The Middle East Interest

Hitchens tells a story about the time that the newly appointed Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, first came to Washington, and stayed in a wing of the White House, along with other members of his administration and various figures—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—who had participated in the movement to topple Saddam. Hitchens was invited to a reception there. “And at one point,” he says, “we were all babbling, and Talabani said that whenever he’d quarrelled with Paul Bremer, which he often did, Bremer would says ‘that’s just your Marxist training coming out again.’ There was a pause. And then Talabani remarked, ‘I wonder if President Bush knows how many Marxists he has under his roof this evening?’”

Hitchens replied that Bush probably didn’t have the faintest idea, but that if he did, he probably wouldn’t mind. Because at least it was an assurance of a group defined by something other than religious sectarianism. (Hitchens does not see any aspect of Bush’s foreign policy as being forged out of his own Christianity.)

“Their Marxism was very different from mine,” Hitchens clarifies. “There was much more Maoist stuff—third-worldism, Castroism—in the background. Still, that was a great moment, and everybody saw the joke.” [read on]