I’ve created this page to consolidate the views and opinions from Christopher Hitchens to try create clarity around why he supported the invasion of Iraq, in deference to the opinions of many people back after 2001, and today.

The following are the key points illustrated by Christopher Hitchens in his interview debate with Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, August 25, 2005.

1. Rectifying past mistakes: Hitchens believed that the U.S. should not have left Saddam Hussein in power after the 1991 Gulf War. He thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a way to correct this mistake, and it was necessary to remove the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein.
2. Justifiable reasons for intervention: Hitchens listed four conditions under which a country could be considered to have lost its sovereignty and warranted intervention. These conditions are: repeated aggression against neighboring states, violating non-proliferation treaties, harboring terrorists, and committing genocide. Hitchens argued that Iraq had broken all four conditions multiple times, making it a legitimate target for intervention.
3. The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998: Hitchens referred to the U.S. legislation passed in 1998, which stated that it was the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime and promote a democratic government in Iraq. He argued that people who were against the 2003 invasion should have voiced their concerns back in 1998 when the policy was established.
4. Presence of terrorists in Iraq: Hitchens argued that terrorists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were present in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Additionally, he pointed out that terrorists involved in the World Trade Center bombing and the Achille Lauro hijacking were sheltered in Iraq. He believed that the invasion was necessary to eliminate the presence of terrorists and their supporters in the country.
5. Promoting democracy: Hitchens saw the Iraq War as an opportunity to establish a federal democracy in Iraq, which would serve as a model for other countries in the region. He believed that this would ultimately benefit the people of Iraq and contribute to regional stability.
6. Fighting against the enemies: Hitchens believed that the U.S. had deadly enemies who intended to cause harm, and that retreating from the fight against them would be a mistake. He argued that the Iraq War was a necessary part of the global fight against terrorism, and that the cause of terrorism was not the resistance against it but the extremist ideology of the terrorists themselves.

The following quotes are pulled from The Quotable Hitchens.

• “The decision to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein is the right one, and was also the only one. It is not, really, a declaration of war. It is, rather, the resolve to bring a long and sordid war to an overdue conclusion.” [“Countdown to War: Two Mirror Writers with Opposing Views,” Mirror, 3/18/03]
• “Those of us who support this intervention do so precisely because we are scrupulous about human life and reverent when it comes to its protection.” [“Countdown to War: Two Mirror Writers with Opposing Views,” Mirror, 3/18/03]
• “ . . . There is both honor and glory in being able to demolish the palaces and cellars of a murdering dictatorship, inflicting so few incidental casualties (and taking such obvious care to minimize them) that the propaganda of Saddam’s goons can produce almost no genuine victims to gloat over. I feel disgust for those who blame this week’s deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein.” [“Gulf War 2: Christopher Hitchens on Why We Must Keep Our Nerve,” Mirror, 3/25/03]
• “This battle . . . has always seemed to me to be a just one. Perhaps for that reason, as well as doubtless for other ones, it received almost zero support from organized religion.” [“Public Solidarity Does Not Help Humanism,” Free Inquiry, Summer 2003]
• “It may be a war waged by generally conservative tacticians, but it is a project designed by internationalist and liberal minds.” [“Rumble on the Right,” Vanity Fair, July 2004]
• “Unless the United States chooses to be defeated in Iraq, it cannot be.” [“Tariq Ali v. Christopher Hitchens: A Debate on the U.S. War on Iraq, the Bush-Kerry Race and the Neo-Conservative Movement,” Democracy Now!, 10/12/04]
• “Yes, we did indeed underestimate the ferocity and ruthlessness of the jihadists in Iraq. Where, one might inquire, have we not underestimated those forces and their virulence?” [“The End of Fukuyama,” Slate, 3/01/06]
• “As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality . . . and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.” [“A Death in the Family,” Vanity Fair, November 2007]
• “I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight.” [“Iraq’s Budget Surplus Scandal,” Slate, 8/11/08]
• “I think it’s a certainty that historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein was something that the international community ought to have postponed any further. (Indeed, if there is a disgrace, it is that previous administrations left the responsibility undischarged.)” [“No Regrets,” Slate, 1/19/09]

The following is a summary and the key points around the Iraq War from Mesopotamia from Both Sides, Hitch 22: A Memoir. Published in 2010, the book is an autobiographical account of Hitchens’ life, work, friendships, and intellectual evolution.

1. Hitchens’ visits to Iraq: Hitchens visited northern Iraq in the 1990s and witnessed the suffering of the Kurdish people under Saddam Hussein’s regime, which influenced his support for the 2003 invasion.
2. Moral imperative: Hitchens believed that the removal of Saddam Hussein was a moral obligation due to the regime’s human rights abuses, use of chemical weapons, and oppressive nature.
3. Larger struggle: Hitchens saw the Iraq War as part of a broader fight against totalitarianism and religious extremism in the Middle East.
4. Diverse perspectives: Hitchens shares anecdotes and conversations with various Iraqis to illustrate the range of opinions on the invasion, showcasing the complexity of the conflict.
5. Historical context: The chapter touches on the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, the impact of colonialism, and the legacy of British involvement in shaping modern Iraq.
6. Critique of post-invasion management: Hitchens criticizes the U.S. and its allies for their handling of the post-invasion period, including disbanding the Iraqi army, the de-Baathification process, and insufficient planning for reconstruction.
7. Power vacuum and sectarian violence: Hitchens acknowledges that mistakes made during the occupation led to a power vacuum, the rise of sectarian violence, and the emergence of extremist groups like ISIS.

Christopher Hitchens focuses on his experiences and observations during his visits to Iraq, highlighting the complexities and nuances of the situation in the country both before and after the 2003 invasion. The chapter title reflects Hitchens’ aim to provide insights from both the Western perspective and that of the Iraqi people.

Hitchens begins by recounting his visits to northern Iraq in the 1990s, when he witnessed the suffering of the Kurdish people under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. He describes the resilience and determination of the Kurds, who were subjected to genocide and chemical attacks. These experiences laid the groundwork for Hitchens’ support of the Iraq War, as he believed it was necessary to remove the oppressive regime and bring freedom to the Iraqi people.

Throughout the chapter, Hitchens shares anecdotes and conversations with various Iraqis to illustrate the diversity of perspectives on the invasion. Some people were grateful for the intervention, while others were skeptical of the U.S.-led coalition’s intentions. Hitchens emphasizes that there were no easy answers or clear-cut opinions, highlighting the complex nature of the conflict.

Hitchens also delves into the history of the region, touching on the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia and the role of Iraq in the broader Middle East. He discusses the impact of colonialism and the legacy of British involvement in the region, which contributed to the shaping of modern Iraq.

In addition to expressing his support for the invasion, Hitchens criticizes the way the U.S. and its allies managed the post-invasion period. He acknowledges the errors made in the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the de-Baathification process, and the lack of adequate planning for the reconstruction of the country. These missteps, in his view, led to a power vacuum, the rise of sectarian violence, and the emergence of extremist groups such as ISIS.

The chapter “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” offers an intimate look at Hitchens’ experiences in Iraq and the reasons behind his controversial support for the war. While he remained committed to the idea of liberating Iraq from tyranny, Hitchens did not hesitate to critique the mistakes and shortcomings of the intervention.

Christopher Hitchens addressed the issue of not finding weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq after the invasion. Though the lack of WMDs undermined one of the primary justifications for the war, Hitchens maintained his support for the invasion.

1. Saddam’s WMD history: Hitchens emphasized that Saddam Hussein had a documented history of using chemical weapons against his own people and neighboring countries, such as in the Iran-Iraq War and against the Kurds in Halabja. He argued that it was reasonable to assume that Saddam would continue to pursue such weapons, given his past behavior. “Love, Poverty, and War” (2004)
2. Moral justification: Despite the absence of WMDs, Hitchens maintained that the moral justification for the war remained intact. He argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutal, oppressive, and responsible for numerous human rights violations, making its removal a justifiable act in and of itself. “A War to Be Proud Of” published in The Weekly Standard, 2004.
3. Regime change: Hitchens reiterated that one of his main reasons for supporting the invasion was to effect regime change and liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. He believed that the absence of WMDs did not negate the necessity of ousting the oppressive regime. “Why I (Slightly) Prefer Bush to Kerry” published in Slate, 2003.
4. Critique of the intelligence community: Hitchens criticized the intelligence community for their failure to accurately assess the situation in Iraq before the invasion. He acknowledged that the faulty intelligence on WMDs was a significant issue, but he did not see it as a reason to dismiss the entire premise of the invasion. “The Case for War” published in Vanity Fair, 2004.

Summary:

1. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, committing atrocities against his own people and neighboring countries.
2. The liberation of Iraq will stand as one of the greatest decisions of American statecraft, despite the challenges and failures.
3. The Iraq War removed a keystone state from the control of a fascist mafia and opened up possibilities for the future of the Middle East.
4. The intervention has had positive outcomes, such as bringing a war criminal to justice, restoring the environment, and supporting Kurdish autonomy.
5. The Iraq War led to non-proliferation victories, such as shutting down the AQ Khan Network and exposing North Korea’s involvement in WMD proliferation.
6. Sovereignty can be lost for four reasons: violations of the Genocide Convention, violating non-proliferation treaties, harboring international terrorist groups, and invading other nations. Iraq met all four criteria.
7. Hitchens argues that moving Iraq and the region into a post-Saddam era was essential, despite the challenges and failures.

Transcription:

It goes, by the way, if drunk with sight of power we lose LW OSE wild hogs that have not died nor such boastings as the Gentiles use and lesser breeds without the law. It’s the whole magnificence of Kipling that makes people nervous about quoting him correctly because, when you get it right, it’s unsettling. Lots of things about this are unsettling, and so they should be. It’s my duty as well as my pleasure to congratulate Peter on keeping things edgy for this evening. You didn’t come here, we hope, for a banal debate, ladies and gentlemen.

Now listen, you can’t see underneath my shirt the garlic necklace, and you have no idea that I’m fighting my way by Northwest Airlines back from here tomorrow morning to be in New York for the memorial service to William F Buckley at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In other words, you’ve got no idea what I’ve been going through lately, and there’s no real reason why you should. But when they said to me this evening, “When you come out, do you want to be at the throne or at the pulpit?”, I did feel slightly discombobulated. And when I said, “Well, where’s the men’s room?”, and they said, “It’s down there, and there’s men’s room and then there’s women’s room”, I began to feel more discovered still.

And today is the anniversary of the day in 1945 when my mother and my father got married, after both of them having been through a very long, brutal, cruel war. After that succeeded the long austerity poverty struggle with which they’d had to beguile their youth in the 1920s and 30s of interwar Britain. If you can even assume that people in Europe in those days lived between two wars, rather than endure long armistice between two terrifying resumptions of hostilities, every time you read fragile truths in the New York Times, think of that as applying to the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, and you’ll get a better idea of what these resumptions of hostilities were. And yes, I think if I look at my brother and think, “Well, our parents got married on this day in 1945,” that is a little unsettling. It’s also, I think, hope you don’t mind my saying so, rather reassuring. We are both here, after all, and determined to testify.

Now, on this question about the Mesopotamian war, everybody knows why they opposed it, don’t they? Everyone’s clear on what the reasons are. We were told wrong things, given inaccurate information by dubious governments. We were sort of cheated into a feeling that we delegations of the UN had overstated the matter of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. In fact, when you think about it, you’ll find that it’s probably even wrong to mention Saddam Hussein in the same breath as weapons of mass destruction or terrorism.

I have a couple of tests of my own for whether people know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about Iraq. Anyone who says that Saddam Hussein was okay, a bad guy, doesn’t know. They don’t know what fascism feels like, you know, what it’s like to see families forced at gunpoint to applaud the torture and execution in public of their family members.

They don’t know what it’s like to see 180,000 members of the Kurdish people, at a minimum, killed by poison gas in the northern provinces of Iraq. In the worst light, to see at least that number of Shia Arabs killed in southern Iraq. They don’t know what it took Anglo-American/British-American policy to put a no-fly zone from 1991 onwards over those two zones to make sure that those two genocides could not be replicated. They don’t know what it would be like to be a citizen of Kuwait or Iran, seeing Saddam Hussein’s army coming over the horizon, attacking your civilians in that way, abolishing, in one case, the whole existence of a member state of the Arab League and of the (Muslim, excuse me) Islamic Conference, and of the United Nations. Abolishing it and annexing it, making it part of Iraq. They didn’t hear the speech from Saddam saying that the only mistake he ever made was that he invaded Kuwait before he’d finished the nuclear weapon. He should have done it the other way round, first get the nuclear weapon, then invade Kuwait. Then ask them what they’re going to do now, now that I’ve invaded it. Don’t do it, don’t get it the wrong way around. We lived at this man’s permission for a long time. We lived by his warrant only his stupidity allowed us to be as complacent as we were. In the meantime, fighters in northern and southern Iraq were fighting against a challenger we should have been fighting ourselves.

The liberation of Iraq, in other words, the decision that we had to move the Iraqi people and the region into a post-Saddam era, will stand, I’m convinced, as one of the greatest decisions of American statecraft, as one of the things that American soldiers, male and female, and politicians do version for it. Those who have defended it would be proudest of in the future. Any decision we’ve ever made, despite the ridicule, despite the incompetence, despite the failures, despite the disappointments. Let us review what we’ve done. First, we have removed a keystone state of the Middle East from the control and sole ownership of a psychopathic crime family who owned all of Iraq and treated its people as if they were disposable citizens. I remind you that this keystone state occupies a chokepoint on the Gulf and an arterial carotid point in the world economy. It cannot be left the control of a fascistic mafia. I remind you further that it exists between the exorbitant Sunni Wahhabi theocracy of Saudi Arabia and the no less exorbitant Shia theocracy of Iran. But it is the keystone that allows us, yes us, we have the right to do this. We have the right to insist on oil. We, who don’t have to be ashamed of mentioning oil in the same breath as democracy, to say, if we can recuperate Iraq, if we can recuperate its oil industry, if we can stop it being the private property of a psychopathic crime family, we can not only help the Iraqis, but we can undercut the monopoly or the duopoly of Shia Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone think this is a matter of indifference? Was anyone willing to get up and say, “You sir, very good for you, I, my own nerve, I wouldn’t mind if you were the only one, as you seem to be, you’re indifferent to it.

Does anyone think this is a matter of indifference? Was anyone willing to get up and say, ‘You, sir, very good for you. I admire your nerve. I wouldn’t mind if you were the only one, as you seem to be, who’s indifferent to it.’ The rest of us here, voters and consumers, all believers in freedom, might possibly want to take the view that it can’t be for us a nothing question what happens to Iraq. What in the remaining time that we have, we’ve brought one of the great war criminals of the world to justice and put him and his crime family and his main complicit associates on trial in public, in a country where until recently, very recently, it was death, slow death, very slow death, to possess a cellphone or satellite dish? That we have undone what UNESCO calls the greatest crime against the human ecology ever committed, the destruction of the marshes of southern Iraq, the oldest wetlands in the Middle East, the smoke and destruction of which could be seen from the Space Shuttle, so terrible was the environmental decay? That we have proclaimed the autonomy of the Kurdish people, the oldest, largest nation in the world not to have a state of their own, and that where they live, in their federalized, democratized provinces in northern Iraq, which were released from Saddam Hussein’s control the full 12 years before the liberation of the rest of the country, business flourishes, press flourishes, democracy flourishes, civil society flushes? The sooner the earlier the intervention by the British and American forces in Iraq, in other words, the happier, the sooner, the greater, the deeper, the more enduring, and the more useful in the future is the outcome I’m willing to defend, because I’ve just seen time, I will need to defend, and underline, and repeat, and restate, and emphasize everything I have said so far. So all of you who’ve come here under the pathetic illusions peddled by Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and moveon.org, have all your work still ahead of you. And you thought it was going to be easy, didn’t you? By now. Thank you, Christopher. Peter, the next five minutes are yours. Thank you. The era of the savages without the law were the Germans. It was the law that they were outside that made them lesser. I just thought I had to add that. Right. Consequences of the Iraq War: six trillion dollars which the United States does not have expended; Iraq under the control, largely, of the ayatollahs of Iran; the resorts to torture by the United States, often by proxy but not always; disgraces in themselves and disasters; an untold number of innocent people killed; the certainty that the United States is unable, for the foreseeable future, to mount a justified military operation abroad; the diminution of the moral authority of the Western democracies again, for the foreseeable future; fantastic. What more can you ask? Resulting from deliberate ignorance of the past, deliberate willful ignorance of the past of Britain’s own attempts to control and exploit and govern Iraq through fake Parliaments and fake elections, at least more successful for a while in gaining the cooperation of at least one of the Iraqi factions, without necessarily having to pay them to fight by the day with AK-47s against our enemies instead of against us again, triumph.

I really do not see what justification there could be for the operation on its own merits. But if it is a principle that the United States has to intervene in every country which is misgoverned where there are despots, whether it’s torture, whether there’s no freedom, then where else can anybody in this room think of that we might be intervening? For instance, the site of the Summer Olympics might occur to some, but we don’t know. Nor, if we’re terribly tender about the massacres of Arabs by Arabs or the citizens of Arab states by other out states, why is it that we accept it as our allies in the first Gulf War, the state of Syria, whose then President Hafez al-Assad ordered his troops with artillery to surround the town of Hama and shell it until everyone living in it was dead? If our principle is that we only associate with nice foreign regimes and we always attack and devastate nasty ones, where was that principle then? Neither it makes sense. None of the objectives turned out to be true. When I was in Iraq for the first time, only a few weeks after the invasion, people crowded around me in Najaf and Karbala, saying, and many of them spoke English: ‘Thanks very much indeed for coming. Now will you please get out?’ And that was the nicest thing that anybody said to me all the time I was there. How can anyone stand here and say that this is a success? All I can say is that it must take the most enormous courage and resolution to continue to stick to an obviously losing argument. Well, it’s obviously come to the actuarial. Seems a waste of Hitchensism, in a way, to just reduce things to the balance sheet, but we do balance sheet. We will do balance sheet properly. Let me suggest some things to you first. Everybody knows that there isn’t a single clever person here who doesn’t know, if they’re watching this on webcast, who doesn’t know that you can’t mention weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein in the same breath, even though he used them against Iran and against the Kurds, wrongly described as his own people, within the borders of his own country, and was continuing to incubate and maintain the capacity to recover them. However, for actuarial purposes, let me just say that having enforced the resolutions that governed this question in the case of Iraq, we forced the capitulation of Colonel Gaddafi, whose stock of WMD we had underestimated when he came in, and he didn’t surrender, I might add, to Kofi Annan or Jacques Chirac. Where did Colonel Gaddafi come, the few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, to say, ‘Okay, you can take all my stockpile now and put it in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it now is, which is where it should be’? He didn’t come to Kofi Annan. Hold your claws, comrades. I know I’m never going to get any from you, but thanks for trying. I sort of appreciate. You can come to Kofi Annan or Jacques Chirac or the prostituted equally prostituted Gerhard Schröder, the real blood-for-oil pimps and prostitutes who constituted the leadership of the anti-war movement in European politics. No, he came to Tony Blair and he came to George W. Bush. Okay, let’s have a look at this big stockpile that Colonel Gaddafi’s got all this time. It’s bigger than we thought. Much bigger than we thought.

We accused him of a lot. It was much worse than we thought, as it had been when Saddam Hussein at the time of Kuwait, much worse than we thought. Well, let’s have another look. Where’s he got it from? Where’s it come from? It’s come from North Korea, and it’s come from Pakistan, Pakistan, our ally. So by walking back the couch, as it’s called in Washington, we discover from this capitulation the AQ Khan Network. We shut it down, or at least we put its leader under house arrest, miss for now. At least we put the North Koreans in the frame, and they know we’ve got them. This is the biggest non-proliferation victory there has ever been for any US administration ever in history. That’s the first thing. The second is we catch the guy who rolled Leon Klinghoffer off the deck of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, who were avoided arrest when he was caught, had to be released as he was travelling on a diplomatic passport, a what passport, a what passport that you’re chromatic passport, what jit right possible an Iraqi diplomatic passport, just like Abu Nidal had been traveling on, just as my every other terrorist gang you’ve ever heard of in the Middle East have been headquartered in Baghdad. We shut that down too. You think this is nothing. You think it’s nothing. You want to sneer at it and say, ‘Bush says mission accomplished.’ Sneer. Go on, sneer. These achievements are real. There are four, four reasons for which a state previously sovereign may lose its sovereignty, may be deemed to be outside the law. They are, for I’ll recite them quickly, one, violations of the Genocide Convention, which we have signed, and by the way, by all means, let’s impose this on Sudan, and by all means, let’s impose it on them for Darfur, and on China for many other offences too, because just as China has backed Saddam Hussein, and just as it backs Robert Mugabe, and justice backed the worst elements in Burma, so it has been behind many of our words in the Middle East. So that’s the first thing. The Genocide Convention may not be violated. We’ve signed it. It mandates that you must move to punish or prevent genocide. Second, a regime loses its sovereignty if it violates the non-proliferation treaty. Iraq has used weapons of mass destruction on its own church in on the Church of others. Third, you may lose your sovereignty if you give aid comfort and harbour to international terrorist groups. Iraq is multiple he convicted of this. And fourth, for occupying and invading the charity of other nations which Iraq had done several times, continue to do, was intending to do again. This is not, unfortunately, the case with all the despots we’d like to get rid of. The cheap point that Peter ends with saying, if you get a do Saddam Hussein, don’t you have to do anybody? Must reach the critical standard I’ve just mentioned, the four great offenses, repeated, flagrant, gross and intentional, and going to be repeated, all of them again. It was essential that we move Iraq and the region into a post Saddam Hussein era, and the woes that have fallen upon us, the second thoughts we’re bound to have, the worries about the blunders that we made while doing it, none of which I would deny and so which I know more about than you could dare to know, I know things about what went wrong, they will curl your hair still. None of these can impeach the idea that we did it, not too soon, but much too late, and that only therein lies our shame.