Hitchens-Galloway
debate
Posted to www.marxmail.org on September 15, 2005
Although I left 90 minutes into the Galloway-Hitchens debate, I feel pretty confident that I had taken
in the high points, such as they were. The event succeeded more as theater than
as education, with both characters playing to the gallery and practically
imitating themselves.
The basic problem is that a debate over the war in Iraq is a little bit like debating whether the
earth is round or flat, or as Galloway put it,
“Is there any sentient being on this planet who still believes that this war
was just and necessary?” Apart from the inner circles of the Bush
administration, Hitchens and the odd band of his admirers
drawn to the debate, that is.
In his opening 20 minute presentation, Hitchens
made the case for how much the better the world is since March 2003, when the USA invaded Iraq. This was basically a rehash
of an article he wrote for the hardcore neoconservative “Weekly Standard” that can
be read here:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp
Hitchens was answered by both
Alexander Cockburn at: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09032005.html
and by Juan Cole at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/05/hitchens/.
Galloway responded with
withering scorn, dwelling at length on Hitchens’s
stance during the first Gulf War. All of the arguments he made for going into
Iraq today could have been made in 1991, and even more strongly since most of
Saddam Hussein’s depredations occurred during the 1980s, including the gassing
of the Kurds. But this did not stop Hitchens from
opposing the war. In a follow-up in the next round, Hitchens
claimed that he was “mistaken” at the time and left it at that. But the most
satisfying part of Galloway’s remarks, and
what most people came to hear, was his characterization of Hitchens
as an exception to the laws of evolutionary biology. He once was a butterfly,
making beautiful speeches against the Gulf War in 1991, but has turned into a
slug, leaving a trail of slime behind him.
When I was outside on the sidewalk before the event started,
I noticed a shabby looking character passing out leaflets to people waiting on
line to buy a ticket. After a few seconds, I realized it was none other than Hitchens himself and not some crazed Trotskyist sectarian
calling for a New International. The leaflet was a screed against Galloway, accusing him of corrupt profiteering over the
dead bodies of Iraqi children through the oil for food program. The charges
found in the leaflet can be read at http://www.hitchensweb.com/
along with others just as baseless. The main impression I got from Hitchens is that he is rather crazed at this point. I tried
to imagine Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman or some other
fan of the war in Iraq
resorting to mass leafleting in this fashion. I was unsuccessful.
Hitchens’s supporters in the
audience were just as crazed. While Galloway’s
supporters, including me, were content to absorb his rapier-like arguments, the
opposite side seemed more like the sort of people who show up at athletic
events, including one woman who kept screaming at the top of her lungs. Another
Hitchens supporter, a young man in his mid-20’s I
would guess, sat in the row in front of me and seemed determined to argue with
everybody around him in what he must have considered a superior Socratic
method: “So you would have not intervened against Hitler then?” (Although obviously innocent of the fact that the American flag has replaced the swastika as the number one threat to world peace.) But mostly he couldn’t
sit still, jumping around in his seat like a monkey overdosed on Methamphetamines.
Amidst all the brawling, there were some educational points.
When Hitchens mentioned the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon as a positive consequence of Bush’s war,
Galloway replied that if there were elections in Lebanon tomorrow, the head of Hizbollah would likely be elected. However, since he is a
Moslem that would be impossible since the constitution bars anybody but
Christians from taking office. Where did that constitution come from, Galloway asked? It was imposed as the result of the
invasion of the US
marines in 1958. That was a valuable point and one worth following up on.
CSPAN2’s “BookTV” will be showing
the debate this Saturday. Check it out for some lively entertainment and some
useful arguments against the war in Iraq, as if any more were needed at
this point.