have suddenly become his personal heroes. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/AidOb (01:16:45)
I truly question the depth of Wolfowitz’s commitment to the Bosnian cause. When he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1995, he was just an academic dean, but endorsed Washington policy as eagerly as any public official. He differed with his government only on the issue of the arms embargo:
“I have been opposed to the arms embargo since its inception, not simply because I believe that it is wrong for the United States to deny the victims of aggression the means to defend themselves. Equally important, I believe that if we refuse to allow the Bosnians the means to defend themselves, the international community would assume the responsibility for their protection, and increasingly that protection would depend on American participation.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (26:03)
In short, Wolfowitz favored arming the Bosnians so that Washington could dispense with them as quickly as possible. He dreaded the prospect of American intervention on the ground in Bosnia, which contrasts sharply with his eagerness to invade Iraq a few years later. These contradictory positions indicate that international rescue work was not his primarily objective. An additional comment about Bosnia further exposes the cynicism behind the idealistic pose:
“I think the reason that we’re concerned about this conflict in a way, let’s say, that we’re not concerned about Rwanda is because the moral dimension when it is in a place like Europe, where there are huge armies engaged, where there are nuclear weapons potentially involved, has a strategic dimension as well…If the plague of ethnic cleansing and ethnic warfare spreads in Europe, what we’ve seen in the Balkans could be really very, very small compared to the kinds of major problems we would have elsewhere.”
To Wolfowitz, it was irrelevant that nearly one millions Rwandans had perished in an African holocaust. The deaths of 200,000 Bosnians only mattered for reasons of strategy. He did not even bother to raise objections to the Dayton Accords, which left Bosnia extremely vulnerable to Serbia in terms of arms and territory:
“First of all, the goal is not parity, certainly not with the Serbs…it would be impossible to establish parity between Bosnia and Serbia. In fact, under this agreement, there are provisions, that if you work out the ratios, amount to a ratio of five for Serbia, and I believe that is one and a third for the Bosnian Federation combined. The goal is to get, I think, enough balance within Bosnia, that at least Milosevic is the man in charge, and that we don’t have the spectacle that we’ve had for the last two and a half years of the Bosnian Serbs shelling Sarajevo with impunity and pushing forward and taking large chunks of the country that aren’t theirs.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (41:20)
In other words, Wolfowitz did not seek justice for Bosnia, but containment of a problem that had proved embarrassing for Washington. He fervently hoped that the U.S. troop presence authorized by the peace agreement would end soon and “would allow us depart with our credibility and our reputation intact.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/STroopsin (1:10)
The fanboys and Hitch hens who are inclined to defend Perle and Wolfowitz should ask themselves why neither man was as eager to wage war against Serbia as they were against Iraq. Certainly, the leftist Hitchens never expressed any admiration for either man in his Nation columns or on television. As far as I can determine, the only member of the right wing on whom Hitchens lavished compliments was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:
“Well, I always think it’s a shame that Thatcher and Reagan get mentioned in the same breath because though I was a political opponent of both, and still am, I mean I think in point of character and bearing she is worth ten of him at any time…I was sort of an admirer of the old battle-ax, a grudging admirer, I must say, but in point of fortitude there’s something to admire…And yes, I think it’s good that she’s held up the West, for want of a better word, to the humiliation that it’s inflicting on itself in its complicity in the mass murder in Bosnia.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153 (26:05)
The journalist was fearless in his praise for Thatcher’s stand on Bosnia, so it was unlikely that he harbored a clandestine reverence for Perle and Wolfowitz. Back then, Hitchens was an astute observer of the Washington scene, and he must have known them for what they were. It is utterly illogical now for Hitchens to claim moral inspiration from these two loathsome practitioners of realpolitik. He is merely trying to justify the betrayal of his own conscience.
In truth, Hitchens really had no need to travel right of the political center to find inspiration. Without a doubt, the late Representative Frank McCloskey of Indiana had little use for the militaristic principles of neoconservatism. As a liberal Democrat, McCloskey had opposed the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Yet, the torment of Bosnia touched his heart, instilling in him the determination to act.
McCloskey did not speak in slick sound bites, which I found refreshing after spending hours listening to Hitchens, Wolfowitz, and Perle. One needs only to watch footage of him to note his passion and concern. To McCloskey, the Bosnian people were not a means to a strategic end, but an infinitely valuable end in themselves. In the face of Serb aggression, the very concept of neutrality disgusted him. “You cannot say that heavy artillery besieging a civilian population is warfare,” McCloskey said with earnest fury in his face. “That’s obvious to the world that this is a slaughter going on.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (4:00)
Like Hitchens, McCloskey strongly favored lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians:
“We have a military role in this already in that the U.S. was the initiating power to impose the arms embargo on Bosnia. Bosnia almost had no arms. Still, they primarily have small arms while the former Yugoslavia, if you will, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro they have large arms ten times over the Bosnians from the previous Tito and Russian connections, if you will.” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (7:20)
As early as 1992, McCloskey had advocated air strikes against the Serbs, far earlier than I would have supported them myself. Hitchens, for his part, initially only wanted to lift the arms embargo to give the Bosnians a chance to defend themselves. Based on my own research, it seems that Hitchens did not even endorse aerial engagement before his appearance on C-Span in 1994. Of course, the UN never lifted the embargo and the situation only worsened. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYu http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/EventsintheNews153 (3:08)
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that McCloskey never recommended the bombing of Serbian cities or other heavily populated areas. The Indiana representative favored airstrikes against artillery sites, supply lines, tanks, ammunition depots, and the bridges across the Drina River that connected Serbia to Bosnia.
McCloskey did not relish the idea of an American troop presence in Bosnia, nor did he think it likely. He believed that U.S. airstrikes, in combination with adequate arms for the Bosnians, would suffice. Unlike Perle and Wolfowitz, however, McCloskey would not have hesitated to support the introduction of ground forces, as a last resort, to stop the genocide.
At a time of fierce partisanship, McCloskey did not hesitate to criticize President Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat. Even though the representative was prepared to back unilateral American air strikes, he publicly revealed his doubt in 1994 that Clinton would take the initiative. “For one thing,” McCloskey said with a laugh, “the president has said several times a week for quite a long time now.” Empty threats did not impress the congressman. The few NATO air strikes that would take place would come too late. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (4:48)
Still, McCloskey stressed the importance of international cooperation with the Europeans. He would have vastly preferred multilateral action: “If all the NATO and European powers, including the U.S. together, can’t stem genocide within several hundred miles of Rome and Vienna, why do we have a need for NATO, or why should be purport to be leaders?” http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ConflictinFormerYugoslavia86 (11:10)
McCloskey shared Wolfowitz’s strategic concern that the violence in the Balkans could spread and involve other European powers, but it is clear that compassion for the Bosnian people just drove the congressman.
Would it have been an essentially neoconservative position to support unilateral action to save Bosnia? Neoconservatives are notorious for their contempt for international law. To be sure, when the UN Security Council imposed the arms embargo against the former Yugoslavia, it became international law. Congressional legislation to unilaterally lift the embargo would broken that law. All the same, Clinton could have made a more substantial effort to persuade the UN to lift the embargo. Even if lobbying the UN would have proven ineffective, Washington could have adhered to a higher principle of international law by taking unilateral action. One could have made the case that the arms embargo violated the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
Obviously, President George W. Bush and his neoconservative handlers exercised the most flagrant disregard for international law by invading Iraq without the consent of the UN Security Council. The difference is that no higher principles of international law guided Bush’s plan of attack.
According to Samantha Power’s ‘A Problem from Hell’: American and the Age of Genocide, McCloskey was prepared to sacrifice his political career for the sake of the Bosnian cause. “I would rather actively try to stop the slaughter than run and continue to win, knowing that I didn’t face this,” McCloskey said. In 1994, he lost his congressional seat.
The cardinal tenet of the neoconservative philosophy is power. It is unthinkable that Perle and Wolfowitz would ever have sacrificed their positions of power for reasons of conscience.
This month is the sixteen anniversary of the Srebernica massacre in Bosnia. As a collaborator with FGFM on his Glorious Hitch Hunt, I searched the Hitchens Watch archives for any commentary on the Bosnian War. I knew that Christopher Hitchens had reported extensively on the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavian republic.
To my dismay, I only found an August 2007 link to an appalling article by Brendan O’Neill in The American Conservative. O’Neill argued that Hitchens’s future embrace of neoconservatism stemmed from his principled defense of the Bosnian people, who were predominantly Muslim:
“Many of today’s liberal hawks, who call for war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, were on the [indent]side of the militants during the Bosnian conflict. Indeed, back then the pro-interventionist Left and al-Qaeda were allies. [indent]Both groups backed the Bosnian Muslim Army and demonized the Bosnian Serbs as savages. Liberal hawks, including [indent]Hitchens, did it with propaganda, al-Qaeda did it by deed. But both the black-and-white worldviews of the Left neocons and the bin Ladenites were forged in the fires of the Bosnian war.”
This is a distortion of the truth, of history, and of Hitchens’s record. O’Neill may leave the reader with the erroneous impression of Bosnia as an artificial spawn of religious fanatics. In fact, Bosnia was an independent state as early as the twelfth century. The Bosnian people, who were European Slavs, slowly embraced Islam once their country fell under the control of Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. As historian Noel Malcolm observed in Bosnia: A Short History, this gradual pace of conversion indicated the unforced nature of the conversions. Moreover, the Turkish governors were remarkably tolerant of the Orthodox Christian and Jewish minorities there. The Orthodox Christian Serbs, who lived in Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia, belonged to the same ethnic group as the Bosnians, and spoke the same language. Religion was the only essential difference between the Bosnians and the Serbs.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire acquired Bosnia. After the fall of that empire in World War I, Bosnia-Herzegovina joined Serbia, Catholic Croatia and Slovenia form the newly independent nation of Yugoslavia. Following a brutal Nazi occupation, the Bosnians managed to maintain their own territorial integrity within Yugoslavia until the nation collapsed upon the end of the Cold War.
Contrary to claims that Bosnian nationalism created the conflict, Bosnia might have remained an autonomous republic in union with Serbia and Croatia had it not felt profoundly threatened. “There is no return to a united Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs said. “The time has come for the Serbian people to organize itself as a totality, without regard to the administrative borders.” According to military theorist Norman Cigar’s Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”, this meant that Karadzic and his sponsor, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, were conspiring to carve up Bosnia for the sake of a Greater Serbia.
Defeating O’Neill’s point of view, Cigar effectively made the case that Bosnia was far more secular than the putative nation of Bosnian Serbs. The military theorist contrasted the referendum proposal that officially brought Bosnia into independent nationhood, with the one that created Republika Srpsk, or the Bosnian Serb “Republic.” Bosnian Serbs voted to “remain in Yugoslavia together with the Serbs of Serbia, Montenegro, Krajina, Vojvodina, and Kosovo.” In other words, the Serbs sought to create an empire exclusively for Orthodox Christians. Members of the Bosnian community, on the other hand, elected “a sovereign and independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state of equal citizens, constituted by the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina: the Muslims, Serbs, Croatians, and members of the other peoples who live there.”
In 1992, the war began. The Serbs began a campaign euphemistically known as “ethnic cleansing.” They sought to terrorize Bosnian civilians out of territory they desired for themselves. Ethnic cleansing led to the deaths of 200,000 people, including 12,000 children; the rape of 50,000 women; and the displacement of 2.2 million people from their homes.
At exceptional points in world history, evil literally battles with good. The war between Serbia and Bosnia was not a fair fight. In “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power noted that the Central Intelligence Agency’s conclusion that Serbs were “responsible for the vast majority of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.” Apart from isolated incidents, the Serbian government and its clients in Bosnia bore responsibility for “90 percent” of the war crimes.
Reporting on the ground in Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Hitchens eloquently and bravely confirmed the destruction of a cosmopolitan, secular society. “During respites from the fighting, I was able to speak with detachments of Bosnian volunteers,” Hitchens wrote for the September 14, 1992 issue of The Nation magazine. “At every stop they would point with pride and cheerfulness to their own chests and to those of others, saying, ‘I am Muslim, he is Serb, he is Croat’.”
Hitchens celebrated Sarajevo’s cultural diversity: “In the Old City itself, you can find a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic and an Orthodox church within yards of one another.” As much as Hitchens admired Sarajevo, he could gaze upon that beautiful city with clear eyes: “There is no need to romanticize the Muslim majority in Bosnia. But they have evolved a culture that expressed the plural and tolerant side of the Ottoman tradition…and they have no designs on the territory or identity of others.”
Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic personalized this cosmopolitanism. Izetbegovic was Islamically pious, but when Hitchens asked for his opinion of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, “he gave the defining reply of the ‘moderate’ Muslim, saying that he did not like the book but could not agree to violence against the author.”
For Hitchens, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. I was struck by the journalist’s empathy and respect for Muslim people, sentiments that he has since lost. For the journalist, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. In the December 6, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens reported on the fatalities at a Sarajevo school that had been hit by mortar fire: “I noted the children laid out in slabs and vaguely registered the fact that the small boy in jeans with eyes still open was about the age and weight of my own son.” Does Hitchens prefer to forget that young men the age of his own son have fallen victim to American bombs dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan?
Back in 1993, Hitchens could still write respectfully of Muslim civilization. He lamented the Serbian demolition of Stari Most, or the Old Bridge, in the Bosnian city of Mostar, “a span of perfectly suspended marble, gorgeously engineered in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent.”
Hitchens’s articles were an elegy for a culture as well as a people: “The minarets are gone, the mosques have been profaned and dynamited, and now all the bridges are down. Some of these treasures ranked with those of Venice and Istabnul as cultural heritage. Many of them were even more beautiful than the World Trade Center.” The World Trade Center had been attacked for the first time that year, and would be attacked again in 2001. Certainly, Bosnians were victims of terrorism, too. I do not understand why O’Neill denied this fact.
Besides the brilliance of Hitchens’s reportage, his personal humility also impressed me. Appearing on C-Span in 1994, Hitchens responded to a jeer that he should fight the Serbs himself. “It will sound absurd coming from a pudgy person in his mid-forties such as myself, but I very much admire those who have gone to volunteer their services in Bosnia, of whom there are some thousands now, and I wish there were more of them,” he said. “And I wish I had the nerve to do it myself.”
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Since then, his personality had undergone a significant deterioration. When opponents to the wars of George W. Bush recommended Hitchens’s personal enlistment, the journalist could only sneer: “The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians…It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.” It would be risible to claim that the average American faced greater danger from al-Qaeda than the average Bosnian faced from Serbian aggression only a few years before.
O’Neill accused Hitchens of demonizing the Serbian people. Actually, Hitchens took pains to acknowledge that individual Serbs had also fallen victim to the evils of Serbian imperialism. In September of 1992, the journalist pointed out that “none of the Bosnian Serbs I met complained of cruelty or discrimination, and where they heard of isolated cases they reminded me that it was the Serbian forces who had stormed across the River Drina,” which served as the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia. As the artillery bombardment of a helpless Sarajevo continued, Hitchens informed his Nation readers on June 15, 1995 that “an unusually large number of Serb civilians in Sarajevo had fallen victim to the renewed assault. The response of the Karadzic regime in (or perhaps beyond the) Pale was to take these pictures, edit them for its own TV station and proclaim that these Serbs were the victims of rape and butchery by Muslim fundamentalists.” If only Hitchens would extend that same humanity to our “enemies” today.
Hitchens did not call for the occupation of Serbia, nor advocate the bombing of its capital city, which President Bill Clinton would later authorize during the Kosovo War. Obviously, Hitchens now has less scruple about targeting areas heavily populated by civilians. During the bombardment of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, Hitchens only complained “the death toll was not nearly high enough…too many [jihadists] have escaped.”
Back then, he did not even insist on Washington’s right to regime change in Belgrade, as deplorable as the Milosevic government may have been. Hitchens only called for lifting of the 1991 arms embargo that the United Nations had imposed against all the former Yugoslavian republics. A local political scientist told Hitchens in September of 1992: “The arms embargo to ‘both sides’ is pure hypocrisy. The Bosnians need arms to defend themselves…” Hitchens concurred: “This, by the way, echoed the street opinion in Sarajevo, which roundly opposed the idea of foreign troops fighting their battles but bitterly recalled that the lavishly accoutered People’s Army had been paid out of the historic tax levies of Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians, and witheringly criticized the moral equivalence that the great powers are using as a hand-washing alibi.” Since Belgrade had been the capital of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs had simply helped themselves to the weapons of the old Communist regime.
Remarkably, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic requested the withdrawal of all U.N. personnel in the spring of 1993. In the June 7, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens praised this request:
“A nation that is fighting for survival actually demands to be left alone to fight its own battles. Though certainly [indent]prompted by the hypocrisy of the NATO powers, which in another historic ‘first’ have announced that the defense of Bosnia is unthinkable because there are foreign troops already there, it sharply distinguishes the Bosnians from, say, the Kuwaiti monarchy or the South Vietnamese junta, and many other clients who were not too proud to clamor for dependent status.”
Unlike Kuwait, of course, Bosnia lacked oil. While the Clinton administration inherited the fear of a Bosnian quagmire from Bush the First, it is important to understand why the United States encountered the Vietnamese version. Americans were the unwanted aggressors in the final phase of Vietnam’s war for independence. The Vietnam War was not a tragedy that happened for Americans; the Americans inflicted the tragedy on Vietnam as well as on themselves. In the case of Bosnia, the Serbs were the aggressors whom the international community should have driven out. “These days, the worst anyone can find to say about the racist devastation and murder and rape of Vietnam is that poor old ‘we’ somehow got ‘bogged down’ in it,” Hitchens pointed out. “Nobody cares to remember that the Milosevic role was played by LBJ.” Obviously, we should not forget the roles of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.
Rightly, Hitchens condemned the weakness to the U.N. response to the Serbian onslaught. Readers of the June 15, 1995 issue of The Nation learned that “control over Sarajevo airport had been ceded to the Serbs by its U.N. guards, who allowed the Serbs to determine how many flights landed and when, and which civilians might board or not board the planes.” Not only did the U.N. deprive Bosnian forces of the means of self-defense, the international organization tried to prevent them from fighting at all. Sarajevo remained trapped by the Serbian siege because “the NATO-proclaimed ‘exclusion zone’ around the city, which forbade even the stationing of heavy artillery, had become used as a platform for bombardment of civilians, the city itself being held hostage for the good behavior of Bosnian forces elsewhere.” [indent]The indifference of the Western world made the massacre at Srebernica inevitable in July of 1995. Although the UN had made Srebernica a safe haven for Bosnian refugees, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic seized the city. The Bosnian Serbs divided the relatively young men from the others, who then were bussed to the “safe haven” of Tuzla. In her chapter on Srebernica, Samantha Power provided a terrifying account of what happened next:
“On the two-and-a-half hour drive, many pressed their faces up to the glass of the bus windows in the hopes of spotting their men. Bodies were strewn along the roadside, some mutilated, many with their throats slit. Trembling young Muslim men were coerced into giving the three-finger Serb salute. Large clusters of men, hands tied behind their backs, heads between their knees, sat awaiting instructions. The buses were frequently stopped along the way so that Serbian gunmen could select the young, attractive women for a roadside rape.”
Meanwhile, Mladic’s forces butchered nearly 8,000 men. One Bosnian man who miraculously survived recounted his experience:
“They took us off a truck in twos and led us out into some kind of meadow. People started taking off blindfolds and yelling in fear because the meadow was littered with corpses. I was put in the front row, but I fell over to the left before the first shots were fired so that bodies fell on top of me. They were shooting at us…from all different directions. About an hour later I looked up and saw bodies everywhere. There were bringing in more trucks with more people to be executed. After a bulldozer driver walked away, I crawled over the dead bodies and into the forest.”
More than ten years later, the International Court of Justice classified the Srebernica massacre as an act of genocide.
The Serbs may not have planned to kill every Bosnian in sight, but the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined the crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group.”
Reflecting in the November 20, 1995 issue of The Nation, Hitchens accused the Clinton administration of possessing foreknowledge of the genocide at Srebernica:
“In the past few days, it has been said that there was no warning of the massacre and that the CIA spy-in-the-sky satellites (which only disgorged their information after the inhabitants had been killed and buried) were therefore not asked the [indent]right questions until it was too late…Everybody knew what was intended, and everybody knew on past form what would happen at least to the males of military age.”
Under international law, the Genocide Convention had obligated the United States prevent the genocide. Yet, the signatory nation did nothing. Why? In addition to the supremely logical explanation that Bosnia possessed no valuable natural resources, Hitchens offered another insight into the apathy of the United States and its western allies:
“Now, what were the roots of this incredible cultural, intellectual, moral philistinism? ...One motive is obviously anti-Muslim prejudice…If Christian churches, whether Orthodox or Catholic, were being burned, and if Christian civilians were being burned by Muslim irregulars with…definite support from a neighboring Muslim power in Europe, who is there here who thinks that Western Europe would have regarded it as a matter of indifference, or it as proof that the Balkan people are incorrigible, or as another proof that the warring factions of the Balkans are at it again? I don’t think so.”
The Dayton Accords substantiate that the Clinton administration did not regard justice for a Muslim people as a priority. The Bosnian Serbs, who only comprised one-third of the population of Bosnia, won half of its territory. In effect, the Dayton accords rewarded Serbian aggression.
Since then, Hitchens has distorted the history of the Bosnian War as badly as Brendan O’Neill. Writing on the tenth anniversary of the Srebernica genocide, Hitchens claimed that “the neoconservatives, to their great honor, mostly supported an effort to prevent genocide being inflicted on Muslims.”
Tellingly, Hitchens did not bother to list these neoconservative heroes. I doubt that he refrained from compiling such a list because he feared that it would be too long. The most diabolical neoconservative of all, the future Vice-President Richard Cheney, had little in interest in Bosnia. Samantha Power recorded Cheney’s ignorant dismissal of the slaughter. Late in his tenure as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush the First, Cheney claimed: “It’s tragic, but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict…for centuries.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell was equally craven. As secretary of state more than ten years later, the civilian Powell would deceptively make the case before the United Nations for Hitchens’s beloved Iraq War. The secretary of state functioned as a neoconservative in fact if not in name. With the most profound irony, the still-uniformed Powell had joined Cheney more than a decade before to persuade “the President that the risks of military engagement were far too high – even to use U.S. airpower to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia’s hungry civilians.”
Military intervention against genocide should only be an extremely last resort. Historically, it would have been possible for Washington to prevent acts of genocide in number of ways. In case of the case of Vietnam, Americans simply could have stopped committing genocide by withdrawing. In the case of East Timor, Americans simply could have stopped supporting the occupying power of Indonesia. In case of Bosnia, Americans simply could have given the persecuted nation a chance to fight the Serbian forces. In the case of Iraq in 2003, however, no intervention was necessary. Saddam Hussein, whose military power had been contained by the international community, had lost access to his Kurdish victims. In truth, the Iraqi leader would never have had the opportunity to kill the Kurds without American support in the first place. Now, the American occupation of Iraq has become a genocide in itself.
Nevertheless, Hitchens has insisted on learning the wrong historical lessons:
“I reflect on what was not done at Srebernica, and what ought to have been [indent]done in Rwanda, and on what was put off long with the Taliban and the Baathists, and I think what an honor it is to [indent]have such enemies. Co-existence with them is not possible, which is good, because it is not desirable or tolerable, either.”
His best writing on the Bosnian tragedy is long behind him.
While we wait to see how late Our Boy will be with his latest Slate essay, let us revisit happier times when The Great Man was beating that ticking clock metaphor like a dead horse. Be prepared to lose a town a week!
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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