The Times today carries two excellent obituary reflections on Christopher Hitchens, and it's a shame they aren't more generally accessible. I shall do my bit towards disseminating a sample, by sharing a couple of excerpts. This is from the paper's first leader (£):
Hitchens' support for US and UK foreign policy after the attacks of 9/11 marked the point, in his estimation, when he abandoned the Left. Loss of friendships in the process troubled him not in the least. He did not care to have friends who would observe the slaughter of civilians by theocratic fanatics and conclude that the fault lay with the victims for provoking it. "The very first step that we must take", he wrote, "is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else."
That captures an essential part of the standpoint of Hitch's last years, though I think his relationship to the left after 9/11 is more complex than is stated by the word 'abandon': he wasn't entirely consistent in how he expressed this himself. David Aaronovitch refers to the same feature of Christopher's 'political journey' (£):
[I]t was... one that earned him a particular kind of epithet from erstwhile comrades.
Typical was this, written in May last year, from the high-table revolutionary Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman, claiming that "those who, like Christopher Hitchens, detest a cliché turn into one of the dreariest types of them all: the revolutionary hothead who learns how to stop worrying about imperialism and love... Paul Wolfowitz". In other words, he was the lean young man corrupted by proximity to power and need for money, and turned into the fat shill of the people's enemy.
That wasn't true though, David continues; Iraq and liberal interventionism were the real reason for the rift.
Hitch was one of that group of 1968'ers who emerged from the Cold War with a deep distrust of totalitarianism and excuses for it on the one hand, and of the cynical dictator-hugging realpolitik of the West on the other. No wonder one of his earliest post-Berlin Wall polemics was against Henry Kissinger, who he believed to be one of this period's most cynical betrayers of humanity.
Rwanda provided the embers, Bosnia the fire. Any internationalist, any progressive, any leftwinger would want to intervene to try to prevent such horrors - and not just because they were horrible either, but because they made the world worse for everyone. After Srebrenica a section of the Left, including people such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit in France and Joschka Fischer in Germany, began to think realistically about what that would mean. In 1999 in Chicago - in the middle of the Kosovan war - Tony Blair almost perfectly expressed the belief and its implications.
And where was the Left? Part of it, including most of the Eagletonian pessimists who have now come to dominate the intellectual Left, simply fell back on their Cold War impulses. The problem was not totalitarianism and authoritarianism, but Western imperialism.
To have taken the other side from the 'Eagletonian' one in this matter was perfectly compatible with remaining on the left - for the reasons David sets out, and which Hitch himself articulated as eloquently as anyone. [See also here.]