Should Christopher Hitchens apologize to Iraqis (and U.S. peace marchers)?

[Enrique]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-branfman/should-christopher-hitche_b_621191.html

(...)

But Hitchens' memoirs provide a textbook case of nonhumanity. For while proudly bragging of helping cause the invasion, he does not even mention let alone acknowledge responsibility for the civilian suffering to which it led.

He writes movingly, for example, of a fine young American, Mark Daily, who volunteered to fight in Iraq partly because of Hitchens' pro-war writings and died heroically protecting his fellow-soldiers. But Hitchens does not mention even one of the countless Iraqis who did not volunteer to have their lives destroyed following the invasion he claimed would help them. He properly befriended Daily's parents, but does not discuss a single Iraqi parent among hundreds of thousands whose loss is equally great.

And he does not even mention the overall scale of Iraqi civilian suffering under U.S. occupation: 5-10 million murdered, maimed, homeless, unjustly imprisoned, tortured and impoverished innocent civilians have all been consigned to the dustbin of his -- and America's -- history.

Ignoring post-invasion civilian suffering, of course, also allows Hitchens to avoid his and America's responsibility for it. He instead admits and then excuses himself for far smaller errors, e.g. writing that "it is here that I ought to make my most painful self-criticisms ... What I should have been asking Wolfowitz was `does the Army Corps of Engineers have a generator big enough to turn the lights of Baghdad back on? ... But, not being a professional soldier or quartermaster ...I rather tended to assume that things of this practical sort were being taken care of."

The Iraqi people's post-invasion agony is also trivialized by Hitchens' ongoing attempts to blame the "left" for Saddam's crimes because they failed to rally to his call to invade and occupy Iraq. By that logic any people who hate their leader but do not support being invaded and occupied indefinitely by U.S. troops are responsible for their own misery.

(...)

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Or Andrew Sullivan...

He gave vocal support to W for President, then for the Iraq invasion. A big part of his 'arguments' involved harsh characterizations of 'the left' which expressed what he said was his 'revulsion' at the Peace marchers. Later he made up a bunch of words claiming he would never forgive himself for his errors and tactics during the war build up. Recently, he has been using nearly the exact same characterizations of 'the left' to promote the least possible liberality out of the Obama Presidency. Again he is stunned, and speaking of Boomers and waxing wordy about the horrible motives and lack of humanity on the part of anyone who is to his left. And he voted for Bush over Gore. He gets posted here as an authority on 'the left'.
So Hitch should not bother with the 'I'll never forgive myself' scene, and cut directly to doing it all over again, as Sully has done. This way, he can be more popular than ever, twice as quickly!

[potone]

2. Hitchens will never admit that he was wrong about the war.

He has invested too much of himself into supporting it, and humility is not his strong suit. I admire his talent as a writer, but I have always thought that he allows his ideology--which has changed over time--to drive his judgment. He never seems able to admit that other persons who disagree with him are doing so out of genuine conviction; he always accuses them of acting in bad faith or cowardice.

[Rob H.]

3. It's not so much "should he?" as much as it is "will he?"

He should, but he never will. He's one of those pro-war ghouls like Richard Perle who'll go to his grave sincerely believing that not only was invading Iraq was absolutely the right thing to do, he would still push for an invasion today, even in light of what we now know about Saddam Hussein's mythical weapons of mass destruction.