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Christopher Hitchens
Columnist, Vanity Fair and The Nation; Author, The Trial of Henry Kissinger and Letters to a Young Contrarian
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: If you were president of the U.S., what would you do, and what would you have done differently with regard to terrorism before September 11?A: At one stage I worried that the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime would not be conducted with sufficient vigor by this administration because the two main pillars of U.S. policy in that region are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – the military, ideological, theological and financial patrons of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I was afraid that U.S. policy might become a hostage to that.
My name is on a petition that went around Washington last June about the enslavement of 50 percent of the women in Afghanistan. It asked the administration, "can it be true that the United States recognizes this government as the government of Afghanistan?" But you couldn't get any traction for that subject then in D.C. at all. And if you remember, Secretary of State Colin Powell hounded about that point of subvention of some four and a half million dollars, I believe, to the Taliban in gratitude to its help on the war on drugs; a war which is as totalitarian abroad as it is at home.
If I had been president, we wouldn't have had to start from there, and Mr. bin Laden's family – some twelve members – would not have been flown out of the U.S. on September 12 by a plane charted by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, with clearance from the CIA. I still want to know who made that possible and what it was they were in such a hurry about. We're left now with the appalling situation of a national security regime, which has for years been given millions of dollars to talk loud about national security and terrorism. It seems it knew, or could have known about and had identified, many of the perpetrators of the September 11 aggression, but did not do so.
Q: Having been in Pakistan, do you believe that bin Laden will be caught or killed? What would be the best way for the U.S. to treat both bin Laden and other Al Qaeda captives?
A: I went to the border of Afghanistan, to Peshawar during the bombing, and I was in Kashmir. I think Mr. bin Laden is still in that vicinity, on that very border. My wish is that he is captured by the British, because they've announced that if they capture him they won't give him to Mr. Ashcroft. Neither British, Spanish nor European Union law allows the delivery of suspects or wanted people or detainees to secret courts which can conduct executions without evidence. In other words, European law doesn't allow you to hand over your captives to a banana republic. Sorry I have to put it like that. The Ashcroft policy is positively endangering everyone – Ashcroft having rounded up god knows how many people but hasn't got a single suspect yet. Not one person has been charged with anything notable. The Spanish police have arrested eight members of the Al Qaeda network, which is a lot better work than the FBI and CIA have done, but they're not going to give them to any other courts. The Ashcroft policy is endangering in the same way as his refusal to indict General Pinochet was for letting off a car bomb in Washington D.C., for which his criminal division now has all the evidence. His job is to protect you from foreign despots. So, I think the case for the impeachment of the attorney general is now pretty much complete.
Of the Al Qaeda rank and file, if you can dignify them with the term, I hope most of them are killed, as many as possible, without compunction. But I would like to see a lot more of Mr. bin Laden; I would like to see him on trial in London. Mullah Omar, who was notionally at least, the head of government, should possibly be taken to The Hague because matters of war crime committed by the state could be adduced.
Q: How would you solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict?
A: I'm of poly-Jewish parentage and affiliation and there are quite a lot of us who think that Zionism is a stupid idea to begin with. That it is a disaster for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine has been obvious from the very first day. But to answer a famous old question much asked in the Shtetl, "Is it good for the Jews?" No. It is not good for the Jews to be invited to follow an ethnonationalist, messianic path that puts them into an inevitable quarrel because it involves the annexation of land, in particular of holy land, if you can believe such a concept, with the inhabitants of a region where until then they had no quarrels. For centuries the Jewish refugees from Europe went to Turkey, Bosnia or North Africa to get away from Christian persecution. They had no quarrel with the Muslim world. Now it's a nightmare.
I don't think the United Kingdom is a good idea for a state either. Lots of states have been founded on ridiculous principles, but they still have the right to exist. That gives us now a quadrilateral of alternatives. One: everyone under the lands claimed by Israeli jurisdiction could become a member of a single unitary state, where anyone who was a subject was also a citizen, with the same rights, whether they were Arab or Muslim or Jewish or Druze or Armenian. That, unfortunately, is now impossible. Two: there could be an expulsion of the remaining Palestinian population, completing the expulsion begun in 1947/8, inviting many more Jewish immigrants in and having a completely Jewish state that would be Arab-free. This would, as well as being an outrageous injustice, lead to a thousand-year-war in the region. Three: you could have a continuation of the status quo – basically an apartheid system – which is now, I think, acknowledged by everyone to be unbearable, insufferable, insupportable. Four: you can have two states. This is the only thinkable one, the only possible one. It should have been proclaimed a very long time ago and the terrible worry is that it now will only be adopted when it's too late.
Q: Do you believe that there are absolute Western values that ought to be protected to the extent of invading even sovereign nations?
A: What we think of as Western values very largely come from fifth century Hellenic conversations; I don't think there's any geographical location for them. And there's always the danger of ethnocentrism when one suggests that there is, and that's to say nothing against the wonders of the west coast. What I would prefer to say is that there are "Enlightenment values," some of them deriving from Greece, Italy, Scotland, Germany, England and Spain. Many of them came from the Muslim world which kept the Greek libraries and texts alive when they had been lost to the Christian world. These values of free inquiry, the scientific method, and the central importance of the individual are what I would define as the core of the Enlightenment cause. Do they give one the right to invade another country? No. But they would give one the duty to do so if one was attacked. These are principles that we do not have the right to give up. We have only the duty to preserve them, elaborate upon them and practice them as much as we can and pass them on. But it must be made very, very plain to those who do not share these values and would replace them with the idea that all society needs is one book, one rule, one text or one god head, that we too have unalterable convictions. And that our culture demands respect as well and will exact it if need be.
Q: Of what magnitude would an attack on the U.S. have to be for Noam Chomsky to agree with retaliation?
A: Professor Chomsky, since the 11th of September, has been in effect conducting a professorial moral equivalence campaign. His efforts in writing and in speaking have been to say that the use of cruise missiles against New York is no different from the use of cruise missiles any other place. Thus, it's an occasion for the U.S. to reflect on the number of times it has created wailing and gnashing of teeth in other places. To make civilian casualties your object and to make civilian casualties your method, as was done on September 11 – the cruise missiles are planes packed with terrified, paralyzed or screaming civilians before they hit the civilian target buildings – is to have created a new situation. He and others are unwilling to give up what was to them a consoling and comforting and repetitive worldview. It's led to intellectual and I think moral disgrace on the part of Professor Chomsky, who only recently at a gathering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that in his view the U.S. was engaged in a genocide campaign in Afghanistan with the objective of killing two to three million Afghan civilians. He said that, rather weirdly, there was almost no comment about this genocide campaign in the American press. And my own comment on this in The Nation was that it was very clever of him to spot that, and arguably very brave of him to be the only one to mention it, but that it would mean that a judgment had to be passed on his fitness to be making speeches on this kind of thing at all.
Q: When Henry Kissinger spoke here, he called accusations you made against him "irresponsible." He said he wouldn't respond to them, and that "he is a big boy and can take care of himself." Has he made any meaningful reply to your Harper's piece about him or your book?
A: He's a small boy. He has other people take care of him, and he shelters behind other people. In my book I make the accusation that he had perfect knowledge of the plan to invade East Timor, the plan by the Indonesian generals in 1975, and that he collaborated with them in advance and provided them the military means, even though it broke American law. In his memoirs he doesn't mention East Timor even once, even in the index. On the occasions that he's been pressed on it – there are only two public events where he's ever been asked – he has denied all knowledge, said the whole thing came as a surprise to him and he knew nothing of the plans or their execution.
Well, last week in Washington the conversation was declassified between Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger and General Suharto in Jakarta in Indonesia on the day of the invasion in East Timor. And, as always with Henry Kissinger, everything you suspected was true, and it was just slightly worse than you thought it was going to be. Suharto says, "Look, we're going to invade East Timor this afternoon," and Kissinger said, "I know. Would you mind delaying until after our plane has left Indonesian airspace because that will give us some deniability." Suharto says, "Yeah, we can do that." He said, "You're going to need some weapons aren't you?" Suharto says, "Yes – your weapons to be exact." Kissinger says, "American law says you're not supposed to use our weapons for this purpose…I'll make sure you go on getting them but I wish you'd be discreet about it." East Timor was a Portuguese possession under United Nations trusteeship; it's not legal for Indonesia to cross its border and take its territory. The genocide convention makes it incumbent on anyone with knowledge or any government with knowledge of an attempt to destroy a people in whole or in part to act not just to prevent but to punish it.
Generally speaking, it hasn't been publicized because what it says can't be true by the reigning standards of our media; it cannot be true that a friend of Charlie Rose and Ted Koppel and Jim Lehrer and Katherine Graham is a deliberate stone-cold mass murderer and errand boy for the fascist dictators. But that is true about him and that is the only thing that is. Everything else is propaganda.
I wrote these pieces and I published them in England so that he could sue me there, because the English libel laws are very much more in favor of the plaintiff than American ones. Kissinger refused to comment initially; finally he said he thought the book was contemptible – why should he care what anyone said about him by an anti-Semite and a denier of the Holocaust? At that point, I sued him. I sent him a lawyer's letter saying "see you in court" or "take it back." Immediately, Cravath, Swaine and Moore, his contemptible attorneys, wrote back much quicker than we thought they would and said, "Okay, for now, Henry Kissinger says he won't say that again." I watched to see when he would next appear and when he would next be asked, and it was right here at the Commonwealth Club. He was asked but he didn't say it again. And so I wrote and said, "That's not good enough. I want you to retract," which he since has. It's a tiny consolation. But he should have been suing me and I sued him and he lost. I make a little holiday in my heart.
Q: Why don't you do an exposé on Bush and Enron?
A: There's a very good piece already done about this by Robert Scheer, in the Los Angeles Times. You can't call it a conflict of interest because what strikes you about it is the absolute unity of interest between this gang of robbers and the gang of politicians whom they sponsored. It wasn't even one hand washing the other, it was one closed hand, which has since, as you know, gone numb and fallen down. The extraordinary extent of it, including the robbing of the employees of the company, the robbing of the California utilities, the open kickbacks, the tremendous access into the White House and the possibility that the change in the top of the Energy Department was actually dictated by the board of directors of Enron – there should be an inquisition. I don't think that the ordinary inquiries will do. Let the witch hunt begin.
