Left mourns loss of Hitchens

Peter Wilby bemoans the loss of Christopher Hitchens to the dark side on the occasion of the publication of Hitchens' latest book, Love, Poverty and War: journeys and essays.

Many left-wing opponents of the Iraq war will therefore want this collection to be bad: full of windbaggery, loose judgements, bad writing, and so on. Hitchens was never that good, was he? We on the left can manage without him, can't we? Alas, no. Hitchens is just too damn good. You will find here the most brilliant anti-capital punishment piece you have ever read; the most thoughtful piece on Israel and anti-Semitism; a marvellously vivid report on North Korea ("I found a class of tiny Koreans solemnly learning Morse code . . . Nobody has told them that the international community abandoned Morse two years ago"); a hilarious account of how Hitchens gave evidence to a Vatican commission on the beatification of Mother Teresa; and a gloriously rude demolition of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Yet Wilby cannot give Hitchens credit For having come by his position honestly or rationally.

In an interview, he admitted to "a feeling of exhilaration" that September day: "Here we are then . . . in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." What he loves most is the idea of America, and particularly of New York, "the magnetic compass point of my life". What he hates most - a "cold, steady hatred . . . as sustaining to me as any love" - is religion, "the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity".

Once you are into love and hate for abstractions, critical distance disappears. You end up supporting an illegal invasion that kills tens of thousands, just as lovers of the Palestinian cause could hail the courage and indefatigability of odious Middle Eastern tyrants. The old Hitchens was still struggling for life when he wrote in the Guardian a couple of days after 9/11: "On the campus where I am writing this, there are . . . a few . . . willing to venture thoughts about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apolo-getics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed."

For Hitchens, the analytical moment never came. When we needed him most, the old Hitchens passed away and was replaced by a new one, shorn of political subtlety and insight. To read this collection is to understand the scale of the loss.