I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me.
The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-the-heels shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of American and British conservatives (Charles Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the right, I was a cultural “traitor” and, in Christopher’s words, an “uppity wog,” and in the opinion of the left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the archbishop of New York, the British chief rabbi, John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Germaine Greer “understood the insult” and failed to be outraged, and Christopher went to war.
He and I found ourselves describing our ideas, without conferring, in almost identical terms. I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offense culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt … understood.
It's a fine tribute, but I'm a little uneasy with the way Rushdie deals with the business of Iraq, and Hitchens' support for Bush and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. This is of course the most contentious part of the Hitch legacy, and by now, a few weeks after his death, it's become commonplace to read extravagant encomiums to the man which feel it necessary to acknowledge that, nevertheless, despite all these excellent qualities – the courage, the quicksilver mind, the eloquence – he did make mistakes. And the biggest mistake of all was Iraq. It's already the standard line, the accepted wisdom: yes, great man, shame about Iraq.
Rushdie's line, basically, is that, after 9/11, Hitchens was horrified by the left's failure to appreciate the nature of the threat faced by the West:
Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the right, that his erstwhile comrades on the left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point, and so, never one to do things by halves, he did what looked to many people like a U-turn across the political highway to join forces with the war-makers of George W. Bush’s administration.
He then got back on track, as it were, and reconnected with his erstwhile allies on the left with his attacks on religion.
But Hitchens' support for the overthrow of Saddam wasn't a temporary regrettable enthusiasm based on a misplaced alliance with the neo-cons: it was an essential part of his political beliefs. An anti-totalitarian left should have had no problem supporting the removal of a despicable tyranny, unrivalled in modern times for its brutality and already guilty of genocide against its own people – nevermind the war against Iran and the invasion of Kuwait. This wasn't some imperialist adventure: this was the liberation of an enslaved people. God knows it wasn't well planned, and there were mistakes aplenty, but to oppose it simply because of a knee-jerk assumption that the US must always be on the wrong side – as most of the left did – was not a position that Hitchens was ever going to be comfortable with. His support for Bush and Blair and the overthrow of the Baathist regime was entirely consistent with the anti-totalitarianism which formed the foundation of his political beliefs.
But yes, apart from that quibble…an excellent piece.
Mick Hartley 
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