Hitchens' Defense of His Debate Foe

[Barry]

While I view Hitchens' zeal for going after religion and the religious as misguided, I have a lot of respect for both his intellect and the way he re-examined his philosophy on many issues, especially in the area of foreign/defense policy, as he grew older. He'll be missed if the reports I've read about the seriousness of his condition are accurate.

The Blair Hitch Project
Since leaving 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair has faced continuing public condemnation for leading the U.K. into Iraq, converted to Catholicism, and plunged into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Debating Blair in Toronto, the author finds the former prime minister battered but unapologetic.
By Christopher Hitchens•
February 2011
Say “Toronto” or “Ontario” and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency. But this part of Canada also has its quixotic and romantic dimension. It was to here that the Tory loyalists fled the American Revolution. In the village of Deptford, Ontario, on the banks of the local river Thames, the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies cast and situated a trilogy variously composed of the elements of magic and exile. One of his chief characters, Percy “Boy” Staunton, gives up much of his life and energy to the cause of the Prince of Wales, a once dashing and promising young blade who shatters and demoralizes his admirers by falling under the thrall of a designing woman and abdicating the throne without a fight.

As I was led past a phalanx of guards to be admitted to Tony Blair's hotel suite overlooking Toronto and Lake Ontario, I was mentally running through our previous meetings. The first had been in the room of the leader of the opposition in the House of Commons shortly after he had been elected to head the Labour Party and to re-brand—or should I say re-baptize?—it as “New Labour.” Then I had seen him in the private office of the prime minister in Downing Street, just before he became eligible to celebrate an entire decade in the job, almost eclipsing Margaret Thatcher and setting an indoor record for any Labour politician. Most recently he had slipped downstairs to say hello while he was on a private visit to the British Embassy residence in Washington. The surroundings were still grand, but by then he had abdicated and was being forced to watch his disliked and inferior successor throw away an election he knew in his heart he himself could have won.

Now he was traveling with a very small but devoted staff, and looking like a Prince Charming in exile. The high-wattage grin was still there, but framed in a lined face with cropped and graying hair that still gave the ephemeral impression of youth. We were due to have a public debate: the first he had agreed to since he had left office. Blair had made an appearance before the Chilcot committee, which is still investigating Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq, looking tight-lipped and conceding nothing. The taunts against him had swollen from run-of-the-mill abuse (“Bush's poodle,” “Liar,” or sometimes “Bliar”) to full-out hatred. “War criminal!” “Murderer.” The first two public launches of his new memoir, A Journey, had been disrupted or canceled. At a bookstore signing in Dublin he had been pelted with shoes and other objects by a mixed mob of anti-war types, stiffened with some gaunt lads from the periphery of “the Real I.R.A.” A later event at the Tate Modern, in London, had to be called off. “It just wouldn't have been fair to everyone else to go ahead,” he says with a rather lame shrug. Perhaps he was relying on the legendary politeness of Torontonians, and on the apparently more neutral subject of our dispute, which was religion. He now operates under the somehow touching name of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which can sound rather like a body set up to express faith in Tony Blair. His principal day job is to serve as mediator for the “Quartet” of powers that supervise the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” This means regular efforts to reconcile Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Holy Land. Cheer up, I want to tell him. At least it's a job for life.

Meanwhile, he has not lost his talent for swift parliamentary footwork. The proposition for debate states clearly that religion is “a force for good.” The onus here is always on those who are advocating the motion. Yet somehow, without quite understanding it, I find that I have agreed to speak first and to surrender the traditional advantage of giving the reply. I feel as if I have gone into a revolving door in front of someone and come out behind him: even as if one of Robertson Davies's suburban conjurors had pulled a fast one. During our public exchange I trail my coat on the Roman question, criticizing Cardinal Newman, whose beatification Blair had advocated, and ridiculing the Pope's position on family planning and aids. He doesn't rise to the defense of what he is bound to regard as the One True Church. Can it be true, then, that he did what both Clinton and George W. Bush had done before him, and ended up in the pews of his wife's church? Cherie Blair—who has told us more than we need to know about the times she did and didn't take her highly heretical birth-control kit for fertile weekends with the Queen at Balmoral—is a devout if eclectic Catholic. Her half-sister Lauren announced a few weeks ago that she had converted to Islam after a visit to a mosque in Iran, for whose state-run “Press TV” she works as a journalist. She described the moment of revelation, in terms that would have delighted Karl Marx, as a “shot of spiritual morphine,” and claims not to have had a drink or any pork products ever since. In spite of her brother-in-law's many pretzel-shaped attempts to accommodate himself to the followers of the Prophet, she took the opportunity to describe him as a foe of Islam. Blair, who relates in his memoirs a period when he became too fond of the cocktail and nightcap hours, yet who exhausts himself daily on “outreach” to Muslims, has no alternative but to put on his sadly misunderstood face once again.

And he really does possess one of the most mobile and expressive faces I have ever seen. I asked him in private what it was like to be hated: not hated a bit but hated really quite a lot. The receptive grin stayed in place, even if very slightly contracted, as if he wanted to go on giving the impression of seeing all points of view. Did he feel he had had to unfairly absorb some of the spittle directed at George Bush? He didn't seem to want to take shelter in this refuge. Now, those who fail to register emotion under pressure are often apparently good officer material, but that very stoicism can also conceal—as with officers who don't suffer from battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress—a psychopathic calm that sends the whole platoon into a ditch full of barbed wire and sheds no tears.

Blair on the platform was an almost complete contrast. He virtually pantomimed reaction: smiling readily if a joke was at his expense, wincing here and there, spreading his palms resignedly once or twice. Yet this body candor, too, can have its iffy aspect, like Clinton biting his fat lip in fake empathy. I couldn't quite make up my mind until after the debate was over. He and I had been chatting in his greenroom, and I excused myself to go to my own (for a shot of morphine, I think, to boost the weak scotch I'd been given). Returning rather quickly, I found Blair whispering with one of his aides. As I paused at the door, they both looked up rather shyly. I offered to withdraw, but they said no: they had just been saying to each other how grateful they were that I had said some words that evening in defense of his decision to remove Saddam Hussein. I have spent my life growing a carapace to shield myself from the appeal of politicians, and nine out of ten of my closest friends now regard Blair as the classic example of the trickster exposed, the hollow man calcified by cynicism and media manipulation. I, too, can remember gagging at his uncritical courtship of Rupert Murdoch and his annexation of the Princess Diana obsequies (even if the latter did make him the first Labour prime minister to give instructions to the royal family). But having caught him in this micro-moment of being vulnerable without exactly being wounded, I find that I simply can't lend myself to the glib consensus. There is a moral pulse to be detected here, and it's quite a strong one.

When Tony Blair took office, Slobodan Milošević was cleansing and raping the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Mullah Omar was lending Osama bin Laden the hinterland of a failed and rogue state. Charles Taylor of Liberia was leading a hand-lopping militia of enslaved children across the frontier of Sierra Leone, threatening a blood-diamond version of Rwanda in West Africa. And the wealth and people of Iraq were the abused private property of Saddam Hussein and his crime family. Today, all of these Caligula figures are at least out of power, and at the best either dead or on trial. How can anybody with a sense of history not grant Blair some portion of credit for this? And how can anybody with a tincture of moral sense go into a paroxysm and yell that it is he who is the war criminal? It is as if all the civilians murdered by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be charged to his account. This is the chaotic mentality of Julian Assange and his groupies.

Scripture warns gloomily that prophets are not honored in their own countries, and given the record of many prophets, that's very probably a good thing. Blair could also join the club of wandering ex-statesmen, including at different times Mikhail Gorbachev and Richard Nixon, who are given respect and recognition only when they visit other peoples' countries. As we said good-bye, he was being taken straight to the airport, staying one jet-lag stage ahead of his demons, and heading back to Jerusalem—that birthplace of all our dreams and graveyard of all our hopes.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... ens-201102

[John F]

Just call him "Snidely." Pure Hitchins all the way. How generous of him to acknowledge that Tony Blair isn't really a war criminal. But Hitchins is certainly an entertaining writer.

[Chalkperson]

He's a good friend of Col. Bob's, the reports about his health are accurate...