Hitch-22
by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.

Whether correct or not (most people find at least something about which to disagree with “Hitch”), it would be unfair at least to say that the man is uninteresting, not simply for his intriguing mix of ideas, but for the rather storied life he’s led—even moreso than I was aware. In latter days, he’s become something of a darling of the pro-liberation crowd with respect to Iraq; he’s a frequent contributor to Fox News, though I imagine he finds most of their bobble-head commentators to be irritating and boorish; simultaneously, he’s come to be a leading voice in anti-theist rhetoric (certainly, his lecture schedule has borne that out). But, in fact, I think Hitchens as political polemicist unfairly impinges upon Hitchens as a literary critic and even, oddly enough, Hitchens as a travel writer.

Given how generally well-spoken and well-read Hitchens is, it should come as no surprise that he was something of a nerdy boy, excelling at the private English boarding school to which his parents sent him. It will be a surprise to those who only know the pro-war latter-day Hitchens to know that he spent most of his life being a card-carrying socialist, getting arrested at rallies, demonstrating against dictators, and generally doing the things that insufferable and indispensable young activists do. It was also a trifle surprising to learn that Hitchens is or was bisexual—or at least took part in homosexual sex up through his college years. Ever the understated Brit when it comes to himself, he never comes out and says this, but it’s clear enough that it’s so. Of the many other stridently homosexual writers that Hitchens knows, he is perhaps the most vocal of Gore Vidal (“massive old darling” that he is).

Rather than stick to a strictly chronological progression, Hitchens divides his chapters by subject, ordered more or less by their order of occurrence. His childhood passes quickly, and I am not terribly surprised that he glosses over this. One of the earliest critical junctions comes at that point where his mother leaves with another man and the two commit suicide in Athens. Hitchens, then in college, describes having to see the crime scene with a sort of distant horror that comes off as heartbreaking. I’ve never known the man to be overly sentimental, and indeed he describes the experience with a philosophical disgust rather than a particularly personal one. This is a memoir, after all, and not a biography: Hitchens controls the content and tone, and thus one shouldn’t expect any shocking revelations from the Hitchens you know and love (hate?) from his appearances on television and previous books. In fact, if you follow his lecture/debate circuit to the extent that Youtube et al. will allow, you’ll find that he uses some of his same phrases, expressions, and stories from the lecture in his book (or vice versa). Though I’ve no doubt that he’s very good at extemporizing (in fact, I’ve seen him do on Uncommon Knowledge), this book as with his speeches is a sort of rehearsed intelligence; or, more likely, he extemporizes from a pool of practiced points, since he lectures so frequently upon the same subject.

One chapter is devoted to his closest friend, Martin Amis; another to Salman Rushdie, which is of course a springboard to Hitchens to express his views on religion, tyrants, and religious tyrants. In fairness to Hitch, he abstains from becoming overly polemical with respect to religion, since his last book was devoted entirely to the subject. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining his views on the various conflicts in the Middle East, which have distanced him from many of his former associates (and employers), but this is largely in service of an overarching point that Hitchens attempts to make with Hitch-22, namely the sort of “double life” that he’s led, both in the sense of believing in two (apparently) contradictory ideas and of having so often compromise his ideals in order to get a story. But don’t mistake me: this is no wistful or maudlin look back, nor an expurgation of youthful indiscretions; though the Hitchens writing his memoirs may be different than the Hitchens planting coffee plants in Cuba after Castro’s revolution, there’s an internal consistency that is at least somewhat gratifying. The same moral impetus made Hitchens (initially) celebrate Castro as made him encourage the invasion (er, “liberation”) of Iraq; defend Paul Wolfowitz and excoriate Henry Kissinger; defame Mother Theresa and laud Thomas Jefferson. The book reminded me more of Love, Poverty, and War than it did his most recent work; stiff-lipped and intellectual, it is occasionally turgid or pedantic, but mostly it’s a fascinating (albeit circumscribed) window into the mind of arguably one of the brightest public commentators of our generation.

Blood, Class and Empire
by Christopher Hitchens

Nowadays, Christopher Hitchens is usually known either for his antitheist views or his staunch support for the war in Iraq; it’s often forgotten that The Hitch has been a journalist for a long time, is fiercely intelligent, and his total output spans a variety of topics, not just his most recent polemical choices. I read some of his collected essays, Love, Poverty, and War, which was fabulous (and only switched to Iraq-related topics late in the book).

Blood, Class and Empire was published originally in 1990, though it reads as though written in 1988, at the beginning of George H.W. Bush’s term in office. Though the book in its republished form sports a preface by Hitchens that ties the book into the recent events, it’s important to remember that the book has no knowledge of anything that’s happened in the last 20 years, which somehow strange and unsettling when reading about geopolitics.

The thrust of Hitchens work is that there is a “special relationship” (Churchill’s phrase, itself quoted when used) between the United States and Britain that has existed since America’s founding. Like the sometimes strained interaction of blood relations, it is not always pleasant, or fruitful, but it informs and qualifies most of the geopolitical actions of both countries. Hitchens is something of a British expatriate, having only become an American citizen in 2007; nevertheless, he’s sat astride the Atlantic, with one foot in either country, since the early 1980s, and written profoundly about both.

I’m not going to lie: Blood, Class and Empire is a little dense. In fact, it’s a 400-page politics soup, name after name after name in a manner which can become numbing after a while. Some parts were straightforward: the three or so chapters covering Churchill’s era—a fleshing-out of Hitchen’s opening observation about the enduring love of Americans for the stalwart British politician—are fabulous and insightful. At other points, well, let’s just say that my brain can only hold so many mid-level politicians in three or four different countries before I start to get confused. As a writer, Hitchens circa 1990 was much different that I know him today: whether intentionally or as a by-product of his intellect, Blood, Class and Empire is grammatically complex, using a denser syntax than he adopts as an essayist in the 21st century. Perhaps concision is a skill he learned later.

For all these minor criticisms, however, Hitchens has written a wonderful book of an immense scope and a real value. Even though a connection between American and England is ever-present in our cultural consciousness, we don’t often pause to consider its cause or true nature. We may be a former colony of the British Empire, but that in and of itself is no reason for the “special relationship.” The answer, as Hitchens shows, is a combination of a shared [core of] language, a shared/intertwined history, most important, mutual political, military, and economic interests in the 20th century (usually aided by the former items). His study begins more or less at the fin de siècle, at the time of Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and a world full of ostensible white man’s burdens. This early history is underscored by a shared race—a cult of Anglo-Saxonism, as it were—and all the unpleasant extensions of this. As this age ceded to Great War, however, the two countries formed the relationship they more or less retain today, strained though it may be. Hitchens splits his chapters into chunks of time, divulging their actors and motivations, with extensive use of quotes. The exception to this is the last few chapters, which are topical rather than chronological; he devotes a chapter to each country’s respective intelligence services, for instance, using Ian Fleming’s life and novels as illustrations of the caricatured phenomena.

Though daunting, Blood, Class and Empire represents an immense intellectual output, and likely criminally underappreciated—not least in the face of Hitchens’ (a) more readable and (b) more controversial and therefore (c) more popular works. For Hitchens fans, this book is a must; for politics or history buffs, this is a must. Even for the casual reader, this represents a clear and insightful look into Anglo-American relations for the last century, and shouldn’t go unread.

October 21, 2002 @ The Commonwealth Club.

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
by Karen Armstrong

Among religious historians, Karen Armstrong is a titan. Certainly, she’s prolific: since 1982, she’s published 22 books, as well as articles in other media as well. She gets a nod, however curt, from Christopher Hitchens in his recent polemic, as an important—if sympathetic—figure in the world of religious scholarship. Her books deal mostly with the major monotheisms, some more specifically than others, but A History of God is considered one of her more famous books, perhaps in part because it’s a broad stroke that looks at the three major Abrahamic faiths simulataneously.

Buddhism and Hinduism may comprise a fair chunk of the global religiosity because of China and India, but Christianity, Judaism, and Islam represent a whopping 54% of the world’s population. These three Abrahamic religions—their founding and their history—are Armstrong’s focus here. It’s not an argument for any particular theology at all, so it should be an uncontroversial book, unless you’ve got your rose-colored glasses on, and you think that, for instance, Martin Luther wasn’t a rather bloodthirsty anti-Semite.

To a great degree, A History of God is a recitation of facts and little else. Important historical figures, important religious texts, major religious wars: these things are all in abundance; in fact, there are some chapters where names and titles fly so fast and furious that I have to reread parts just to keep them straight. If there was a “point” to the book—that is, some kind of conclusion that can be wrangled out of it—it is that, according to Armstrong, the history of these monotheisms isn’t nearly as consistent or as neat as we’d like to think. It was quite a while after the “official” founding of the Christian church, for instance, before there was even a general consensus about the nature of the doctrine of the Trinity. Even more surprising is the number of hats that Islam has worn, always seeming to flip back and forth between periods of amazing progressivism and confounding conservatism.

Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the very nature of God, an issue that all of these religions have wrestled with. Is God an ineffable Mystery? The eastern Christians seem to think so, and that is part of the joy of their faith. Or, is God more anthropomorphic, a being with concerns like us and emotions like us, who sits and watches and interacts with the universe? Armstrong contends that, especially in modern times, people attempt to have it both ways, which leads to some confusion about what it is we actually believe about God.

This all rather neatly segues into the last section of the book, which is a discussion of God in the modern world. The complexity of life and the difficulty in reconciling it with a coherent religious faith, is likely a major cause of the recent shift to fundamentalism in the three Abrahamic faiths. When in doubt, simplify.

As much as Armstrong seemed like a bit of a rockstar among the religious historian set, I admit that I was a little disappointed at how dry the reading got at times. In some parts, the book was joy to read; in others, it was little more than a laundry list of Semitic names and a sentence about how his or her (usually his) beliefs happened to be different than the norm. Each religion has enough of a long and storied history by itself, but trying to cover all the minute doctrinal fluctuations in all three of them was perhaps too much to cram into a single book. As a primer, it should have had a better sense of what needed saying, and what needed excision.

Regardless, I would recommend this book, or any book by Armstrong, who continues to have a strong publishing presence.

God Is Not Great
by Christopher Hitchens

Continuing a long and somewhat tawdry literary affair with the much-loved and oft-maligned Christopher Hitchens, I am reading his latest, God Is Not Great. This is his first book that deals with his rather public denunciation of religion, though to faithful readers of his other books, his articles, or his interviews, it’s no surprise at all. In a manner much to the consternation of the political conservatives who gleefully forward his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Christopher Hitchens is a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, lumped together with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris as the new breed of intellectual disbelief (so-called the Four Horsemen, either with affection or opprobrium, depending on with whom you’re speaking).

What may be said almost without reservation about Christopher Hitchens is that he is the most eloquent and compelling writer of his little group. While Richard Dawkins may have made a name for himself in the mainstream by his well-written and comprehensible accounts of science, and likewise Daniel Dennett has a long history of successful philosophical tracts (Sam Harris being the relative newcomer); Hitchens, however, is a veteran journalist, essayist, literary critic, and his breadth of knowledge, grasp of language, and staunch support for liberty of any and all sorts makes him a powerful intellectual force.

Some or much of God Is Not Great is historical in nature; he references, at length, the noted historians Karen Armstrong and Bart Ehrman, among others, to make historical criticisms of the three major monotheisms and their inherent schisms. Dubiously, Hitchens seems to insists that the person of Jesus is far from a historical truth, though in fact I think Dr. Ehrman himself would disagree with the conclusion, depending of course on how you define the person of Jesus. Some history is more recent: in dealing with the common misconception that disbelief somehow begets violence, intolerance, and lawlessness, Hitchens debunks more recent examples (Stalin, Hitler, & al.) and in doing so notes some of the more reprehensible actions of the Catholic church, even in the last century.

Remarkable, I think, about Hitchens’ book is that, unlike Dawkins, at least—who while generally civil, made few concessions—Hitchens reveals that he has tremendous respect for religious intellectuals, and for the generous intellectual, literary, and scientific achievements many of them have left for posterity. Evelyn Waugh comes to mind immediately: though Waugh was a staunch Catholic, and by extension a supporter of the Vatican-supported fascist regimes in Italy and Spain, for instance, Hitchens dearly loves and respects the literary canon that the man left us. In this way that Hitchen’s book, however uncompromising, feels less like a screed and more like a tract in the grand tradition of those he so dearly admires—Hume, for instance, and Socrates and Paine. Some old canards, such as Anselm’s ontological argument, and Paley’s argument from design, Hitchens dismisses outright with the same easy answers as most other disbelievers.

It is interesting to note that Hitchens’ book, while arguablky the most overtly intellectual and steadily uncompromising, also feels the least condescending and the most pluralistic. He says, in one moment, that he doesn’t really care what you do or believe so long as you stop trying to convert him and it is this ultimate conceit of religion—that it cannot for a moment respect the right of another to live without obligation to a particular moral/cosmological/ritual code—that is its greatest fault and that which has led to the most of the suffering commonly attributed to religion.

Some memes are held in common with other noted atheist/agnostic writers, which is only to be expected. The notion of a child being of the faith of his parents, even before he is of the age to understand, is a notable one, as is the notion of child mutilation (think circumcision of various sorts). In fact, Hitchens devotes a whole chapter, entitled “Is Religion Child Abuse?” to the subject, which, even if you don’t ultimately think so, is deserving of some contemplation. The ritual removal of that which can never be reinstated is hardly a fair thing to do to a child for whom there is no possibility of consent and a very real possibility of regret.

In something by way of conclusion, I feel compelled to say that God Is Not Great is not a likely tool of conversion, which Hitchens hints/hopes at some point in the book; at most, it will disgust the faithful, who will likely never read more than a summary of it, and convince only the disbelievers, for whom I am disinclined to use the worn metaphor of a choir. However, God Is Not Great manages, I feel, to walk the line between a screed and a genuine criticism, which should also be good reading for the faithful; it never hurts to get a good prod every now and then.

Thomas Paine's 'The Rights of Man'
by Christopher Hitchens

I continue my torrid literary affair with Christopher Hitchens with his latest short biography. He’s previously done a slim tome about Thomas Jefferson; now, he turns to famed pamphleteer Thomas Paine, beginning a theme of which Susan Jacoby would be proud.

Ostensibly a biography of Paine, one gets the feeling early on that Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography is going to end up being itself something of a philosophical treatise, piggy-backed on the narrative framework of a biography. Hitchens begins with a sizeable introduction which is dark with just such portent. He dispatches swiftly with Paine’s childhood and young years as a sailor, and later as an oft-fired government bureaucrat (this is in his native England). His penchant for rhetorical rabble-rousing made him a few good friends (eventually with Ben Franklin) and plenty of enemies.

His exploits in America are of course his best-known: he wrote Common Sense, the most famous of several pamphlets that he authored in support of a war for American independence—and it is notable that he called explicitly for an independent American state, since there was still a sizable population that simply wanted a redress of grievances and not complete secession from their motherland. He is, perhaps, the first to use the phrase “United States of America.” He was an ardent abolitionist, and originally influenced a passage in the Declaration of Independence denouncing the slave trade, though it was excised by committee before the final revision.

But easily half of this book focuses on Paine after the American Revolution, when he returned to France to foment a revolution there. Between France and England, Paine made plenty more enemies: his efforts east of the Atlantic were not as fruitful as those west of it. The French revolution changed states more often than a transistor, and was infinitely more bloodthirsty.

Curiously, Hitchens focuses on Paine’s intellectual rival, a man by the name of Edmund Burke, an Irish author and political theorist who wholeheartedly supported the American colonists’ independence, but strong opposed the French Revolution. Burke saw the French Revolution not as the true establishment of democracy, but a violent compulsive reaction to the suddenly unpopular notion of monarchy or hereditary power, which he curiously supported in his native Britain.

The literary catfights in this period are a subject of great interest to Hitchens, for whom they are a platform to wax idealistic, as he so often does, about the nature of liberty, the vagaries of inherited v. elected power, and the effect and wisdom of religion—specifically in connection to Paine’s Age of Reason an argument for deism among other things.

Paine eventually came back to the United States, where Federalist detested him for his ideas on government, devout religionists detested him for his ideas on deism, and yet others detested him for his associated with the French Revolution. He, poor and largely unpopular, in 1809.

If you’re interested in an in-depth history of Thomas Paine’s life, Hitchen’s brief treatment might not be for you. If you would merely like to know about Paine, and his influence, then you might appreciate what Hitchens has to say: it’s a good primer on Paine and his legacy.

And so begins the fourth year of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme, where I challenge myself to read a minimum of 52 books in the coming calendar year, and then briefly review each book here on A Modest Construct. Keep a close watch as books are added to the list.

The Gang

Other bloggers doing participating in this meme for 2008:

• Rob
• J Madigan
• Dennis Kennedy
• P.E.B.K.A.C.
• Tindrumfire
• AcademyX
• Maw Books
• Nicholas Tam
• Deja Fu

The Books

The Golden Compass
by Phillip Pullman

Publisher: Knopf

Year: 2006 (reprint)

Pages: 432

№1

The Subtle Knife
by Phillip Pullman

Publisher: Knopf

Year: 2007 (reprint)

Pages: 368

№2

The Amber Spyglass
by Phillip Pullman

Publisher: Knopf

Year: 2007 (reprint)

Pages: 560

№3

The Daily Show and Philosophy
ed. Jason Holt

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Year: 2007

Pages: 280

№4

The First Word
by Christine Kenneally

Publisher: Viking Adult

Year: 2007

Pages: 368

№5

Dave Barry's History of the Millenium (So Far)
by Dave Barry

Publisher: Putnam Adult

Year: 2007

Pages: 224

№6

The Big Con
by Jonathan Chait

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Year: 2007

Pages: 304

№7

Thomas Paine's 'The Rights of Man'
by Christopher Hitchens

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Year: 2007

Pages: 160

№8

Bill of Wrongs
by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose

Publisher: Random House

Year: 2007

Pages: 240

№9

The Year of Living Biblically
by A.J. Jacobs

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year: 2007

Pages: 400

№10

Shakespeare: The World as Stage
by Bill Bryson

Let me first say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am absolutely crazy about Bill Bryson. Really, the man can do no wrong. I think perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever said about his books is that his very first one was kind of dry. I therefore look forward to each new Bryson release with a fervor most people save for Harry Potter.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a short book, written as a (sort-of) one off project for Bryson. The book is one in a series of brief biographies. Luckily, it’s not as short Bryson’s African Diary, but I was disappointed nonetheless, not by the quality of the book, but by my selfish desire for an endless amount of Bryson’s prose.

Bryson does manage to pack his 200 pages with excellent material, however. Writing a biography about Shakespeare is a difficult process, because despite being one of the most revered authors in the English language, he is shrouded in mystery, his legacy built by a canon of plays and poetry and piecemeal legal documents and snippets of text. If you were to play a drinking game wherein you did a shot every time Bryson uses phrases like “We can’t know for certain” or “It’s impossible to know,” you’d be comatose by the end of the book. Yet, as Bryson points out early on, we know more about Shakespeare than any other English playwright of that era. Much like I thirst for new Bryson material, so society at large thirsts for information about this demigod of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama.

Given the relative paucity of direct historical data about Shakespeare, much of Bryson’s biography is told with context: he talks about the era, and the places where Shakespeare would have likely been. He talks about the vagaries of playwriting and performance; he talks about Shakespeare’s father John, and Shakespeare’s various and sundry relatives. He also talks about what others of the time had to say about Shakespeare. He even, ironically enough, transmits a great deal of information about the lack of information about Shakespeare.

Finally, and with great gusto, Bryson deals with the conspiracy theorists: those that think Francis Bacon is Shakespeare, or that Ben Jonson is Shakespeare. Or that a slew of different people are Shakespeare. The author comes down hard on the conservative side, insisting that despite the many holes in our history of Shakespeare, there’s no convincing evidence for most of the marginal theories about his life. The truth is simply that Shakespeare was an exceptional writer that left us very little about himself.

Bryson does all this without fawning or obseqious language; he manages his trademark blend of anecdote and information. Like every other Bryson book, this one is fantastic and you’re a horrible person if you don’t read it.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

Few people, with the notable exception of perhaps Christopher Hitchens (who is perhaps better known as a warhawk than an atheist), are as outspokenly critical of religion as Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion represents his first effort at a book whose entire text is (ostensibly) an attack of religion—his previous works, such as The Ancestor’s Tale have been mostly scientific works about evolutionary processes or mimetics.

Having heard Dawkins in various other contexts—a few interviews, some previous books, &c.—much of the book wasn’t new to me. Almost as if the entire religious debate writ small, The God Delusion contains its fair share of recycled material and careworn phrases. Which is not to say that Dawkins isn’t an excellent writer—indeed, his slew of successful books is what pushed him into prominence—and that he isn’t very thorough in his attack of religion.

There were a few portions in particular that stood out to me, and which I found particularly interesting. The first was a lengthy chapter about mimetics: mimetics, or the sort of “evolutionary” passing of “memes” (units of cultural information). I find this kind of social science fascinating, because what we’re talking about here is how culture is passed on generationally. I think even religionists would agree with most of the tenets here, even if their noses would crinkle at some of the terminology that Dawkins uses. Dawkin’s question is Assuming no supernatural impetus for its longevity, why is religion such a healthy and persistent meme?. He reasons that the answer must either be that religion does cultural good or that it’s caused by a “mis-firing” of other impulses. His eventual conclusion is—grudgingly—a mixture of both. But I am now inspired to go find some other works on mimetics.

The other particularly poignant section, and apparently Dawkin’s pet peeve, is the way in which young children are immediately labeled with the religion of their parents, as though the largely arbitrary matter of a progenitor’s religion was somehow congential. 5-year-olds can be “Christian children” or “Muslim children” or “Buddhist children,” and yet you would never heard children referred to as “Marxist children,” “Contractarian children,” or “Anti-establishment anarchist children.” Given my vehement stance for intellectual liberty, this seems to me a rather good point. Kids are too young to know any better: parents obviously think that they are doing their kids a favor, but are they really? Personally, I think this sort of nonsense only increases sectarian tension.

The God Delusion had some good points, but overall I must admit that it didn’t blow me away by any stretch of the imagination. But a solid Dawkins work, to be sure, with a few high points that make it worth recommending.

Several weeks ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associates maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read accounts like Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Iraq from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion, and its message seems congruent with the cries that have been heard since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. The most important “string”—to borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in the story of Iraq’s fall is the similarities to the ailing Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003, but it was many years in the making—arguably as far back as the original Gulf War. At that time, the first President Bush had foregone a removal of Hussein from power, noting that an invasion of Baghdad would have forced the United States into a position of control in Iraq, alienating Arab allies in the region and generally precipitating a disaster of every conceivable sort—a possibly “barren outcome” (Bush and Scowcroft 489). Bush Senior’s reaction to Iraq was a measured response that sought to establish a precedent for international aggression, a policy fresh from the lessons of the Cold War and Soviet belligerence. In fact, the United Nations was continuing this admittedly cautious policy in 2003, when it refused support for President George W. Bush’s intended invasion of Iraq, supposedly to relieve Hussein of his nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs, no evidence of which had been found at that time by Hans Blix and his team of U.N. weapons inspectors. To date, no evidence of recent illicit weapons programs have been found, save for a specious reference to “Weapons of Mass Destruction-related program activities” (George W. Bush 3), prompting a noisome revision of the United States’ motivations for invading Iraq, namely the removal of the tyrannical Hussein and the installation of democracy and its incumbent responsibilities of self-determination for the Iraqi people. These are perfectly valid reasons, but unacceptable ex posto facto. Journalist Christopher Hitchens cites with some vindication the story of Mahdi Obeidi, a senior scientist under Hussein, who was ordered in 1991 to bury in his backyard the components of a gas centrifuge, an item used for uranium enrichment (Love 464). Hitchens seems to view this as proof positive that Hussein intended to become a nuclear power, but in all fairness there are a number of other rogue states—North Korea being the primary example—with weapon programs considerably more advanced than the buried bits of a centrifuge, but this does not provide a pretext for unilateral invasion. If it did, the United States would have the ludicrous responsibility of toppling governments all across the Eastern hemisphere.

The soi-disant “coalition of the willing” announced by Colin Powell just before the invasion was a motley collection of member nations whose roll included social democracies such as Britain and Denmark as well as less illustrious states like Uzbekistan, which harbors a repressive dictator of its own. Notably absent were any important nations of the Middle East, even those which had sided with the United States in the first Gulf War. It need hardly be stated that the United States’ essentially unilateral aggression against Iraq only exacerbated the region’s antipathy for the former’s continued support of the “Zionist entity” of Israel, but in much of Europe as well, public opinion took on a veritable distaste for America—a nation which had, less than two years prior, the sympathy and support of the entire developed world (Schifferes 2-3).

The ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in their country was nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” (11) was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be, however: coalition forces were in some cases greeted with joy and gratitude (Hitchens, “How to Ruin” 2); in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation languished and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a malevolent despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy, civil war, and a devastated infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing violence was to the architects of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, [...] Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46). Except perhaps among the Baathist elite, there was no ambivalence about Saddam Hussein: on the subject of their dictator, most Iraqis could agree that he was a repressive, megalomaniacal tyrant with a brutish, iron-fisted regime reminiscent of the nadir of Stalinism. His tyranny, however, was the only thing holding the country together: no collective “Iraqi” identity graced the arbitrary boundaries set by the British in 1917; no religious harmony united the fiercely-opposed Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish communities.

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many respects a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam—his multi-billion-dollar expenditures for his war with Iran in the 1980s having largely bankrupted the nation—but also the United Nations and the United States by proxy, whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward; Hussein, though his government was more or less secular, had used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shi’ites and Sunnis (as well as the Kurds and the Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (Garrels 55). What little was imported into Iraq was the result of the United Nations “Oil for Food” program, which died a messy death in 2003 with the start of the invasion and charges of corruption, the truth and impact of which will vary depending on the source. All told, something approaching $65 billion worth of oil was sold in exchange for basic necessities like food; as much as $1.8 billion may have been lost in kickbacks and other schemes by Saddam (Langenkamp 1).

This legacy of corruption would continue even well into the Iraq War, but it would unfortunately be perpetrated by American companies serving as third-party contractors in the rebuilding process. As early as 2004, reports of mismanaged property, missing funds, and fiduciary misconduct were being leveled at contractors such as Halliburton and its business unit, Kellogg Brown & Root. Regardless of the implications of suspicious business connections (some of which were facile and others of which are the vagaries of American politics), the financial management of the U.N.-created “Development Fund” and the billions of tax dollars being funneled into reconstruction seemed a monument to inefficiency and waste (Miller 188-189). In the case of the much-maligned Halliburton, T. Christian Miller writes “The company delivered, but wasted a lot of money doing it” (82). Clearly, there seemed to be no coherent vision for Iraq’s future, nor any sort of comprehensive oversight of the literal warzone pursuant to Hussein’s involuntary abdication. None of the ensuing chaos mitigated the fears and suspicions of the war’s opponents, and the fact that the United States’ immediate priority in post-coup Iraq were the Oil Ministry fostered much distrust among already-ambivalent Iraqis (Garrels 202). Hitchens asserts that oil is, in fact, worth fighting over (“Fault Lines”), and his point is of course true in practical terms: the United States feared that retreating hostile forces would set fire to oil fields and detonate oil reserves, bruising the international market and introducing an enormous logistical problem as it did in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (Garrels 126). The lack of a simple good/evil binary in Iraq—despite the best efforts of certain ideologues to convince Americans otherwise—makes it impossible to successfully balance the necessities of realpolitik with the sort of public relations campaign that the region’s inherent anti-westernism would require of the occupying powers.

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s sudden and violent transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion: even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans, the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (Garrels 26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party soundbytes with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why was the United States not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes. Importantly, U.N. embargoes tended to hurt only the general populace of Iraq: for loyal Party members, money and comfort was still no issue: Garrels makes mention of dealerships selling expensive Mercedes which must only be patronized by oil barons and Baathist elites (53). “While this family [with whom Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

The American motivation for attack remains a problem that hasn’t been explained away by the President’s on-camera jingoism: he may have convinced a slim majority of Americans to support his politics, but the situation in Iraq has deteriorated in complete disregard of Bush’s high ideals. Whence, then, the supposition of America’s legitimacy as a liberating power, especially after half a century of careful political tiptoeing? Hitchens proposes four criteria by which a nation forfeits its sovereignty, submitting as well that Iraq met all four prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The first is invading sovereign neighbors, as was the case with Kuwait in the first Gulf War; the second is genocide, as was again the case with the state-ordered massacre of Kurdish villages; the third is the violation of nonproliferation treaties, which Iraq’s clandestine attempts at a nuclear program ostensibly indicate; the fourth and final is the state sponsorship of international “gangsterism,” which Iraq is supposed to have done in a variety of ways (“Fault Lines”). The problem with Hitchens’ assessment is that the sparse evidence for recent WMD research and manufacturing requires a rather great leap to assume an explicit violation of nonproliferation treaties; the fourth item, as well, is famously false insofar as the 9/11 Commission Report found no evident link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (334), though likely true in that Iraq was and still is a nesting ground for terrorism. The implicit problem, however, is that there are a great many countries in the region which abet “gangsterism”—for instance, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran—as well as one infamous example—Iran—which claims to have not a single, disassembled centrifuge but rather 3,000 fully functional ones (“Iran” 1).

Working under the assumption that Iraq was indeed culpable for all the requisite trespasses, and the United States was justified in its military action, however premeditated,—this is not necessarily a difficult stretch to make—cognizant lookers-on must still then question not the purported moral authority or practical necessity of invasion, but the relative insouciance with which it was executed. Garrels make a critical point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty but deep-rooted religious rivalries more at home in the Dark Ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern by the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate. Like the failed “Hearts and Minds” campaign in South Viet Nam during the 1960s and 70s, winning a foreign war has as much to do with popular appeal as it does with military strategy. It seems as though the more effectively the military does its job of rooting out the phantom of terrorism, the further Iraqis are estranged from the ostensible benevolence of the West. The very idea of popularity seems to have been a foregone conclusion inside of a year: Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek said, “The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but that’s not the point. Their fighting force is based on a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s gang of enforcers. [...] For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda victories every time Americans break their own codes of warfare” (35). With the spectre of Abu Ghraib still looming, the political and civil-rights limbo of Guantanamo Bay still festering, and the historic free elections deepening the cleft of religious and cultural divides with political power, it seems unlikely that comprehensive peace is an implausible goal under the current circumstances—so say Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s close friend and advisor, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor and noted Cold War historian. Fundamentally changing the odds in Iraq would require either a commitment of money and troops far beyond the pale of Americans’ current mood or a change of paradigm with regard to control of operations (A12).

Barring a semantic quarrel, it would be accurate to call the war in Iraq so far a “failure” insofar as it has not produced any of the desired dividends: lasting peace, stable oil, democratic influence, or efficacious disarmament. The only considerable goals which have been achieved are the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the implementation of divisive elections. Understandably, the great hope for the Middle East is not a short-term armistice, but rather a long-term process whereby the benefits of secularism, self-governance, and civil liberty will osmose through the Arabian peninsula; however, the approach to the War in Iraq, in all its various and sundry guises, critically misunderstood what was plain as vanilla to anyone familiar with the region. Garrels summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East: there is no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there, as the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though they are entirely clear to its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the War in Iraq has become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

Works Cited

• Bush, George, and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Bush, George W. “State of the Union.” Washington, D.C. 20 Jan. 2004. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html>.
• Cheney, Dick. Interview. Meet the Press. MSNBC. 14 Sep. 2006. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/>.
• Hitchens, Christopher. “How to Ruin an Occupation.” Slate 5 July 2005. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.slate.com/id/2121996>.
• —. Love, Poverty, and War. New York: Nation Books, 2004.
• —. “Fault Lines: Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine and The Nation.” Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund, Berkley. 8 Dec. 2002.
• “Iran ‘enters new nuclear phase’” BBC News 9 Apr. 2007. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6538957.stm>.
• Langenkamp, R. Dobie. “Putting Oil-for-Food in Perspective.” Jurist. 2 Nov. 2005. University of Pittsburgh School of Law. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2005/11/putting-oil-for-food-in-perspective.php>.
• Miller, T. Christian. Blood Money. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
• National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
• Nordland, Rob, and Babak Dehghanpisheh. “Rules of Engagement.” Newsweek 29 Nov. 2004: 34-36.
• Priest, Dana, and Robin Wright. “Scowcroft Skeptical Vote Will Stabilize Iraq.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2005: A12.
• Schifferes, Steve. “US names ‘coalition of the willing’” BBC News 18 Mar. 2003. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm>.