I knew before picking it up that Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger belonged to the first, "good" phase of Hitchens's career—when he was still a left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy—and not to the bad, second phase of his career, when he became a neoconservative (ahem, "liberal hawk," he would insist) and an apologist for Bush's war on terror.
What I hadn't fully processed, though—until I got around to reading the book recently—is what an incredibly small chronological gap separated these two radically different stages of Hitch's career.
The book on Henry Kissinger, after all, was first published in early 2001. Within a few years, if not months, of its publication, Hitch would be cheerleading multiple U.S. wars (many of them highly Kissingerian in their brutality) around the world.
I searched the text for signs of this coming political transformation—and I admit I did not find many. Hitchens here in 2001 mocks figures like Norman Podhoretz for fawning over Kissinger in prose. You'd never guess that Hitchens would go through his own highly-Podhoretz-like process of "breaking ranks" with the left shortly thereafter.
Page after page, Hitchens is utterly blistering (and rightly so) on the subject of U.S. military atrocities—in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Laos, and elsewhere. He is no fan of carpet bombing a civilian population—or so it would seem.
One would never guess that months later, he would applaud a catastrophic war in Iraq that was fought by quite similar means.
Of course, one could (and Hitch did) make a strained argument that somehow these positions are all consistent with one another. Kissinger was a "realist," after all, who supported U.S. bombing and military atrocities for cynical, realpolitik reasons; whereas the neocons of the Bush administration were "idealists," who did it in order to promote democracy.
Therefore, one could argue that comparing the two was apples and oranges. Hitchens wanted a U.S. foreign policy that was rooted in support for human rights. Kissinger, throughout his career, stood for a school of thought that overtly rejected such considerations. Whereas the neocons, by their own account, were all about promoting democracy and human rights abroad.
If this is really how the flip-flop in Hitchens's career was supposed to make sense, though, it does no more than prove what Gustave Le Bon called "the power of words" in politics—which "is so great that it suffices to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious things to make them acceptable[.]"
In terms of the actual substance of policy, after all, I see virtually no moral distinction between U.S. bombing in Iraq and U.S. bombing in Vietnam. If anything, Vietnam might have had a slightly better justification from first principles, since at least there was an argument in that case (however tenuous) that the other side had violated the law of non-aggression first.
Did it really make all the difference to Hitchens, then, merely that the neocons had chosen to "baptize" their war with the sonorous rhetoric of democracy and human rights, rather than the discourse of Kissingerian realpolitik? Is that really all it took to get him to do a political u-turn?
God help us all if such mere substitution of words can scramble as potent a brain and conscience as his so easily.
And how about Afghanistan? The U.S. argument there was that—even if Afghanistan itself had not directly declared war on the United States—it was harboring people who had attacked us on 9/11, and so had made itself a legitimate military target.
This is the sort of argument, however, that Hitchens disposes of entirely in this book, published just months before 9/11. Pointing to the Suez crisis and similar incidents, he writes, "the United States under Democratic and Republican administrations had denied even its closest allies the right to invade countries that allegedly gave shelter to their antagonists."
Hitchens then rejects on this basis Kissinger's use of the "hot pursuit" rationale of VC fighters hiding in the jungles of Cambodia and Laos as a pretext to bomb those countries.
But apparently invoking the "hot pursuit" of Al Qaeda as a pretext to bomb Afghanistan was an entirely different matter?
Hitchens's conversion to hawkism during the Bush years had a lot to do, as I understand it, with his realization that the people we were fighting in the War on Terror were deeply unsympathetic radicals with a fanatical and anti-democratic ideology. Which, of course, they were.
But the same could be said—let's be real—of the Viet Minh. As more Soviet bloc archives have opened, following the end of the Cold War, it's become ever more obvious that Ho Chi Minh and his troops were taking orders from Moscow. They were not simply fighting a "national liberation" struggle, then, as the Left wanted to believe for decades, but were actually fighting to impose a Communist totalitarian state on the entirety of Vietnam—which, by the way, they proceeded to do.
The U.S. adversaries in Vietnam, then, were perfectly unsympathetic—as were our adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But that doesn't mean that the war of massacre and annihilation that the U.S. fought against virtually the entire civilian population of Indochina—across three separate nations—was justified or proportionate.
Likewise, the evils of Al Qaeda and Saddam, which were real, do not justify a series of wars that cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives across two decades and permanently destabilized the region.
How could Hitchens not have seen all of this? How could he have sized up Kissinger so accurately—and the decades' worth of atrocities in which he participated—and not noticed that the Bush administration, with its apparatus of torture memos, secret prisons, CIA black sites, and mass bombings, was cut from the same cloth—and doing much the same sort of thing?
We can only speculate now, alas, as to the psychological roots of these blind spots—and to whether or not Hitchens would have reassessed any of them, had he lived into the Trump era or beyond.
Perhaps it's simply that Hitchens still lived and wrote in an era when "public intellectuals" taking "positions" on things—particularly unexpected or contrarian positions—could be news in itself; thereby furnishing many opportunities for gratuitous self-dramatization—for those who had a weakness in that direction.
And the best way for such figures to dramatize themselves was always to "break ranks," as Podhoretz put it—adopting new attitudes and beliefs with each decade that had nothing in common with each other, apart from the extremism and absolutism and ill-temper with which they were preached.
(Philip Roth mocks a highly Norman Podhoretz–like figure in his Zuckerman novel, The Anatomy Lesson—"The 'mind' may change, or appear to, but never the inquisitor's passion for punishing verdicts." His next memoir, Zuckerman jokes, ought to be entitled "Right and Rigid in Every Decade: the Polemical Spasms of a Hanging Judge.")
I suspect, though, in Hitchens's case, the political conversion also had something to do, unfortunately, with needing throughout his life to have all good on one side, and all bad on the other. And so, in later life, as he was forced to conclude that U.S. adversaries had a lot of bad on their side, and the neocons were using some "good" ideals—at least rhetorically—it permanently scrambled his brain.
It's precisely the same phenomenon that Hazlitt used to explain Robert Southey's no less conspicuous and dramatic political volte-face in the early 19th century—going from being a youthful radical to a defender, with age, of king and altar.
Hazlitt explained this flip flop on the part of the poet laureate as follows:
While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul [...] while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with child-like simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover, he was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world [...]
But when he once believed after many staggering doubts and painful struggles, that this was no longer possible, when his chimeras and golden dreams of human perfectibility vanished from him, he turned suddenly round, and maintained that "whatever is, is right." Mr. Southey has not fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature of things. His irritable sense rejects the alternative altogether [...] He must either repose on actual or on imaginary good [...] his eagerness admits of no doubt or delay. He is ever in extremes, and ever in the wrong!
That sounds like Hitch. He was a leftist radical for as long as—and no longer than—he could convince himself that all good, and nothing but good, lay with the left. (A figure like Kissinger, who straightforwardly backed rightist dictatorships that were torturing and disappearing people, made it possible for a time to maintain this delusion.)
Once it became impossible to believe this any longer—once some radical leftists started praising Islamist fundamentalism, for instance—and other idiocies (which were by no means a new form of stupidity on the left, even if they appear to have taken Hitchens by surprise)—Hitchens suddenly had to pivot to the extreme opposite.
(Let me say on this subject, that in a head-to-head contest between Hitch and, say, Terry Eagleton, or some other New Left nincompoop, I would side with Hitch a hundred times over.)
He needed to find all good somewhere—and "imaginary good" would have to do, as Hazlitt puts it, if actual good failed to suffice. And so, neocons using the right rhetoric—neocons invoking the right "ideals" of democracy and human rights, if only in name—was enough to sway him.
One is reminded of Thomas Love Peacock's more succinct description (in Nightmare Abbey) of the political transformation that Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge underwent as a result of a similar disenchantment with the Left:
"He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done; and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done[.]"
As Hazlitt wrote in his essay on "Consistency of Opinion"—the problem in every case is the failure to understand that good will never be all on one side, and evil all on the other. The person who refuses to shed this juvenile delusion is condemned ever after to simply pivot and hop back and forth from one extreme, absolutist ideology to the other—because they will inevitably discover some good on the other side, and some evil on their own, and have to reverse themselves again.
If you proscribe all opinion opposite to your own, and impertinently exclude all the evidence that does not make for you, it stares you in the face with double force when it breaks in unexpectedly upon you, Hazlitt writes, or if at any subsequent period it happens to suit your interest or convenience to listen to objections which vanity or prudence had hitherto overlooked. [...]
I cannot say that, from my own experience, I have found that the persons most remarkable for sudden and violent changes of principle have been cast in the softest or most susceptible mould. All their notions have been exclusive, bigoted, and intolerant. Their want of consistency and moderation has been in exact proportion to their want of candour and comprehensiveness of mind. Instead of being the creatures of sympathy, open to conviction, [...] they have (for the most part) been made up of mere antipathies—a very repulsive sort of personages—at odds with themselves, and with everybody else.
[...] They have been persons of that narrowness of view and headstrong self-sufficiency of purpose, that they could see only one side of a question at a time, and whichever they pleased. There is a story somewhere in Don Quixote, of two champions coming to a shield hung up against a tree with an inscription written on each side of it. Each of them maintained, that the words were what was written on the side next him, and never dreamt, till the fray was over, that they might be different on the opposite side of the shield.
It would have been a little more extraordinary if the combatants had changed sides in the heat of the scuffle, and stoutly denied that there were any such words on the opposite side as they had before been bent on sacrificing their lives to prove were the only ones it contained. Yet such is the very situation of some of our modern polemics. They have been of all sides of the question, and yet they cannot conceive how an honest man can be of any but one—that which they hold at present.
That's Hitchens all over, god rest him.
But in his polemicizing, it cannot be denied that he often hit the truth—even if only a partial and one-sided truth.
Which makes it all the sadder that he spent the last decade of his life in defense of one of the most unsympathetic causes of the twenty-first century: Bush's war.
This makes the Trial of Henry Kissinger an especially heartbreaking book to revisit, all these years later. To have been capable of this much righteous truth in 2001—and then to pervert it all, just a few years later, into a remit for the most murderous and illegal war the U.S. had fought since Kissinger's own atrocities in Indochina!
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— as Shelley once wrote of Wordsworth, about the latter's own political conversion.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
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