Since the argument was between confirmed old leftists (in the sense that Henry Higgins was a “confirmed old bachelor”), the audience was manifestly, jeeringly and unreservedly anti-Bush. Based on the timing and intensity of the cheers and boos and the tenor of the catcalls, there were essentially no supporters of George Bush in the room, although I imagine that there were a few who, like myself, were operating under deep cover. The division in the audience, which was profound, seemed to line up according to one’s attitude toward Israel, which more often than not predicts one’s attitude toward the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein. This is, of course, precisely the charge that anti-war types such as Galloway bring against those of us who support Operation Iraqi Freedom, intoning, as they do, the word neocon at every opportunity, knowing full well that it is code for an international conspiracy to enslave America’s foreign policy to Israel. It is, however, particularly inappropriate to aim this bolt at Hitchens, who knocked around with Edward Said back in the day and has long championed “fully developed rights for the Palestinians.”
In any case, the debate was absolutely wonderful political theater in a packed auditorium in lower Manhattan, and I left wishing that there were natural born Americans who could fill a big room at $12 a head just by debating matters of great moment. Whether it will translate well to the small screen when C-SPAN2 broadcasts it this weekend (Saturday at 9 pm, with a couple of subsequent rebroadcasts) is a different question, but I bet that it does. Do not miss it: either Galloway or Hitchens will piss you off mightily, but, if you are honest, neither will fail to entertain.
The organizers of the debate were anti-war and, obviously, anti-Bush to the point of distraction. For example, the introductory speaker, the moderator, and George Galloway all devoted a lot of time to linking the screw-ups in the relief of the Gulf coast to the war in Iraq. The now-familiar argument is that our efforts at disaster relief suffered because the military was not here, it was there. This argument is a populist attack on Bush, but it is only an argument against the war in Iraq if one believes that domestic emergency relief and local policing are properly the job of the military. It is not original to observe that this is the first time that any leftist living outside an actual communist country has argued this. One does not have to be a cynic to suggest that the attempt to link Katrina and Iraq is, well, cynical. But George Galloway, Amy Goodman (the moderator and activist-chieftain of Democracy Now!) and about two-thirds of the audience did not care – the debate about the war in Iraq was largely a means for attacking George Bush, whom Christopher Hitchens did not defend. Just fine, it wasn’t his job, even though Galloway tried to tag Hitchens with that responsibility, calling him “an apologist for the Bush family,” and the “court jester, not of Camlot, but at the court of the Bourbon Bushes.” That segue allowed Galloway to attack Barbara Bush for her comments about the hurricane evacuees, calling her “the Marie Antoinette” of today’s America. All so much red meat for the crowd, even if it did not help us understand the war in Iraq.
Rather than the absurd and cramped format used in American presidential election “debates,” Hitchens and Galloway each had extended segments to open arguments and rebut. Each had 15 minutes, then ten minutes and then five minutes, followed by 35 minutes of “more freewheeling” discussion, and then closing remarks.
Hitchens opened by prearrangement, offering a bit of his time for a moment of silence for the 150 Iraqis killed by fascist terrorists in Iraq on Wednesday. The gesture came off gracefully, I thought, but it did set up a shot from Galloway 15 minutes later (he wondered whether there would also be a moment of silence for the many more Iraqis killed by American soldiers in Tal Afar in the last four days, and repeatedly cited The Lancet's discredited estimate of more than 100,000 civilian casualties, a false figure with almost totemic significance on the left). That exchange was typical of the evening, except that thereafter it was almost always Hitchens making the sharp debating point in response to Galloway’s emotional gestures.
Hitchens’ opening argument was not the best argument in support of deposing Saddam – you need a book or a long essay to make that case. He did, however, open with the best argument that might be made to this crowd in this setting, and it stood throughout the debate as substantially unresponded to by George Galloway.
Hitchens challenged the very idea that it was supporters of forcible regime change who needed to explain themselves, and asked his audience to consider what the world would have looked like had the anti-war arguments of the left prevailed in the last fifteen years. Saddam Hussein, a brutal, expansionist and reckless dictator would have annexed Kuwait without objection, massively expanding the proportion of the region's oil under his control. Since there would have been no Gulf War, the post-war regime of sanctions and inspections would not have uncovered and destroyed Hussein's nuclear weapons program, which was well along in 1994. Had the anti-war argument prevailed, Slobodan Milosovic would have annexed Bosnia, and the slaughter in Kosovo would have continued. The Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda would still have training camps there pumping out thousands of jihadis.
This is not the best argument that might be made for Operation Iraqi Freedom because it relies on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand: one need not have opposed all these wars to oppose OIF, so arguing that anti-war forces have been chronically wrong in the past does not automatically discredit the anti-war position this time. But it was the best argument against George Galloway in front of this audience, because he and undoubtedly many of them have, in fact, opposed the actions of at least the Western side in all the named wars.
Hitchens also listed the many positive consequences that he sees flowing from OIF, including that Saddam Hussein is in jail, and "will soon follow Slobodan Milosovic and Augusto Pinochet into the dock," that Iraqis are debating a federal democratic constitution on six television channels and 100 newspapers ("does anybody not agree that this is night and day compared to the way it was?"), that Kurds are "assuming their full height as a people" ("this is an extraordinary gain"), and that Libya has disarmed, allowing us to "walk back his evidence to A.Q. Kahn" [the Pakistani nuclear scientist who sold atomic secrets to bad guys all over the place - ed.]. Opposition leaders throughout the Arab world (listed by Hitchens later in the Grapple) say that the recent thaw there would have have occurred without the removal of Saddam Hussein.
To this bundle of charges -- that the anti-war movement has been wrong many times in a row and that there have been great gains from the removal of Saddam -- Galloway had essentially two responses. To the first, he charged Hitchens with hypocrisy, not once but over and over again, taunting Hitchens over his opposition (at the time) to the 1991 Gulf War, his denunciation of the American war in Vietnam, and his support for the Algerians versus the French. (Galloway on Hitchens admitted flip-flop: "This is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphasis of a butterfly into a slug. I say slug instead of caterpillar, because slugs leave a trail of slime.")
To the second argument, Galloway banged away at the idea that the cited threats were themselves the consequences of British and American foreign policy. But for American support for Saddam (his atrocities were "mostly in the 1980s, when he was the closest friend of the United States") and the Afghan resistance to the Soviets (who grew up into al Qaeda and the Taliban), these threats would not exist. The Arabs hate the West because of Anglo-American support of Israel and the corrupt dictators of the region. The most massive lefty applause of the evening came when Galloway demanded a reversal of our policies toward Israel.
Hitchens closed his opening remarks with a two minute assault aimed directly at George Galloway, including repeated references to his cozy relationship with various of Saddam's henchmen (Tariq Aziz in particular), his fawning admiration for Syria's fascist dictator Bashar Assad, and his stated support for the insurgency in Iraq. Hitchens attack on Galloway personally was one of the most ruthless guttings ever to appear on American television, I imagine, and Galloway returned the favor in triplicate later in the debate. Talk about your "must see TV."
Most of the rest of the debate was taken up with expansive rhetorical flourishes, mostly from Galloway and mostly involving red meat for the audience. Ms. Katrina popped up again and again, and Galloway did not miss his chance to skewer Hitchens for his comparatively mild criticism of Cindy Sheehan (the mere mention of whom triggered wild applause, which is more than a little creepy, if you think about it). This was probably a mistake from the perspective of the "audience at home," because Hitchens then had a chance to observe that it was "rather revolting" that Galloway went to Damascus and praised the people who killed Cindy Sheeehan's son, only to travel to the United States to appeal to the emotions of his mother.
The audience did not appreciate everything that George Galloway said. At the end of his long description of the depredations of Anglo-American foreign policy ("our two countries are the biggest rogue states in the world today") Galloway declared that "The planes from 911 did not come from the clear blue sky. They came from a swamp of hatred created by us." The audience booed deeply, giving Hitchens the chance to observe that "I think you may have noticed, Mr. Galloway, that you picked the wrong city to say that in." Hitchens himself earned boos, though, when he also said "and the wrong month." This, presumably, because it is an article of faith on the left that the Bush administration exploits the anniversary of September 11 for political gain.
Galloway's most cheered and most booed moment came when he demanded that the United States stop its support for "Sharon's Israel." This remains the line that divides New York liberals, even when they quite obviously agree on just about everything else.
Hitchens most cerebral points did silence the crowd. He observed, for instance, that Galloway is not a pacifist by any measure, and he quoted Galloway's support for the insurgency in Iraq. (I did not scribble down the part Hitchens recited, but the longer version is on a leaflet handed out by anti-Galloway outside the debate, quoting his interview of July 30, 2005 on Al-Jazeera: "These poor Iraqis -- ragged people with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons -- are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable by the people who occupy it. We don't know who they are, we don't know their names, we never saw their faces, they don't put up photographs of their martyrs, we don't know the names of their leaders... They are the base of this society.") Hitchens asked the audience to consider some of the people that Galloway's insurgents had killed, including some of the best relief workers and human rights advocates of the United Nations (and specifically Sergio Vieira de Mello), gathered children and Shia clerics in front of their mosques.
Hitchens also observed quite neatly that it is not anti-imperialist to oppose Islamists -- "they want to establish the Caliphate," a ghastly and oppressive empire. This did not resonate with the audience, which assumes that al Qaeda exists largely as the result of American foreign policy mistakes, but I think it will work well on television.
In the end, an honest scoring of the debate would have found Hitchens as the clear winner, since most of Galloway's attacks did not respond to Hitchens' substantive arguments. That does not mean, however, that either will change many minds.
Watch it when it comes on. It was a spectacle the likes of which we rarely see in this country.