Towering Shamelessness
"Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty."
Christopher Hitchens in Slate, Jan. 16, 2006:
"Of course, most reporters then returned to their insulting (and insultingly easy) task of demarcating and segregating all Iraqi opinion as if it had to fall into one of three groups...Now we read (in the Jan. 12 New York Times) of members of the Sunni"Islamic Army" directly confronting al-Qaida's gangsters on the streets of Taji, a town to the north of Baghdad, with appreciable casualties on both sides...Interviewed for the Times piece was Abu Marwa, a militia activist from a town farther south, who described setting a trap for two Syrian al-Qaida members—and killing both of them—after their group had tortured and killed one of his Shiite relatives...The significance of this, and of numerous other similar accounts, is three-fold. First, it means that the regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war."
So, yes: In January, 2006, Hitchens argued that the sectarian conflict in Iraq that people were"trying to ignite" had not at that time begun, and would not begin, due to interrelationships and shared loyalties between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shiites.
In December, 2006, he argued that the sectarian conflict between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shiites predated the 2003 invasion.
And, by the way, he drew the same conclusion from each set of mutually exclusive facts: The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq had no causal relationship to subsequent sectarian violence in that country, whether present or projected. All possible combinations of fact prove the same thing, apparently.
Incredible that he still finds people willing to pay him for this garbage. What facts will Christopher Hitchens believe in next week?