If Christopher Hitchens was a leftist, why did he support neoconservative intervention in the Middle East?

(My answer on Quora)

Christopher Hitchens was a man of the left but he was also an independent thinker and an opponent of staid dogma.

I first encountered Hitchens when he was still solidly in the Leftist camp. His political philosophy had a Trotskyist appeal and was linked to a type of International Socialism that refused to give allegiance to Moscow or Washington during the Cold War. In his early days in the UK he wrote for the New Statesman and the Daily Express before making the journey across the pond to write for The Nation where he specialized in issues pertaining to Central and South America.

Hitchen’s break with the hard left was initially a slow process that began with what he described as the “tepid reaction” by many of his colleagues to the Satanic Verses controversy. This was further expedited by his disdain of the Clinton Administration and his fallout with Sydney Blumenthal. Hitchens wrote about this in his classic No One Left to Lie to which is about a competent take down of the ‘Billary’ pairing as you will find.

Hitchens was rarely somebody that you could agree with all the time. He was for the most part anti-Zionist, was a universalist to a fault and often gave cover to thugs such as Che Guevera and slave reparation advocates, when he really should have known better. However he defended his positions with a mental gusto that suffused the talents of George Orwell with a young Bill Buckley.

Nevertheless Hitch (as he was often called) also valued the freedoms of Western civilization and loathed reactionary world philosophies shrouded in religious ethos. For him these were not just inferior in argument but dangerous in application. Islamism stood at the apex of this counter-challenge. It had to be defeated and knocked into submission. It was in his analysis beyond the line of reason.

Above all else - and this became more apparent toward the end of his life- Hitchens was a man of the Enlightenment. For him there was something intrinsically superior about Western rationalism that could serve as a bulwark to ideas that were at best reactionary. He would do his part to advocate for this and if such thinking necessitated political intervention than so be it.