Informed Speculation

The great Christopher Hitchens is in rare form as he follows up on his uncontradicted narrative last week detailing the almost certain attempt by Iraq to obtain uranium from Niger:

The person whose response I most wanted is Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who has claimed to discover that Saddam was guiltless on the charge of seeking uranium from Niger, and has further claimed to be the object, along with his CIA wife, of a campaign of government persecution. On Keith Olbermann’s show on April 10, Wilson was asked about my article and about Zahawie. He replied that Zahawie “is a man that I know from my time as acting ambassador in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. … He was ambassador to the Vatican, and he made a trip in 1999 to several West and Central African countries for the express purpose of inviting chiefs of state to violate the ban on travel to Iraq. He has said repeatedly to the press, he’s now in retirement, and also to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to their satisfaction, that uranium was not on his agenda.”

If you think that’s good enough for our dear Christopher, then you aren’t acquainted with the Hitch:

Once again, the details and implications of Zahawie’s own IAEA background are ignored (as they were in the IAEA’s own report to the United Nations about the forged Italian documents that were later circulated about Zahawie’s visit). In the same press interviews to which Wilson alludes (and which I cited last week), Zahawie went a bit further than saying that uranium was “not on his agenda.” He claimed not to know that Niger produced uranium at all! You may if you wish choose to take that at face value—along with his story that all he was trying to do was violate sanctions on flights to Iraq. Joseph Wilson appears to be, as they say, “comfortable” with that explanation.

And it’s true that the two men knew each other during the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991. Indeed, in his book The Politics of Truth, Wilson records Zahawie as having been in the room, as under-secretary for foreign affairs, during his last meeting with Saddam Hussein. (Quite a senior guy for a humble mission like violating flight-bans from distant Niger and Burkina Faso.) I cite this because it is the only mention of Zahawie that Wilson makes in his entire narrative.

In other words (I am prepared to keep on repeating this until at least one cow comes home), Joseph Wilson went to Niger in 2002 to investigate whether or not the country had renewed its uranium-based relationship with Iraq, spent a few days (by his own account) sipping mint tea with officials of that country who were (by his wife’s account) already friendly to him, and came back with the news that all was above-board. Again to repeat myself, this must mean either that A) he did not know that Zahawie had come calling or B) that he did know but didn’t think it worth mentioning that one of Saddam’s point men on nukes had been in town. In neither case, it seems to me, should he be trusted with another mission that requires any sort of curiosity.

Now, I’m no Johnny-Come-Lately who adopted Hitchens when he became a ‘neocon tool’ that supports the Iraq War; I have all the major Hitchens works, including those when his viewpoint was undisguisedly, unapologetically Socialist (he is an admitted ex-Trotskyite).

Hitchens is an Oxford grad who has read to the blind Jorge Luis Borges, written for most of the major publications of the Left, visited Iraq numerous times, covered every conflict since Vietnam firsthand, made acquaintances and friends with Sandinistas, Kurds, fellow travellers, and yes, a Republican or two, and who has castigated Ronald Reagan, Charles Krauthammer, and Irving Kristol in most vicious fashion. He’s no apologist for the Bush administration, then, but he’s virtually unmatched for erudition in what passes for the pundit class these days (though he’s certainly far more than a pundit; intellectual is not too far a reach for a man of his background and skill with the written word). In other words, the pathetic Joe Wilson may have shared with Hitchens the honor of appearing in Vanity Fair, but he’s no match for him in a battle of wits.

Thus, the finish is a bit disappointing, as Wilson proves far too puny a prey:

Take that permanent smirk off your face, Ambassador (and the look of martyrdom as well, while you are at it). It seems that your contacts in the Niger Ministry of Mines—the ones that your wife told the CIA made you such a good choice for the trip—didn’t rate you highly enough to tell you about the Zahawie visit. It would, interestingly, have been a name you already knew. But you didn’t even get as far as having to explain it away—or not until last week—because you were that far in the dark. It was left to Italian, French, and British intelligence to discover the suggestive fact and transmit it to Washington. And it’s been left to someone else, most probably in the Niger embassy in Rome, to produce a much later fabrication, either for gain or in order to discredit a true story. The forged account has no bearing at all on the authentic one: It bears the same relationship as a fake $100 bill does to a genuine bill. The rip-off remake movie, “Mr. Wilson Goes to Niger,” now playing to packed houses of the credulous everywhere, has precisely the same relationship to its own original.

There’s a certain nasty pleasure one takes from seeing a really first-rate takedown of a third-rate mind by one from the first rank…