Should Christopher Hitchens apologize to Iraqis (and U.S. peace marchers)? [View All]

[Enrique]

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

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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.

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