HITCHENS UNHINGED BY 9/11?

What changed Hitchens’s mind about American foreign policy? Three things, it seems. The first was a growing identification, the longer he resided here, with American society and culture, a romance affectingly described in his autobiography, Hitch-22. The second was his increasingly militant anticlericalism, fed especially by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Hitchens’s friend Salman Rushdie. The third was a long-gathering disaffection with the Anglo-American left, which he saw as frozen in postures of multiculturalism and anti-Americanism. He refers in the introduction to Arguably to an “ongoing polemic … between the anti-imperialist left and the anti-totalitarian left”; announcing his accession to the latter in Hitch-22, he described the former as those who “in the final instance believe that if the United States is doing something, then that thing cannot by definition be a moral or ethical action.” Perhaps because of chronic deadline pressure, Hitchens has never plumbed this important question any deeper than that facile opposition and glib taunt.