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"Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well.'
Due to the CIA's failure to generate a convenient justification for Total War on Iran, Hitchens entitles his piece, "Abolish the CIA', and declares: "The system is worse than useless - it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.' So the CIA should be abolished not for extra-judicial assassinations or torture or anything like that, but because" it doesn't tow the neocon line on unilateral pre-emptive warfare!?
Perhaps we should also abolish the FBI for failing to indict bin Laden for 9/11. Or abolish the entire Western intelligence community for lampooning the widely debunked neocon allegation, supported by self-anointed crystal-ball intel-gazer Hitchens, that 9/11 chief bomber Mohamed Atta was linked to Saddam Hussein. Or abolish the British Ministry of Defence, whose Chief Scientific Adviser described the Lancet study finding of 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as "robust' and methodologically "close to best practice' - the same study hysterically described by Hitchens as "politicized hack-work', a "crazed fabrication', and "conclusively and absolutely shown to be false'. While we're at it, let's abolish the BBC for reporting the MoD's inconvenient opinion.
Notice the pattern - the need for war is an unquestionable given; those who pull the rug out from under the war-machine by pointing out the emperor's brazen nudity are committing "treason'. Yet it is the impassioned concern for evidence, and for the well-being of Americans and the world, that motivates Gore's discussions about issues like Pearl Harbour, Timothy McVeigh, and the collapse of the American empire.
Historical Revisionism: From Pearl Harbour to the Lusitania
Here, again, we see Hitchens incapable of even-handedness. On Pearl Harbour, Vidal's remark "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!' is a call to question the received wisdom about a historical debate that still continues. His disquiet reflects some of the views of high-ranking officials in Roosevelt's own administration, such as Vice-Admiral Frank E. Beatty, aide to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who wrote in 1954 in US News and World Report:
"Prior to December 7, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they felt the Allies could not win without us and all our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed; the conditions we imposed upon Japan - to get out of China, for example - were so severe that we knew that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way - and we knew their over-all import - pointed that way.'
This perspective, we should note, neither contradicts nor fully supports the conclusion that Roosevelt specifically provoked and knew about the attack on Pearl Harbour as such - rather it suggests that Pearl Harbour occurred as a consequence, surprise or not, of US provocation. There is a lesson in this, as in Gore Vidal's wise remark that "In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction'.
If Gore's scepticism about Pearl Harbour represents a "crackpot' strain, then what do Hitchens's writings about the sinking of the Lusitania in his Blood, Class and Empire (2004) say about him? Hitchens points to how the US sank its own ship, the USS Maine, in Havana as a pretext for the Spanish-American War. This was precedent for Winston Churchill's "pivotal role' in the Lusitania deception, a "psychological warfare' operation that "prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe' by placing the ship in the line of German fire. He concludes ominously:
"I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill's express permission and approval.'
Talk about pot calling the kettle black? Whether either of them is right or wrong, compared to Hitchens's repeated, heated, solemn references to "conspiracy', Gore is far more measured, albeit laden with a heavy-dose of the blackest irony.
Misconstruing McVeigh
Similarly, on Gore's reference to Timothy McVeigh as a "noble boy': Lazily as usual, Hitchens relies only on the solitary interview with Hari, but Gore's off-hand comments to Hari about McVeigh are simply an ironic snapshot of a thoughtful, well-documented analysis printed in Vanity Fair in the same month as 9/11, where Gore points to US authorities' attempts to deflect attention from a much wider plot. Gore refers to a "classified report prepared by two independent Pentagon experts' concluding that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing "was caused by five separate bombs' with a "Middle Eastern "signature"'. Sources close to the study "say Timothy McVeigh did play a role in the bombing but "peripherally", as a "useful idiot"'. Gore's argument is not to laud over McVeigh's role in this heinous atrocity, but to highlight that his desire for revenge against Waco and so forth was part of a simplified self-righteous moral framework manipulated by a wider terrorist network for its own ends; a self-righteous moral framework that has often plagued Western foreign policy with its callousness about "collateral damage' in the South. Alas, it seems such nuances are beyond Hitchens's own selectively bankrupt moral framework.
Triumphant Denialism
This hypocritical selectiveness is evident again when Hitchens attempts to laud over the supposedly self-evident preposterousness of Gore's prediction that the US will end up "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina', the empire collapsing militarily in Afghanistan and internally when China calls in US debt. Yet over a year ago, in the midst of the financial storm, Hitchens himself wrote that the meltdown will put the US "on a par with Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea.' He even refers reverentially to Milton Friedman - and Gore Vidal! - for coming up with the phrase "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest' to describe the "collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns': a condition characterising the US, and thus grounds for defining it as a "banana republic'.
But when Gore Vidal says the same, with greater prescience, precision and panache, it is for Hitchens evidence of his craziness. Given Gore's one-time playful endorsement of Hitchens as his literary "successor' (erased by Gore himself with the recent apt observation "You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn't die. I just kept going on and on and on.'), one detects more than a hint of jealous dejection here, perhaps for Gore's unique ability to deploy just a few witty turns of phrase to capture harsh truths. Such as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen's warning to US Congress about the Afghan War that "We can't kill our way to victory' or that "We're not winning... and if we're not winning we're losing'; not to mention Obama advisor and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's sobering observation that China's economic rise underscores a decline in US "economic' and "intellectual' leadership: "I don't know how we accommodate ourselves to it', Volcker told Bloomberg News. "You cannot be dependent upon these countries for three to four trillion dollars of your debt and think that they're going to be passive observers of whatever you do'. Alas, it seems, all this is simply beyond Hitchens's hopelessly impaired cognitive faculties.
