Christopher Hitchens is Not Great. Nor is George Galloway.

Christopher Hitchens seems to be one of the most loathed figures on the left for his support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and for the 'war on terror' .

Yet like most radical journalists with a desire to develop a reputation for themselves as fearless tribunes of freedom and justice he projected his own ideological fantasies on to the 'liberation' of Iraq in 2003.

This seems to be a mental vice amongst many who want to overcome their sense of impotence and lack of control over world events, whether it is Hitchens or Tariq Ali and John Pilger extolling some mythical 'the Iraqi resistance'. Hitchens writes in his latest column for The New York Times,

"If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement the Iraqi people would now be tyrannised by the gloating sadists of Al Qaeda".

Well, that's impossible to verify as a second conditional sentence because the anti-war movement has no 'timetable' apart from 'troops out' or to try and ratchet up the threat of terror within Britain if this is not done.

But in any case without the invasion there would have been no Hobbesian style chaos and anarchy from which insurgent militias could have developed.

It's unfortunate that the anti-war movement is dominated by the remnants of the hard left such as Andrew Murray of the British Communist Party and Lindsey German of the SWP, those who see Iraq and the war in Leninist terms as a historical inevitability

It was actually rather than just a bungled attempt to gain energy security whilst introducing a secular market state democracy and somehow expecting that this would be simple should there be the will to do it.

Anyway, the idiocy and fanaticism of the StWC and RESPECT does not mean that the neocons and fellow travellers of a radical US Imperialism should be let off the hook. Hitchens saw the war as a way of discrediting polemical enemies. Rather than looking at hard empirical facts.

Those like Hitchens tend to see everything as a polemical battle where reality and the facts are bent to justify conclusions they have already arrived at, in particular how fundamentally evil the opposition to one's own politics is.

Yet even if the anti-war movement was dominated in Britain by those like Galloway who fawned on the notion of Arab nationalist dictatorships, that was hardly a reason in itself to see the 'liberation' of Iraq as a defeat for the global threat of neo-totalitarianism everywhere.

Hitchens tends to think of himself romantically in the tradition of Orwell who saw the similarities between the power worship amongst those on the left who supported Stalin's dictatorship and Fascists.

Whilst that might help explain the politics of a crude dolt such as George Galloway ( yet another self promoting media whore who works for Iranian funded Press TV ), it hardly had much relevance to the politics concerning Iraq at the time of the invasion in 2003.

Hitchens just rolled together the Baathist regime in Baghdad with 'Islamofascists' because he sees them all in a manichaean fashion as part of a seamless web of evil. Just as others in the Henry Jackson Society did like Micheal Gove or Denis MacShane.

That conflation explains why Hitchens sees all those fighting the US in Iraq as just essentially evil 'jihadists' and why in his God is Not Great he has to assert that 'religion poisons everything' and religion is germane to totalitarian thinking.

By 2005, however, it became clear that Sunni militias themselves were attacking Al Qaida. Hitchens himself wrote about that in a Slate article ( January 16 ,2005 ) but denied they were insurgents because he does not like the idea they might be revolutionaries or rebelling against the liberating force.

So , obviously, trying to append the term 'jihadist' or 'Bin Ladenis't, as Hitchens has consistently done, to all those opposed to the US occupation is just an attempt eradicate this important distinction between Al Qaida and groups like the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades and other Sunni militia groups.

The conflations allow Hitchens to see the Iraq war as part of some crusade for enlightenment against the dark forces of evil and to portray Saddam as a metaphysical evil. Yet Saddam was just brutal, banal and evil.

Even if he did not possess WMD he can be mentioned 'in the same breath' because he had a latent intent to acquire them, had used them in the past and would use them again. That's one of the the lame ex post facto rationalisations anyway. Hichens opines,

"Most people appear now to believe that it is quite wrong to mention Saddam Hussein even in the same breath as (a)WMD, or (b) state-sponsored terrorism. I happen to disagree".

If there is not one exact reason why it was absolutely necessary to invade Iraq, then it is easy to shift the justification from one to another such as 'state sponsored terrorism'. The Baathist regime was a brutal Stalinist police state and a terror state.

Yet it's connection with terrorist groups was no greater than Iran' or Syria's nor is it anywhere been as near as important in having fostered terrorism as Saudi Arabia. The regional terrorism of the groups Saddam did support were not a threat to the security of the USA or Britain.

Yet it is important to remember that Saddam did not sponsor 'jihadists' apart from paying some suicide bombers in Hamas who would do what they would do anyway without Saddam's rewards. That was just for domestic consumption to please Islamists.

Bin Laden actually hated Saddam. One of the reasons Bin Laden turned his fury against the USA in 1991 was that the House of Saud allowed US troops into the Holy Land of Islam without allowing him to join the fight to push Iraq out of Kuwait.

Hitchens can't accept such facts because they don't fit in with his creed. In God is Not Great he even denies that Saddam's regime was a secular one just because he made demagogic statements including Allah and Islamist tropes.

That made Saddam a demagogue not a fully fledged Islamist. That is a very simple point. But he does what his supposed hero George Orwell never did: fit the facts to suit the prescriptions of va propaganda creed.

As John Gray has rightly insisted in a review of God Is Not Great,

'Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe.

The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history.

The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.'

Hitchens is a busted flush and his inability to admit he got it wrong, as Michael Ignatieff and Johann Hari have done is becoming ever more embarrassing. It seems certain atheists really are as dogmatic and faith based as fundamentalists.

This has not stopped shrill and preachy atheists such as A.C Grayling whiffling on in the Guardian like some pernickety old maid about General Dennett's public proclaimation of his religious faith whilst serving in Iraq whilst praising Hitchen' s worldview in God Is Not Great and ignoring the scale of the destruction and bloodshed in Iraq.

It seems there is one standard for the religious when they propagandise for faith based politics but not for atheists when they do the same.

Yet the history of twentieth century ideological mass murder and terror in the cause of secular goals shows that the idea that 'religion poisons everything' is a myth.

It is just a convenient way of rationalising the failure of such politics in the lands of Islam and the rise of Islamism which is, it should be remembered, a creed with its origins in politics and bolstered by an apocalyptic mythology hardly absent from creeds such as global Communism.

It is also interesting that Hitchens wrote back in 1976,

"The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers.

It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser'.

The irony here is that is precisely what the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades lauded by Seumas Milne as the nucleus of some united 'the Iraqi resistance' movement are aiming for.

With most tedious polemicists who want to believe they are riding the wave of the future, politics is a substitute form of religion and this appiles not only to Hitchens and the pro-war liberal interventionists but as much to those who want to hitch their otherwise redundant secular atheist leftist politics to radical and revolutionary Islamism in order to get a new lease of life.

Nothing could be more comic and pathetic than Hitchens< style="font-style: italic;">Inside the Whale ( 1940 )-to believe one can ride the wave of Progress or be on the Right Side of History for purely egotistic purposes