One thing I noticed about Hitchens that has completely confounded the Left is his so-called “conversion” from Liberal to Neo-Con, exemplified by his “betrayal” of Sidney Blumenthal to get at Clinton during his impeachment, and his support for the Iraq War.

Certainly it can be proved that, disregarding these two controversies, just about every position Hitchens has taken, including his approval of Sweden, can be placed on the Left side of the political axis. I think the problem with this is that almost everyone gets caught up in the Liberal vs. Neo-Con fight, it’s easy to forget that he was never very interested in the predominate cable news battles and typically limited himself to matters of foreign affairs. When the domestic agenda is one’s primary focus, it’s much easier to defend Clinton as a means of stopping a Republican takeover of politics.

I think it’s pretty easy to figure out the reason for his focus on world affairs: he was neither a Liberal nor a Neo-Con but rather never stopped being a Trotskyist. While Liberals and Neo-Cons both saw in Iraq a rematch of the same generational conflicts brought on by the Vietnam War, Hitchens’ belief that the North Vietnamese were not our enemy caused him to completely dismiss the parallels, so that he continued pushing for charges to be brought up against Henry Kissinger even as he made friends with certain Bushites like Paul Wolfowitz who many Liberals would rather have seen arrested. His single contribution to the state of the economic crisis was an article named “The Revenge of Karl Marx.”

Although his book, “No One Left to Lie To” managed to convince me that Clinton was in fact a mass-murdering rapist, his arguments in “A Long Short War,” based on the assumption that the Iraq War is a continuation of the Gulf War (which he ironically opposed at first), appeared to me to be sourced in the revolutionary desire for instant change over the more progressive strategy of gradual improvements (typified by the failed attempts to force regime change through sanctions). This belief was confirmed by a recent article of his called “In Defense of Endless War.”

As Glenn Greenwald snarkily put it: “Chris Hitchens last week: Endless War is good… Now: when’s Obama going to get our enemy Pakistan?”

I often wonder why no one ever asked him, “Exactly how many people would have to die for you to admit that the war was a mistake?” I think the answer to this is that he was less interested in the end-results of the Iraq War, which even many heard-headed Republicans have started to realize is indefensible in terms of lives and money lost, and instead saw it more along the lines of the “Big Picture” that the Saddam regime had to be removed — no matter the cost — as part of the world-wide ongoing transition from tyranny to freedom. He gave a similar answer that Lenin’s Communist Revolution, which killed millions, was necessary. Whereas Liberal Progressives are so-named because of their idealization of slow, non-violent change being the hallmark of civilized politics, Hitchens was closer in embracing the founding figure of the Democratic Party in saying that “Rather than [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the Earth destroyed!” Having written a book on Jefferson and used Jefferson’s war on the Barbary Pirates as a precedent for the War on Terrorism, I would not be surprised if he held similar beliefs about the Iraq War. Another example would be the American Civil War that Karl Marx supported, which slaughtered more human beings than it freed from the bonds of slavery, but is nevertheless assumed to an entirely necessary step in the evolution of human freedom.

This belief that the ends justifies the means, working under the assumption these battles against tyranny are absolutely essential for the greater war against World Totalitarianism, is what I think drove his support for the War on Terror. Whereas Neo-Cons attempted to use America’s ignorance of history to argue that Saddam needed to be taken out due to the millions of Iranians and Kurds he slaughtered while forgetting to mention that the U.S. was supporting him at the time, Hitchens went the other direction to say that our prior support of Saddam made us all the more responsible for the fate of that country. For him, it was never about the danger Saddam posed to us but the danger his regime posed to the surrounding states of the future. Of course, the problem with this is assuming winning the battle justifies the losses and that winning the war justifies the battles, when it seems more likely that violence just begets more violence until the country simply erupts into chaos and everyone loses.

Although I think he has made some very compelling cases against the Pope that others may find extreme, his anti-theism has often been placed in the context of this same war against Totalitarianism: that the belief in God can be compared to a “celestial North Korea,” as he very often put it. But that comparison has never had any more force with me than Richard Dawkins’ pathetic simile for God being as realistic as a flying spaghetti monster. Working under the Freudian assumption that one’s parents often provide a massive subconscious influence, I can’t help but think that the suicide pact Hitchens’ mother made with a priest played a large part in his “anti-theism,” which if one parses the words, can be interpreted as an intellectual redefintion of hating God.

I could be wrong. Like most Liberals, I assumed that Bush’s desire to invade Iraq could be at least partially traced back to the belief that Saddam had tried to have his father assassinated, but began to have my doubts that Bush was emotionally involved in wanting Saddam dead when I heard that he had decided to sleep through the dictator’s hanging.

But for me, the thing that I will always remember Christopher Hitchens the most for is when he got into a street brawl with Syrian neo-Nazis after going up to a sign with a “cylone” swastika on it and scribbling, “No, no, Fuck the SSNP.” As Hitchens said, “My attitude to posters with swastikas on them, has always been the same. They should be ripped down.” Not many people can truly claim to have been in a fist fight with fascists. After his ass kicked and barely escaping with his life, his friend Michael Totten told him, “The SSNP is the last party you want to mess with in Lebanon. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you properly. This is partly my fault.” While I think most people would be berating themselves for their own stupidity, Hitchens’ reply best sums up his own combination of principle and ballsiness:

“I appreciate that. But I would have done it anyway. One must take a stand. One simply must.”