It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An even clearer picture emerges of the hubris that led American policymakers, and the West in general, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the spread of liberal enlightenment, rather than subjecting them to the tests of Realpolitik.
Never trust a man whose favorite sport is politics. For Hitchens and the neocons who adopted him as a defector from the left, arguments were about shock and awe: the force with which they could be argued, and the humbling of the opponent, mattered more than the facts of the case.
