Christopher Hitchens's political views

Christopher Hitchens (born 1949) is a prominent intellectual and journalist whose political views have been expressed in his prolific writings on American and international politics.

First principles

Alexander Linklater has summarized Hitchens' intellectual outlook as follows:

“

One of ... [Hitchens’s] old strongholds...[is] the 17th-century contest between king and parliament of the English civil war. For Hitchens, the Cromwellian revolt represents not just the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right.... But he is no optimistic Enlightenment rationalist. He identifies himself with Thomas Paine's disillusion at the French terror, and Rosa Luxemburg's famous warning to Lenin about the inexorability of one-man rule. He retains, however, from his Marxist youth an intellectual absolutism and a disdain for liberal dilemmas and trade-offs — hence a brutal assault on Isaiah Berlin's genteel liberalism in a 1998 essay. And there is an undertow of violence in his arguments, an inability to empathize. He is, for example, incurious about what religious belief feels like, or what meaning it has for millions of people — even though, unlike his co-anti-religionist Richard Dawkins, Hitchens concedes that religious feeling is ineradicable.[1]

”

Marxism

Hitchens became a Marxist and a Trotskyist in his teens, beliefs that further developed during his time at Oxford University. In the 1960s Hitchens joined the left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire".

But by 2001, Hitchens had disavowed socialism, declaring "capitalism is the only revolutionary system".^[2] In the same year he flirted with libertarianism, telling Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalization as "innovative and internationalist". He suggested that he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral authoritarians.^[3] Although by 2004 he described himself as "a recovering ex-Trotskyite",^[4] in a 2006 debate he remarked that "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".^[5]

Hitchens, as recently as 2009, has again referred to himself as "a Marxist". Hitchens continues to affirm his respect for Marxist theory, including his 2009 article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx". There he explains how Marx's economic analysis in Das Kapital has predicted many of the failures of the U.S. economy, including the late-2000s recession. He continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the Bolsheviks' October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.^[6]

The American Revolution

Since his disenchantment with socialism, Hitchens has increasingly emphasized the centrality of the American Revolution in his political philosophy. As early as 2002 Hitchens wrote that "as the third millennium gets under way, and as the Russian and Chinese and Cuban revolutions drop below the horizon, it is possible to argue that the American revolution, with its promise of cosmopolitan democracy, is the only ‘model’ revolution that humanity has left to it".^[7]

Islamism

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the February 14, 1989 fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie.^[8] He became increasingly critical of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face": radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie and sought the recreation of the medieval caliphate. Hitchens is often credited with coining the term "Islamofascism", but Hitchens himself denies it. (Malise Ruthven appears to be the first to have used the term in an article in The Independent on September 8, 1990.^[9])

Hitchens did use the term "Islamic Fascism" for an article he wrote for The Nation, shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, but this phrase also had an earlier history. For example, it was used in The Washington Post on January 13, 1979; it also appears to have been used by secularists in Turkey and Afghanistan to describe their opponents.

Hitchens also became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, accusing him of being a rapist and a liar.^[10][11] Hitchens also claimed that the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime.^[12]

The years after the Rushdie fatwa also saw him looking for allies and friends. In the United States he became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz.^[13] Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.^[14]

Republicanism

Hitchens is a vocal supporter of Republicanism in the United Kingdom, in 1990 publishing the book-long polemic The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. During a debate with George Galloway in 2005, Hitchens revealed that he is a supporter of Irish reunification, and was critical of Galloway's opposing views on the war, as well as his "insulting" attitude towards the U.S. Senate.^[15] In the debate he stated that he was "a lifelong supporter of the reunification of Ireland."^[16] Many times, when discussing "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland, Hitchens will refer to their location as simply "Ireland", rather than "Northern Ireland", for example in an article written for Slate in 2007, discussing the power sharing and devolved government in Northern Ireland and describing it as "an agreement to divide the spoils of Ireland's six northeastern counties".^[17]

Bosnian war

Hitchens has cited the Bosnian war as something that monumentally changed his views on military intervention and that he for the first time found himself on the side of the neoconservatives. In an interview with Johann Hari he said:

"That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."^[18]

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between a multi-ethnic plural democracy led by Muslim^[19] president Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia and a fascistic, nationalistically inspired ethnically-cleansed state driven by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. He has called Milošević a fascist and a "national-socialist",^[20] and considered the Croatian nationalist president Franjo Tudjman "equally detestable".^[21] In God Is Not Great, he writes that the crimes of the Roman Catholic Croatian neo-fascists during this period are "often forgotten".^[22] He was highly critical of Western inaction against Christian Orthodox Serbian and Roman Catholic Croatian nationalism in protection of the Muslim Bosnians, partially blaming this on the Clinton administration and specifically Hillary Clinton.

"In effect, the extremist Catholic and Orthodox forces were colluding in a bloody partition and cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were, and still are, largely spared the public shame of this, because the world's media preferred the simplification of "Croat" and "Serb," and only mentioned religion when discussing "the Muslims." But the triad of terms "Croat," "Serb," and "Muslim" is unequal and misleading, in that it equates two nationalities and one religion. (The same blunder is made in a different way in coverage of Iraq, with the "Sunni-Shia-Kurd" trilateral.)"^[23]

Abortion

Hitchens has stated that "[an] unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix, You can't say the rights question doesn't come up. I don't think a woman should be forced to choose, or even can be." Although holding a pro-life position, Hitchens opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade, stating, "that will make abortion more like a contraceptive procedure than a surgical one. That's the Hitchens plank, and I think it's a defensible one." Hitchens takes a middle path by affirming that he is pro-life and believing a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, supporting the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believing in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.^[24] He strongly criticizes the encouragement of sexual abstinence within the pro-life movement of the Christian Right.^[25] Hitchens is a notable genital integrity activist, strongly criticizing the tradition of male circumcision, which he regards as male genital mutilation, and entirely comparable with female genital cutting. In collaboration with his antitheism, Hitchens would write of this subject in God Is Not Great citing the tolerance of the removal of the male foreskin which he views as equal to the mutilation of the female clitoris in tribal Animist societies of Africa, as due to tolerance of religious doctrine within society.^[26]

Waterboarding

Hitchens was asked by Vanity Fair to experience waterboarding for himself at a U.S. Army training facility. In May 2008, Hitchens voluntarily underwent the procedure after which he fully endorsed the view that it was "torture". He concluded "if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."^[27][28]

Drug use

Hitchens has called for the abolishment of the "war on drugs", which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley.^[29] Hitchens favors the legalization of cannabis for both recreational and medicinal purposes, and has said "Marijuana is a medicine. I have heard and read convincing arguments and had convincing testimony from real people who say that marijuana is a very useful medicine for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and for glaucoma. To keep that out of the reach of the sick, it seems to me, is sadistic."^[30]

Civil liberties

In March 2005, Hitchens supported further investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election.^[31]

In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.^[32][33]

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.^[34]

Religion

At the New York Public Library in May 2007, Hitchens debated the Reverend Al Sharpton on the issue of theism and anti-theism, giving rise to a memorable exchange about Mormonism in particular.^[35]

In God is not Great, Hitchens contends that,

above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.^[36]

Hitchens has been accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded, "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share".^[37] Hitchens has also been accused of "anti-Catholic bigotry" by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.^[38][39] When Joe Scarborough on March 12, 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was “consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics”, Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that “all religious belief is sinister and infantile”.^[40] Piatak claimed that “A straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine.”

In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition."^[41] In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."^[42]

On April 4, 2009, Hitchens debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University on the topic "Does God Exist?" before both a live and closed circuit audience of over 15,000.^[43]

Middle East conflicts

The conflicts in the mideast and ideological war between Islam and the western world has prompted Hitchens's most hawkish stance, which is against Muslim terrorism. While this is part of his much more general anti-theism, he has attracted many critics.^{[39][44][45][46][47][48]}

In February 2009 he was physically attacked on Hamra St., West Beirut, after scribbling “No, no, FUCK the SSNP” on a sign erected by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party commemorating party member Khalid Alwan, who killed two Israeli soldiers there in the Wimpy café during the Israeli occupation of Beirut.^[49] He was able to escape with relatively minor injury to the Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Hitchens has described Zionism as being based on "the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land." He went further, saying "Zionism is a form of Bourgeoisie Nationalism" when debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis at a Town hall function in Pennsylvania "^[50] Hitchens supports Israel's right to exist, but has argued that

Israel doesn't "give up" anything by abandoning religious expansionism in the West Bank and Gaza. It does itself a favor, because it confronts the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews, and because it abandons a scheme which is doomed to fail in the worst possible way. The so-called "security" question operates in reverse, because as I may have said already, only a moral and political idiot would place Jews in a settlement in Gaza in the wild belief that this would make them more safe. Of course this hard-headed and self-interested solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists. But one isn't seeking to placate them. One is seeking to destroy and discredit them. At the present moment, they operate among an occupied and dispossessed and humiliated people, who are forced by Sharon's logic to live in a close yet ghettoised relationship to the Jewish centers of population. Try and design a more lethal and rotten solution than that, and see what you come up with.^[50]

On November 14, 2004, Hitchens noted that

Edward Said asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).^[51]

Hitchens earlier had collaborated on this issue with Edward Said, publishing the 1988 book Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

Historical views on Saddam Hussein

In July 2007, the New Statesman printed selected portions of a 1976 piece by Hitchens which they claimed "took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator" than his later strong support for ousting Saddam Hussein.^[52]

"An Arab country with the second largest proven oil reserves, a fierce revolutionary ideology, a large and recently-blooded army, and a leadership composed almost entirely of men in their thirties is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Iraq, which has this dynamic combination and much else besides, has not until recently been very much regarded as a power. But with the new discussions in OPEC, the ending of the Kurdistan war and the new round of fighting in Lebanon, its political voice is being heard more and more. The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussein — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser."

He also described the means through which the Baathist regime rose to power as similar to that of Iran: having crushed any political dissent and notions of an independent Kurdish state.

"In their different crusades, both Iraq and Iran take a distinctly unsentimental line on internal opposition. Ba’ath party spokesmen, when questioned about the lack of public dissent, will point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings. True enough, there are such efforts, but they fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition. The argument then moves to the claim, which is often made in Iraq, that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue. Somewhere in the collision between Baghdad and Tehran on this point, the Kurdish nationalists met a very painful end."

9/11 and its aftermath

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On September 24 and October 8, 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation.^[53][54] Chomsky responded^[55] and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky^[56] to which Chomsky again responded.^[57] Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden,^[58] and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky. Hitchens was also severely criticized by Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and Hitchens's former friend. Citing Hitchens's support for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, as well as Hitchens's critique of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, Finkelstein called Hitchens a "model apostate," a "dirt bag," and a "showboat run amuck" who is "dying for the camera."^[59][60]

Hitchens has strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan, particularly in his "Fighting Words" columns in Slate. Hitchens had been a long term contributor to The Nation, where bi-weekly he wrote his "Minority Report" column.

Iraq War

Hitchens' employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his support for the Iraq War have caused Hitchens's critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation,^[61][62] insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative".^[63] In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues.^[64] He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".^[65]

Pre-war American and British Intelligence
In a variety of articles and interviews, Hitchens has asserted that British intelligence was correct in claiming that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger,^[66] and that US envoy Joseph Wilson had been dishonest in his public denials of it.^[67] He has also pointed to discovered munitions in Iraq that violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687, the cease-fire agreements ending the 1991 Iraq-Kuwait conflict.

On March 19, 2007, Hitchens asked himself whether Western intelligence sources should have known that Iraq had "no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction." In his response, Hitchens stated that

[t]he entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for material that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for — has in fact never accounted for — a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?^[68]

Abu Ghraib
In a September 2005 article, he stated "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."^[69] Hitchens continued by stating that he

could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day.^[69]

Haditha
In a June 5, 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, he stated that

all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity — the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes — overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai — "if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up" — has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.^[70]

References

1. ^ Alexander Linklater, “Christopher Hitchens”, Prospect, Issue 146, May 2008
2. ^ http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/01/free-radical/1
3. ^ "Free Radical", Reasononline, from November 2001 print edition
4. ^ Hari, Johann (2004), “In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens” (22 September).
5. ^ [1]
6. ^ 2009, April, The Atlantic Monthly
7. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (2002), Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books, pg 105
8. ^ Cartoon Debate
9. ^ William Safire (2006).) "Islamofascism Anyone?" The New York Times, Language section. October 1, 2006. Retrieved November 25, 2006.
10. ^ "Hitchens: Clinton could sell out Blair". BBC News. 1999-06-03. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/354470.stm. Retrieved 2007-05-25. 
11. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (1999). No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso Books. ISBN 1859847366. 
12. ^ Christopher Hitchens, No One Left To Lie To (Verso, 2000)
13. ^ "That Bleeding Heart Wolfowitz", Slate, March 22, 2005
14. ^ "Ahmad and Me", Slate, May 27, 2004
15. ^ "George Galloway debates Christopher Hitchens". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INy2ysHhgYM. Retrieved 2007-11-20. 
16. ^ http://www.endusmilitarism.org/gallowayhitchensdebate091605.html
17. ^ http://www.slate.com/id/2163217/
18. ^ "In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens."
19. ^ Bodansky, Yossef (1996). Some Call It Peace: Waiting for the War In the Balkans. International Media Corp. Ltd. ISBN 0952007053. 
20. ^ "In Defense of WWII: Chapter 5 of 5". Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB9uqI62ikA. Retrieved 2008-09-07. 
21. ^ "FrontPage Magazine". Frontpagemag.com. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C83A870D-93BE-4ACD-B8E0-E082B1D313C0. Retrieved 2008-09-07. 
22. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (May 2007). God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books, 21.
23. ^ Hitchens, Christopher God is not great:how religion poisons everything Hachette Book Group USA, 2007, Page 20-22
24. ^ Belief Watch: Pro-life Atheists
25. ^ Atheists
26. ^ http://www.slate.com/id/2125225/
27. ^ "Believe Me, It’s Torture", Vanity Fair, August 2008
28. ^ On the Waterboard
29. ^ http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/3420306.html
30. ^ Just a Pretty Face? by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, July 11, 2004
31. ^ Ohio's Odd Numbers
32. ^ New York Times
33. ^ Statement – Christopher Hitchens, NSA Lawsuit Client
34. ^ Fronter Centre for Foreign Policy interview
35. ^ Google video has the full debate
36. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (May 2007). God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books. pp. 283. 
37. ^ Look Who's Hammering Mel August 1, 2006
38. ^ Hood, John Hollowed Be Thy Name Miami Sun Post
39. ^ ^{a b} Tom Piatak, The Purest Neocon: Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right, The American Conservative, 2005-10-10
40. ^ Scarborough County Transcripts for March 12, 2004
41. ^ PBS, 2005
42. ^ Godless Provocateur Christopher Hitchens Pledges Allegiance to America
43. ^ "Craig, Hitchens ask 'Does God Exist?'". Whittier Daily News. April 5, 2009. http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_12079851. Retrieved 2009-04-24. 
44. ^ Fraternally yours, Chris, by Norman Finkelstein: criticizes Hitchens for perceived "opportunism", 2004
45. ^ Christopher Hitchens's last battle, by Juan Cole, September 5, 2005
46. ^ Hitchens Backs Down, by Alexander Cockburn
47. ^ Christopher Hitchens Rants Again, by Daniel Pipes, August 24, 2005
48. ^ The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens, Monthly Review, November 26, 2005
49. ^ Eye-witness account by Michael Totten
50. ^ ^{a b} "Frontpage Interview: Christopher Hitchens Part II". Front Page Magazine. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11253. Retrieved 2007-05-09. 
51. ^ "Arafat's Squalid End". Slate. http://slate.com/id/2109860/. Retrieved 2007-05-09. 
52. ^ Christopher Hitchens, Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle, New Statesman, July 5, 2007 (originally published 1976)
53. ^ Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism September 4, 2001
54. ^ Blaming bin Laden First October 4, 2001
55. ^ Chomsky Replies to Hitchens
56. ^ A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky: Minority Report
57. ^ Reply to Hitchens's Rejoinder October 4, 2001
58. ^ Taking Sides September 26, 2002
59. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgB20YmqN6A
60. ^ http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=6
61. ^ "Tariq Ali v. Christopher Hitchens". Democracy Now. http://www.democracynow.org/2004/10/12/tariq_ali_v_christopher_hitchens_a. Retrieved 2007-05-09. 
62. ^ "The Situation Room, Nov. 1, 2006". cnn.com. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/01/sitroom.03.html. Retrieved 2009-06-04. 
63. ^ "The big showdown: Andrew Anthony on Hitchens v Galloway". London: The Guardian. September 18, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/sep/18/otherparties.iraq. Retrieved 2009-06-04. 
64. ^ Johann Hari, "In Enemy Territory: An Interview with Christopher Hitchens"", The Independent 23 September 2004.
65. ^ Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Fukuyama", Slate 1 March 2006.
66. ^ Slate: Wowie Zahawie
67. ^ Slate: Clueless Joe Wilson
68. ^ Slate: So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?
69. ^ ^{a b} "A War To Be Proud Of" September 5, 2005
70. ^ The Hell of War June 5, 2006