From: "Salil Tripathi" <salil61-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Ali vs. Hitchens: Battle on the Left
Date: Fri, 03 May 2002 05:48:20 +0000


>Christopher Hitchens debates Tariq Ali.
>
>http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i34/34b01301.htm
>
>Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 May 2002.
>
>Ali vs. Hitchens: Battle on the Left
>
>                   By MICHAEL BERUBE
>
>    Over the past five years, I've begun to catalog and dissect all
>    the myriad divisions on the left -- between intellectuals and
>    labor, identity politicians and aging New Leftists, Judith
>    Butler and Martha Nussbaum, In These Times and Social
>    Text. In fact, just as I was deciding that I had to write my next
>    book on the topic, the endgame of the 2000 presidential
>    election pitted Naderites against Goreans, and I began to hope
>    that Nader would pull 5 percent of the national vote and
>    qualify for matching funds in 2004. Not because I supported
>    Nader, but because I wanted to see the Green Party hold a
>    national convention, so I could watch the vegan-macrobiotic
>    wing and the Mumia Abu-Jamal wing tear each other apart
>    over health benefits for same-sex partners of replacement
>    workers or some such thing.
>
>    Then, while most of the left was still assessing the damage
>    wrought by 2000, the terrorist attacks of September 11
>    divided the anti-imperialists on ZNet from the liberal
>    internationalists at Dissent -- and from pretty much the rest
>    of the country. So, when I heard that Tariq Ali and
>   Christopher Hitchens would be debating "The Left and the
>    War" at Georgetown University in mid-April, I dropped
>    everything and made the four-hour drive from State College.
>
>    The Ali-Hitchens Fight! In this corner, the prolific Vanity
>    Fair and Nation columnist and sometime CNN welterweight,
>    Hitchens, notorious among liberals for his attacks on Bill
>    Clinton, notorious among leftists for his support of the war in
>    Afghanistan; in this corner, Ali, the renowned New Left
>    Review editor, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker from
>    Lahore via England, weighing in with a new book, The Clash
>    of Fundamentalisms, soon to be notorious for its disturbing
>    jacket images of George W. Bush as a mullah and Osama bin
>    Laden as a U.S. president. What better occasion to take the
>    pulse of the left?
>
>    The battle lines were clear from the outset: The Hitchens left
>    is soft on American imperialism, and the Ali left is soft on
>    Islamist radicalism. Ali argued that the United States should
>    have devised "a measured and essentially police response" to
>    the September 11 attacks, centered on apprehending bin
>    Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership, but avoiding wider U.S.
>    military action. The current war against terrorism is really a
>    "war to promote terror," he said: It won't "stop the flow of
>    young people to terrorism," especially among the volatile
>    middle classes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It will produce
>    blowback for decades to come, and American leftists must
>    protest. "What you do matters," Ali urged. "There is no other
>    countervailing force." A stirring conclusion, I thought, to a
>    not-quite-convincing speech.
>
>    Hitchens began by citing the Ayatollah Khomeini's infamous
>    fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and argued that American
>    imperialism cannot be portrayed as morally equivalent to
>    such Islamist radicalism; that the victims of September 11
>    were killed not by "subjects of empire," as Ali had written in
>    his book, but by "henchmen of the advocates of Shariah law";
>    that there is a civil war in Islam between moderates and those
>    who would visit the dictates of Shariah on Muslims and
>    non-Muslims alike; that the left can make no compromises
>    with the latter. In response, Ali demanded that the left
>    support "the power of the people to overthrow their own
>    oppressors."
>
>    The opening statements, complete with insults, took an hour.
>    At one point, Hitchens insisted that there could be "no
>    intelligent and no principled way" to oppose the struggle
>    against Al Qaeda, whereupon Ali replied, "If we are talking
>    about intelligent and principled debate, I don't intend to learn
>    any lessons from you." On to the questions.
>
>    One young man asked Ali an incisive two-parter. First, what
>    about his claim that nothing had changed in Afghanistan as a
>    result of U.S. actions? Would he stand by that even with
>    regard to Afghan schoolgirls? Second, if the United States
>    had responded to the September 11 attacks with police action,
>    and failed to capture Al Qaeda's leaders, at what point, if any,
>    would a military response have been justified? Ali replied
>    that the military response has failed, so it would seem
>    appropriate to try other means. That didn't quite answer the
>    second question, but the lacuna was overshadowed by the fact
>    that it also never addressed the Afghan schoolgirl issue.
>
>    Twice, Hitchens was challenged for slandering Islam. He
>    made a halfhearted appeal to the golden age of Islam, but
>    mostly he took such criticisms as opportunities to call the
>    Koran a "10th-rate penal code" and to suggest that, if the
>    book indeed represents the word of God, "then it was a very
>    bad day for Him." As if to reassure everyone that he was
>    engaged in an equal-opportunity offend-a-thon, Hitchens
>    opined that God was also having a bad day when He dictated
>    the Pentateuch and most of the New Testament.
>
>    As the evening wore on, and Hitchens combined aggressive
>    secularism with sublime disdain, I asked one of his friends
>    whether Christopher might not consider hiring media
>    consultants from Al-Jazeera to help him with his
>    self-presentation. "And I say this," I whispered, "as a lifelong
>    agnostic."
>
>    Much of the support Hitchens lost over religion, he regained
>    when he asked one questioner whether anyone involved in the
>    liberation struggles in South Africa or Chile would crash
>    planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians. "Can
>    you imagine," he queried, picking up speed and heat as he
>    went, "can you imagine Nelson Mandela or Salvador Allende
>    giving that order?" It was easily his best moment. Then he
>    followed it with a biting contrast between Arab support for
>    Palestinian suicide bombers and Desmond Tutu's personally
>    preventing members of the African National Congress from
>    "necklacing" an informer -- and suddenly, just like that,
>    there was a split between Hitchens and Ali on Palestine.
>
>    Hitchens condemned suicide bombers and Ali asked him
>    incredulously how he could support U.S. bombings in
>    Afghanistan but not the Palestinian resistance. Ali then
>    worked himself into a remarkably tangled position, first
>    declaring that Palestinians have the right to resist Israel by
>    any means necessary, then insisting that he does not
>    necessarily support the right of Palestinians to resist Israel by
>    any means necessary, and finally proclaiming that the
>    principle of resistance must be that the oppressed seek to win
>    over the population against whose government and army they
>    are fighting. Ali thus moved from Malcolm X to Mahatma
>    Gandhi in less than five minutes, offering in his final
>    argument the grounds for condemning the suicide bombers he
>    had refused to condemn in the first argument.
>
>    An hour later, at a postdebate dinner, I ran into a similar
>    impasse. Ali had just finished summarizing his recent essay
>    "Who Really Killed Daniel Pearl?," and arguing, quite
>    compellingly, that it was never plausible that Pakistan's
>    Inter-Services Intelligence Agency did not know who had
>    done so. Outraged that the United States had already
>    exonerated both General Pervez Musharraf and the
>    intelligence agency, he implied that we were once again
>    bedding down with a corrupt client state.
>
>    I was sitting across from Ali and could not waste the
>    opportunity. "I've read your essay, which was terrific, and
>    I've followed your critiques of U.S. complicity with this and
>    that -- most but not all of which I sympathize with," I said.
>    "But I wonder what would constitute an appropriate response
>    to Pearl's murder on the part of the United States?"
>
>    "Well," he replied, looking keenly at me, "I'm certainly not
>    calling for sending in fighter jets." I said I hadn't thought he
>    was. He suggested more U.S. pressure on Musharraf, then
>    added the proviso that the many Taliban sympathizers in the
>    intelligence agency are waiting to dispose of Musharraf the
>    minute U.S. support is gone.
>
>    By that point in the evening, however, I had decided that the
>    problem with Tariq Ali's anti-imperialist left is not a lack,
>    but a surfeit, of principles. An oppressed people  must
>    overthrow its own dictators; the Palestinians have a right to
>    resist oppression, even though we may not support specific
>    uses of that right; the aim of resistance is to appeal to the
>    people whose government and army you are fighting; U.S.
>    intervention produces blowback, particularly when it is, as in
>    the case of Daniel Pearl, not interventionist enough.
>
>    Hitchens's arguments were systemically more coherent, and
>    yet problematic in their own way. His troubles are the
>    troubles of the liberal internationalist who doesn't say where
>    his commitment to foreign intervention might end, and on
>    what grounds. There is no question, for example, that liberal
>    internationalists can find a plausible moral basis for action
>    against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. But then, there is no
>    question that arguments about Milosevic can also be deployed
>    with regard to Saddam Hussein's treatment of his nation's
>    Kurds. Surely that is why an otherwise decent leftist like
>    Michael Walzer would sign up for Bush's planned invasion
>    of Iraq? Having set out to dispense justice around the world,
>    American interventionists are on a dark and unpaved road
>    trod by many leftists, progressives, and liberals before who
>    believed, every step of the way, that this time, the Force
>    would be used for good.
>
>    Although Christopher Hitchens is not likely to do an
>    about-face and support Star Wars, liberal internationalism
>    will have to think more clearly and speak more loudly about
>    its own limits, and its opposition to imperialism. For if Ali is
>    burdened by a surfeit of principles, Hitchens is burdened by a
>    principle without a braking system. Ali does not tell us how
>    to proceed when the "organic opposition" to a despotic
>    regime turns out to be composed of Islamist radicals;
>    Hitchens does not tell us how to proceed when a secular
>    democracy turns into a unilateral global cop.
>
>    The after-debate dinner, billed as a bacchanal of loquacious
>    leftists, turned out to be rather a sober affair. Hitchens and
>    Ali left shortly after midnight, in good trim and with
>    faculties intact; the only people left at closing were me and
>    three or four writers and editors -- and even we were talking
>    more like color commentators than combatants. But then
>    again, I thought as I wended my way back to my hotel, these
>    are sobering times. After September 11, Daniel Pearl, the
>    Passover Massacre, and the siege of Jenin, no one on the left
>    feels like ordering another round of the same.
>---
>    Michael Birubi is a professor of English at Pennsylvania
>    State University at University Park.
>
>
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