Bitchslapping administered

Christopher Hitchens was interviewed last night by Tony Jones on ABC-TV’s Lateline program. Hitchens looked ill, but was as arrogant and combative as ever. He chided Jones as a schoolmaster would a dull schoolboy. By some accounts, Hitchens gave Jones a fair old ‘bitchslapping’.

But what exactly was Hitchens’ point again? Well, ostensibly it all went to supporting President George W. Bush’s case for a ‘linkage’ between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. He referred approvingly to GWB’s own dull-schoolboy assertion featured in the previous segment:

REPORTER: What did Iraq have to do with that?

GEORGE W. BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

REPORTER: The attack on the World Trade Center?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Nothing, except for it’s part of – and nobody’s ever suggested in this Administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack – Iraq was a ... Iraq ... the lesson of September the 11th is take threats before they fully materialise, Ken.

Or, as Hitchens then himself somewhat clumsily paraphrased it: “The removal of Saddam Hussein was for the next attack so that it wouldn’t come.” (Does Hitchens moonlight as GWB’s speechwriter?)

Anyway, Jones put it to Hitchens that...

At least one key witness to the events within the White House immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, says that advisers in the White House were bent on attacking Iraq in retaliation, whether or not Saddam Hussein had anything to do with al-Qaeda.

Hitchens roundly rejected Clarke’s view that there was no linkage between Saddam and al-Qaeda, pointing out that Clarke had previously said in 1999, in relation to the US attack on a chemical facility in Sudan, that there was indeed a link.

Anyway, said Hitchens, Clarke is now being partisan and is not to be trusted. The bottom line is that even Clarke said there was a linkage, and although he has since repudiated that view, he just can’t be trusted anyway.

So there! That stitches up Clarke – to Hitchens’ satisfaction, anyway.

Jones then cited the recent US Senate committee report that found no linkage between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Hitchens made even shorter work of that – notwithstanding he doesn’t appear to have actually read the report itself, but rather “at least one very trenchant critique of this report”. He nevertheless witheringly dismisses the report as “half-baked and unfinished”, based apparently upon what he has read by an indeterminate number of unnamed critics of an only partially-released report.

Hmm... Perhaps the only ‘bitchslapping’ was of the viewers’ entitlement to honest and objective analysis.