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STEPHEN CAPEN: I'd like to put a couple of things to you before we talk about your book, The Missionary Position. What do you suppose it's like in Tuzla on this Christmas Eve?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I was in Tuzla just last month and it's not the most beautiful place in the world to begin with, it is the sort of headquarters of the Bosnian working class in an industrial area. It looks like Pittsburg, the Bosnian Pittsburg. What it will look like under snow I don't know. I think it's probably a good and a bad thing that the U.N. mission begins in winter because there's much less likelihood people will give them trouble when it's this cold On the other hand, the first impression they'll get of Bosnia is of an incredibly bleak and miserable place. One reason I think the mission might succeed is that most people who go there will find Bosnia a very pleasant surprise. The effect of all the coverage has been to make it seem like a real heart of darkness and it's not, it's full of very nice people. It was the most developed bit of the country. When it was Yugoslavia it was already developed enough to be a candidate for European Union membership. Only the fascists have had guns all this time which has been part of the problem. Millions of people just want to get on with their lives.

CAPEN: The US troops will probably be there for quite some time.

HITCHENS: Well, they've given themselves a mandate of a year, which is kind of interesting because that's partly a response to pressure, you know, you must have your exit strategy ready before you go in, and all this rather odd doctrine. Also, it makes people think it must be election-linked, so it adds to cynicism. But in a way I think it's quite good to say look, we're only going to be here for a year, so if you'd like to make the most of it... But, yeah, it's time sensitive, as they say on certain kinds of special delivery envelopes. I think that might turn out to be a good thing. Its motivation is rather a second rate one.

CAPEN: The region is going to be dealing with a redivision of the land, new borders. Is there any possibility while the US is involved there, while the UN becomes involved, will there be changes in that, renegotiations of these borders?

HITCHENS: Well, the theory is that they aren't exactly borders, they're regions or spheres. They don't have barricades or frontiers between them, but there are certain demarcations of Croatian and Serbian areas. Anyone who wants to go home in theory has the right to do so under American protection and only when that's been done to everyone's satisfaction do they call elections. That's the really ambitious bit of the thing that some people think utopian and impossible. I think that it will be very, very hard to get that toothpaste back in the tube. I had a call last week from a Serbian woman who was helping a Bosnian friend who has just heard, well he's now living in America as a refugee having been a prisoner before this which was lucky for him because the rest of his family were all in Srebrenica and he's just heard that after the fatwa all fifteen male members of his family including his father and his sons and his cousins and his uncles were all killed.

All the female members fled to Tuzla, where they are huddled in some school at a temporary refugee establishment. I'm trying to help him now to go with his Serbian comrade. His big demand in life is not to go back to Srebrenica and start over, he wants to get them out any way he can. He's going to try to get them official Red Cross refugee status. I think they would go anywhere but go to Srebrenica again. There are a lot of people in that condition and what it reminds me of is all of this could really have been avoided. There was no reason for a town the size of Srebrenica guarded by an alliance the size of NATO ever to become a killing field. No one can tell me they couldn't have done anything to stop that. The overpowering sense of wasted time and wasted life and wasted political and moral energy, which makes it hard to focus on the modalities of Dayton because what this is is the outcome of a series of setups and betrayals. So it's hard to praise him. But I suppose in the end one is left with the rubble and the hope that some shoots can still grow on it.

CAPEN: So do you feel this is occurring maybe six months or so later than it should have?

HITCHENS: No, more like four years, I would say. Let's be realistic. Certainly two years too late, maybe two and a half. You know, roughly speaking, it was within President Clinton's power to do something about it from the moment he took office. If he had given a lot of Bosnians the impression that he did think it was a serious question.

He had compared it to the final solution, which is maybe an exaggeration comparison but there are people who have done their best to make that comparison stick and come true since then and before. Many people sort of wagered their lives on the possibility that the US would come to Bosnia's aid and lost their lives on the wager. It's pretty hard to look them in the eye now. Well, it's very sad to think of the way that someone like General Miladic, who has now been disowned by his own political boss and his only allies in the world, namely the Russians, and is completely isolated among his own people and has been discredited as widely as it is possible for anyone to be discredited. He was considered by the US to be a formidable military and political foe, the kind that you really couldn't afford to take on.

This little Nazi bastard was allowed to call all the shots and to subject an open city to round the clock bombardment with nothing being done about it. No, it's just not believable when you look back on it that all that was allowed to happen. And what I think is very sad is the retrospective thought that as far as what's left of the American liberal left community is concerned, that was more or less alright by them. They were so hostile to anything that could be called intervention that they basically said that the return of fascism to Yugoslavia or to southern Europe can be viewed as very nearly a matter of indifference. No one comes very well out of it, but the sort of people who are normally most solid on questions of human rights and death squads and so on in this instance decided to sit this one out. I find that a cause of great shame.

CAPEN: The political left seems to be in disarray as it is. As you say, what's left of it. The community seems very confused about this move when a lot of us have been waiting for this for quite some time, the intervention by the only real power left in the world. It took so long. Clinton waffled for a while but he seems to finally have come around, doing what is the humane thing here to stop this.

HITCHENS: What this reminds me of and in some ways where it originates is what I call the body-bag peace movement in the case of the Gulf War. There was quite a large element in America that opposed the Gulf War on the grounds that it could lead to American casualties. It had no larger reason to oppose or criticize the war and did it in what I would call opportunist ways stressing the body bag factor.

Well, depending on who was able to take care of them, they said we can if you wish conduct this war by massive aerial bombardment in such a way as there are no American casualties to speak of. The casualties will all be Iraqi or Kuwaiti or bystanders such as immigrant workers in Kuwait. Will that satisfy you? And it seemed that it did, that when the Highway of Death incident occured after Iraq had withdrawn from Kuwait, when the withdrawing retreating forces and their baggage train of refugees were blasted and machine gunned from the air, no one really complained. There wasn't a single protest or demonsration against that massacre. Because it sort of conformed to what people had demanded. There were no body bags on our side. It met that so elevated "moral" condition. Elements of what, I wouldn't call it political isolationism, I'd call it sort of moral nullity isolationism, have been present in the Bosnian dispute as well.

So you actually have a quite absurd position now of Republicans borrowing the slogan of the body-bag peace movement from the Gulf and saying they support the troops but not the operation in Bosnia. I've actually heard that said in Washington by members of the extreme right in congress. And I'll never forget laughing out loud at the anti-war people that said "I support the troops but not the war" in the Gulf affair and thinking, well, we'll probably be hearing a slogan as evasive as that. A slogan as evasive as that is too good to be wasted just on the peace movement. We'll be hearing that one again some time.

CAPEN: I was surprised to see the number of people who turned out in Washington during the Gulf War, I was there for both marches. There's still a fairly sizeable community that apparently doesn't vote in this country who will turn out for just such a thing.

HITCHENS: I was at demonstrations, too, and I thought they were fairly good sized demonstrations but they had no real politics to them. It was in a real sense antiwar in that it had no particular critique of this war or that administration and there were strong tendencies of people either fighting the last war, namely Viet Nam, i.e., support the troops and bring them home now as if this was a conscript army, as if people had been drafted for the Gulf. Some had no take at all on whether or what Iraq's relationship ought to be to Kuwait, in other words as far as they were concerned it didn't matter to them whether Iraq had taken over Kuwait or not, which was something it seemed to me was unavoidable, one had to have a position on that. You can see it now. Not many people realize it but American forces all can't be in Kurdistan or on the Iraqi Kurdistan border at any rate, the Turkish border, guaranteeing the survival of a rudimentary Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

Now, does one say support our boys in Kurdistan, bring them home now, or does one say US out of Kurdistan, or does one say US out of Turkey? Well, I think that's a very complicated position. I personally I think that it is right for the US to act as an umbrella for the Kurds. I hope it won't be needed for long, but I don't think it would be a great demand to bring them back out. The point about that also is it exposes the nature of what the Gulf War was. The Gulf War was the outcome of a collusion between President Bush and Sadam Hussein which broke down and has now been restored for all practical purposes and rhetorical gestures had to be made to cover up what was in a sense a quarrel between business partners, a business which was supposed to be redeemed and paid for in other people's blood.

The Kurds are the great proof of that, the great victors that suffered and so on. So, look, the fact is the peace movement has to deal with the fact that we have a new situation, a post-Cold War situation and a post-Gulf War one and there are some cases therefore where there are worse things than an activist American foreign policy if it's informed by democratic public opinion, one that wants to have a say itself in how this vast military expenditure is deployed. This may sound utopian but I think it is less so than pretending that nothing has changed.

CAPEN: Apparently part of that reconciliation between these countries was the Turkish attack on the Kurds just several months ago now. Another bloody onslaught. This government has an amazing capacity for this dual approach to the problem doesn't it?

HITCHENS: It does because it never has to answer any questions from a democratic and informed public opinion. If it did it wouldn't be able to keep the act up, I don't believe. The foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq all met at one point in Tehran I think but it may have been in Akron to declare their opposition to an independent Kurdish state, which I think has been a proper and democratic demand, usually made on the left, by the way. Self- determination for Kurdistan.

The Turks would certainly like the American mission withdrawing from southeastern Turkey and Northern Iran. They do raise the cry "Yankee Go Home." The US has taken no position on self-determination for the Kurds itself, it just says we're there to protect them from being massacred. No high American official, not since Woodrow Wilson at any rate, has ever said to my knowledge that they think there ought to be a Kurdistan run by Kurds, but that doesn't mean that we just have to sit on our hats. Of course, the Kurds that make themselves vulnerable by having factional and tribal divisions among themselves upon which their different enemies have often traded and the hope must be that the cure for that is self-determination.

CAPEN: Clinton's point man in this region, Richard Holbrook, was featured in a story in The New York Times Magazine. He certainly is a balls-to-the-wall policymaker unlike any other I could think of for quite some time. He's made the moves to bring these people to the peace table--and God knows if this will hold or not, but he managed to do that. What is your estimation of this fellow?

HITCHENS: Dean Atchison, when he was Secretary of State, would wear a kind of sponge-bag, striped pants suit and sporting a moustache, and I believe that he carried an umbrella. He was once mistaken for Sir Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister, and apparently didn't feel insulted that he had been mistaken for him. Well, the thing about Richard Holbrook is that when people compare him to Henry Kissinger he does not issue a writ of libel or slander, he sort of quite likes the comparison. I think should put one on one's guard. What I think he thinks of Kissingerism as being is an utterly unsentimental realism.

That, I think, is an illusion about Kissinger, by the way, who was an all-over-the-map, rather sentimental, rather emotional and therefore highly unsuccessful diplomat. Let's say the model is a sort of Metternickian, ultra-realistic, unemotional doctrine, it fits Holbrook's strategy in this instance rather well. The Cohen profile that you mention, which I think was brilliantly executed, makes this quite clear. He found at Dayton that the people who were easiest to press and squeeze were the Bosnians because they were weakest.

We start by saying okay, even though we're the US, we put our heaviest pressure on the weaker party because they have to buckle. On the other hand, we have to do something about the Serbs and it was revealed that before Dayton they had covertly encouraged--we knew this, I thought, but it was interesting to have it confirmed--covertly encouraged the huge Croatian offensive that had driven all the Serbian civilians headlong out of the Crimea and then burned their homes. Because the Serbs had to be shown what defeat could look like. So this had been allowed by the US. And then when the Bosnian army was on the verge of taking Banja Luka, which was the Serbian military stronghold, the intervention had been the other way: Stop the Bosnians and the might win because if they take banalucca then it will double the number of Serbian refugees and then negotiations will be impossible.

So this sort of graduated application of pain and misery just to make sure that everyone knew how bad things could be and then we'll bring them together and sort of put them in a pressure cooker and see what comes out. And there shouldn't be attachment of any kind at all to any principle that can't be abandoned. In other words, there is no absolute principle here. I think it's been fortunate in its timing because I was in Bosnia when the Dayton meeting was announced, not when it took place but when it was announced that it would take place. It was my impression that with some exceptions most of the fighting forces in the region had independently concluded that they couldn't go on much longer this way and the mass of the population was very demoralized by the war and certainly among the Serbs who were probably replenishing their lives people didn't want to report for the draft.

So the timing there had been good but it's the most brutal and the most cynical practice of diplomacy that is possible to imagine. And though the president made the lunge for what's traditionally called the moral high ground and spoke about the horror of ethnic cleansing and rape and deportation and mass murder and expulsion and all of these horrors that have come to be associated with the Bosnian war have got at least a mutual public opinion, as a result I think people were rather impressed by the speech, those who heard it.

You had to decide to keep another set of books, another set of accounting to make sure that you didn't notice that the people who were doing best out of the agreement were those who were responsible in the first place for the ethnic cleansing, the rapes, the mass murders and the rest of it. What I hope happens all the same is that even if Mr. Milosevic is going to be the ultimate big winner of this and everybody's new friend, and he had become Holbrook's obviously best friend in Dayton that Karadzic and Miladic are now taken to the Hague and that the international standing of the war crimes tribunal is moved up a notch or two. That would mean that some moral fabric had been saved from the general wreck.

CAPEN: Your book, The Missionary Position, is an astounding account of a saint in the making, but this saint seems to have a dark side, what you call the "missionary multinational." Mother Theresa has been glorified for a number of years now and it has been left at that, but I don't think that many people know where this funding is coming from and what is exchanged for this funding, anybody from Baby Doc Duvalier to Charles Keating. I understand the book started as a television production in London.

HITCHENS: Actually it began as an interest of mine that I had been keeping up idly over the years after my visit to Calcutta and after I had noticed a few things about her. I opened a kind of file on the lady. The first time I went public with it was with an open letter to Jerry Brown when he was running for the Democratic nomination.

I was quite sympathetic to the Brown campaign, still am if it comes to that, but he could hardly open his mouth, I noticed, without stressing the fact that he had once been to Calcutta and worked for a while, sleeping on the floor and meeting Mother Theresa. I said look, you'd be better off without mentioning this, and I wrote a column in The Nation that said all the things that people don't know and should, like her connection to Keating Savings & Loan, her friendship with the Duvalier family, her identification with the most reactionary forces within the Church on doctrinal questions like divorce or contraception or abortion, and said this is not at all a model for your campaign, the campaign she belongs in is the Pat Buchanan campaign.

The Catholic fundamendalist right is where she originated. And that got quite a response, a lot of people were really amazed there was anything bad to be said about this woman. Out of that grew an offer to make a documentary from Channel Four in London which was made in 1994.

Then so many people wrote to me because that got so much publicity, saying "I thought I was the only person in the world who understands about Mother Theresa, I worked with her mission here or I worked with her in Calcutta" and this and that. They sent me such a wealth of material that I hadn't had before because the iron rule of journalism, as perhaps you know, is that by writing a piece you come in contact with the people you should have met before you started.

So I thought, I can't throw this all away, I can't let it all go, I must try and get it all between a set of covers and thus I have done this short book called The Missionary Position. And now, of course, people are starting to write to me again with more stuff, so you never know, there might be a "part two."

CAPEN: I wonder if you are familiar with The London Sunday Times.'s "Style Magazine" and the name John Dougdale: "Feud's Corner."

In "Christopher Hitchens vs Mother Theresa" he seemed to delight in falling into the easy position of attacking anyone who would undermine a would-be saint. In doing that he borrows your quote of Mother Theresa saying that "people are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered, love them anyway, and if you do good people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives, but love them anyway." There's something a little deeper going on with her that is the thrust of the book: fundamentalism, over and above helping people. In other words, the helping of people is not the central aim of her work. This sort of statement might flabbergast some people, but tied up in that is this notion out of the Vatican that the work here is stopping people from doing wrong, i.e., having abortions and using contraception, consequently feeding into the incredible problem of overpopulation in the world.

HITCHENS: The words you cited, which are from Mother Theresa's own brevury, are in a sense derived straight from the New Testament, from Jesus of Nazareth's alleged remarks. I say "alleged" because the gospels don't always agree and the gospels are internally contradictory.

But anyway, what is believed to have been said by someone who is believed to have existed to the effect that one should turn the other cheek, return good for evil, be nice to those who despitefully use you, as it is phrased. All this is fine if you make the assumption that you are on the right track in the first place and that means that all opposition you encounter is simply proof that you are doing something right. But just let it be remarked for the moment that if said by just anybody this is sheer moral arrogance, it's assuming you are right and everyone else is wrong and thus that you don't actually have to answer any critique that is made of you, you simply take it as some kind of a tribute.

Well, this is now a falsifiable position, of course, designed indeed to make the person offering it immune to challenge, it is exactly the sort of carapace that I am trying to penetrate. And either way it is self-penetrating because there is a crucial admission at the heart of it which was made directly to me by the lady herself in Calcutta in 1981 when I went to see her. She gave me the tour of her orphanage and so on. When she had done so with a gesture of her arm that took in the whole scene she said you see, this is how we combat abortion and contraception in Bengal.

I thought, well, it was you who said that, not me. Had I written that the purpose of all this is simply to make sympathetic propaganda for a fundamentalist missionary outfit, people would have said I was being unfair or imposing my own value judgment upon the reportorial scene. But here she was offering me the proof of it, namely what is done there and elsewhere. It is done in order to underpin and propagandize for an extremely fundamentalist view of human nature and the human condition, which view can be stated pretty simply: suffering is a gift from God. Repeatedly stated.

It is something one can offer as a sacrifice to Christ, repeatedly stated. You can't be expected to be cured in the here and now, but it can bring recruits to holy mother Church, especially if it is allied to hectic patterns of reproduction. Thus the real job is to campaign against contraception, abortion, divorce.

The point and purpose, therefore, of the work of the mission is of charity, is not the relief of pain or suffering, with which they are half in love anyway, so much as it is to witness in a very potent manner to the church's most extreme doctrines on abortion, contraception, divorce and reproduction, so the fundamendalist version of Catholic teaching in this matter. Now that, I think, would be fine, I have no objection to people saying "there's Mother Theresa, the world's most dogged, sleepless, selfless, untiring witness for the Catholic fundamentalist worldview." Instead, she is represented to us repeatedly as some kind of humanist who spends her entire life on her knees washing the feet of the poor.

Now I also show in the book that she spends a great deal of time not on her knees washing the feet of the poor, but licking the feet of the rich. Some people find that such a jarring contrast with what they wish to believe about her because there is obviously a great human need to believe in sainthood. All they can do is come back and say the meaner you are to her, the more it proves that she is doing God's work. And again one comes up against the mentality that is partly by design impervious to reason, impervious to evidence. But there is some sign from the correspondence I get that some people at least are willing to reconsider.

CAPEN: Let's take a fairly far out what-if: If she were to lose her financial support based on the information in this book and these facts being promulgated, would there be somebody to move into that position to help those people? The suffering is enormous in this world, that's a certainty, the good that she does is certainly there to a degree, but if she were to lose the support of the rich that make it possible for her to do her work, would there be somebody to step in to take up that slack? And would you feel that you had done something wrong here by increasing the suffering of these people? Is that a fair question?

HITCHENS: Yes, it is. I had to ask myself, and I've been asked this before anyway: is she, in spite of everything, a net plus or a net minus? I have resolved it in the following manner. Given that I think she has abused the charitable impulse among the better off, in other words I think she has taken the money that has been given her in good faith and used it for proselytizing and for the building of convents and the adornment of religious buildings and not for the purpose it was fondly imagined to be intended for, given that she has preached contentment and subjection to the poor at the other end while basically building them a hospice where they may die preferably as Catholic, given that she has preached consistently against the right of people or the ability of people to limit the size of their own families, which is agreed by most people involved in development and the relief of underdevelopment to be crucial, the thing that enables development aid and charitable aid to work and she has ranged herself in unflinching dogmatic opposition to it, I am prepared to say that we would be better off without her altogether.

In other words, I think her efforts amount to a net minus.

So, not to avoid your question because I see the force of it, no, if she was to stop or give up I don't believe it would leave us with more suffering to alleviate than we already have. I think it is quite possible there would be less of it and we could see it more clearly.

I have been in the Third World a bit, I am not a veteran of it, but I have travelled in India and other parts of the subcontinent and in Africa and Central America and other stricken parts of the world and I have met very many heroic and selfless people who really are trying to make the crucial difference, to dig that well or open that clinic or isolate and contain that particular bacteria.

These people are unsung and don't expect to be sung, but they are doing it for its own sake and for humanity. Nor are they with the other hand--and here is another reason I think Mother Theresa is a net minus--supporting the sorts of people like the Duvalier family who are the original root causes of poverty and misery and exploitation.

That's another strike against her. None of them were on the fast track for sainthood, but none of them have the nerve to lecture people and say that they mustn't be allowed to regulate their own marital, sexual, and reproductive lives. So I think that people, as so often in this culture, have decided to live vicariously, to live a virual life, to behave as-if or to think as-if. They know, as I say in the book, the rich world has a poor conscience, it wants to believe that someone is doing something about what it daren't face, the unending misery of the Third World, as we used to call it and some of us still do. So they think, well that's great, Mother Theresa is doing it, maybe I'll just send her a check, that will take care of it, I'll just believe in her, live vicariously through her.

Okay, I say that's false. You can't make it a consolation, you're not going to be allowed anymore. The outcome of that might be that people become even more cynical or it might be that they decide well, maybe there is more to be done, not simply leaving the whole task vicariously to a pretend saint or plaster image of her innocent self-sacrifice. Certainly the risk of the second course is well worth running.

CAPEN: The virtuous life supplanted by the virtual life.

HITCHENS: Yes, exactly. What's always been true of the whole missionary ideal is you leave it to them and give your money to the missionary societies. I think it is pretty conclusively proven to be a false solution to begin with. I mention in my book this case of a woman, not much younger than Mother Theresa actually, not quite as old as her, who spent all of her life as a nurse in relief work mainly in Africa and has recently been in Rwanda. She's been in some really tough spots, the sort of person who never does get awards of any kind and doesn't ask for them either. She went to a lunch with Mother Theresa and was absolutely appalled to be told by her that the big issue was stopping the poor from getting contraception. I mean, what is this, really? This is not just not facing the public, it is digging the pit deeper and wider for everyone to fall into in the end.

CAPEN: And you touched on this with the phrase "this saintly rubber stamp" applied to people like Duvalier, as in Haiti, where more people are suffering than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. This fellow is aggrandized and these people continue on under the same policies and oppression--a worsening situation for the very people she claims to help.

HITCHENS: Yes, the Haiti example I give is in my opinion pretty much irrefutable. Everybody knows that the misery of the people is greater probably than any one single spot on earth with the possible exception of parts of Rwanda now, certainly greater than it is in Calcutta.

Everybody else there knows, because they've got no excuse for not knowing, that this is not the cause of the human nature of the Haitian people and it is not because of the climate and it is not because of an Act of God--not to be profane in borrowing that phrase--and it is not because of bad luck. It is because of really brutal, predatory, greedy, sadistic dictatorship that governs the country, owned the country, in effect, for seven years.

They became notorious, the Duvalier family. Now for Mother Theresa to get from Calcutta to Haiti was not, as her defenders say, the act of a sort of innocent woman who may have blundered into a political situation she didn't understand--this is what her defenders do say. You've got to get on a plane, you've got to go to Port Au Prince, it's quite a long way out of your way if you're a simple humble woman simply looking after the poor in the streets of Calcutta. Having arrived at Port Au Prince you have to be picked up and taken to the palace, or find your way there.

There you have to accept the decorations, the Legion d'Honneur from the Duvalier family, then you have to make the speech--you can't be forced to make it--in which you say, as she said, that "the Duvaliers love the poor and the poor love the Duvaliers." And then you have to fly home with or without, I'm not clear on this, some money. I don't know whether they paid her or not, I would be very surprised if they didn't.

But then you have to answer the question, did you in doing this alleviate the lot of the Haitian people or did you make it worse? I don't think there is any conceivable doubt as to what the correct answer to that question is. But her defenders have this inclination to say she's so saintly, so simple, so pure in heart that she can never believe anything but the best of people. Well, maybe that's true, but once you've been photographed not just with the Duvaliers but then with Hoxha's widow in Albania, with Charles Keating, with all kinds of other despots--Indira Gandhi, who after all was for compulsory sterilization in India--at what point do people say it stops looking like coincidence?

Obviously some people would say never, but they've dropped off the argument train altogether.

CAPEN: Have you ever in your wildest imagination fancied that she would enter into a debate over these issues, or is this below her station?

HITCHENS: Well, I have tried to lure her into one and I would certainly be willing to go anywhere, anytime, under any conditions whatever to do it, but I think probably not. Her current book, which is called A Simple Path and came out at the same time as my Missionary Position , is coauthored by two people, one of them a Canadian religious woman called Lucinda Vardi and the other an English religious guy whose name for the moment escapes me. It has two ghostwriters.

I've been asked to appear on radio and television programs with both of them and they have both accepted, but when I turned up they wouldn't debate with me directly. In one case they insisted on a separate interview in another studio, and in another wouldn't answer any of my questions. So I have a feeling that no, there is no desire on the other side to engage with this and they probably feel, and they are no doubt right, that it would be to dignify a vulgar, materialist, atheist argument to do so.

But isn't that interesting? If I was her and it had been said of me that I misused funds, that I was chummy with those who exploit the poor rather than with the poor themselves, that my theology was a crude medieval vulgarity and so on, I would want to reply, I would want to defend myself.

Of course, with the serenity that makes her so certain that she and God are working in harmony--amazing how this is always claimed as a modest position, isn't it, you are so modest that you know you and God are "like that," there is no need to argue about anything ever at all.

CAPEN: Has the thought ever occurred to you that maybe her book was published to steal the thunder from this critique? They came at an amazingly coincidental time.

HITCHENS: No, I regard it as a very nice harmonic convergence. We didn't know when we decided on our publication date that her publishers had done the same. So we were hoping we might vamp off their multimillion dollar publicity budget, another part of their "vow of poverty." We have taken a vow of poverty unwilling. By being New Left books we have taken a vow to be poor, of a different kind. We hope that booksellers will have the nerve to pile the two books next to each other.

I must say it has been instructive to see how many booksellers have refused to do anything of the kind and have been extremely nervous about carrying any kind of book that ridicules or criticizes any kind of religion. I was told in one case by a quite well known book shop conglomerate in the US and Canada--I may as well say which one it was actually, Borders Books--that they would order a number of copies if we changed the title of the book. I don't think any publisher in history has ever been met with a demand like that from a commercial book trade seller.

CAPEN: I don't think any publisher, any bookstore chain in history has.We have never seen one on as grand a scale as Borders either and they are starting to play corporate politics with what they do.

HITCHENS: Well, yes, and it should be opposed and it should be exposed as well. It's like when Dalton and Crown announced that for security reasons they wouldn't sellThe Satanic Verses.

This was at a time when everything was on a knife-edge about the future of that book and one of the great moments in American publishing, well, actually great moments in American civic history, came when the actual representatives of those who work in the stores, the people who were going to have to stand between the cash register and the plate glass window, announced that they didn't want to be spoken for in this way by their employers and they were perfectly happy to run the risk of taking the book and they were in the bookselling business rather than the hamburger or frozen foodselling business by choice. That they were interested in selling books and in defending the First Amendment. That was a great moment of civic fortitude and there should be many more such.

But of course the incitement to murder with a bounty attached to it by the theocratic head of a foreign state against a book alleged to be blasphemous, that used Holy Writ anyway for literary purposes, it was interesting to see that the Vatican, the chief rabbi of Israel, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many other religious leaders all said that the real problem was not the fatwa, but the book. And so one did see there the signs of the sort of reverse ecumenicism, the unprincipled alliance between widely disparate even hostile fundamentalist forces against the secular interpretation of life that's become such a pattern since. And is such a menace, too.

I think as we approach millenium, at least it's the millenium as we count in our inaccurate version of the Christian calendar, there's going to be quite a lot more of this, a lot more sort of crude religious demonstrations are going to occur.

CAPEN: The small independent bookstore-cafe that I work with luckily enough has a mind of its own--Borders, just up the road a ways, is a giant warehouse of a bookstore with a raft of unhappy employees, not unusual, not unexpected. A very sweet older woman came into the store and we had the book on display on the counter. The photograph on the cover is the most saintly of depictions of Mother Theresa, and when she spotted the title it sent her into whoops, she was so startled, so taken aback. She thought it was the book by Mother Theresa.

HITCHENS: We did have a tussle of our own about the title. There were some people who thought it was a bit vulgar. There were some people who wanted to call it Sacred Cow, there were some who wanted to call it Hell's Angel. My view about it was that since it is not just a pun, it has three levels of reference in it, that it was justifiable and the faint echo of indecency in there was mainly in the eye or ear of the beholder.

When I am asked to justify the title, as I was on Irish radio, I say the missionary position is the position of those who think that the poor are poor because of the love of God and that the condition of poverty can be alleviated by prayer and that in the meantime they should be told to go forth and multiply. That's what I think the missionary position is. Why, what did you think it meant, I asked the Irish interviewer and he dissolved into the series of splutters. I couldn't judge of what kind the splutters were.

The reason I was being interviewed by Irish radio apart from the obvious reason that Ireland is a Catholic country where Mother Theresa has a lot of fans is this: about six weeks ago now there was a referendum in Ireland on the legalization of divorce. Ireland is the only country in Europe where divorce is not legal. A lot hinged on this referendum. For one thing it was the question of whether Ireland would join the twentieth century as far as divorce law is concerned, but second and equally important is that in a way it formed part of the argument about the reconciliation that is going on between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.

If the voters of the Republic voted the way the Church wanted them to on divorce it would yet again reinforce the ultra-Protestants in the north who believe that Ireland can never be reunified because it would be ruled from Rome. So all of the political parties in Ireland were really urging a vote for yes, legalize divorce, let's get on with it. The "no" forces were very cunning and very well organized and very well financed, but they were losing and so in the closing stages of the campaign they got Mother Theresa to write a letter urging a no vote. Very important, of course.

She does this all the time. In several countries of the world where similar political moments of this kind have occurred, the same was true with the transition of Spain from a Francoist Catholic dictatorship into a more or less open European society and again she ranged herself with all the forces who wanted the Church to continue to make moral law for everybody. These are countries about which she knows nothing.

These are interventions that she makes that she has the nerve to say are unpolitical, but of course they are intensely political interventions done at extremely political moments. Her intervention in Ireland, you can't measure its result definitely. Actually the yes vote did in the end win, but it won by a very tiny minority. And yet Mother Theresa comes out and says I have no politics myself, I never get involved. There couldn't have been a more political moment than the Irish divorce referendum and there she intervened in the most open manner.

And yet she is able to preserve her reputation as someone who is so innocent and unworldly as to be practically unaware of the existence of these confrontations. I do think it is time that she was deprived of the ability to have that both ways. Actually, I don't know if this is worth mentioning or not and I don't want to sound conceited, but of the letters that I've had, and I've had a lot of correspondence from thoughtful Catholics about this and many of them very hostile of course, but many of them quite open and willing to debate, the best ones I've had have been from Ireland.

CAPEN: Has this peace in Ireland got a chance to sustain given the British government's stalling of these talks?

HITCHENS: Yes, I think it's a bit like Bosnia in a way.

Once the fighting stops and once the ceasefire holds for a certain amount of time, enough time for people to start coming out of their wrecked homes and looking about themselves a bit and maybe borrowing a shovel and starting to dig out, then maybe opening the shop again or whatever it might be, or starting the taxi company again that goes all the way to the other side of town as in Beirut, once it stops no one wants the responsibility of starting it again. It does develop a momentum of its own.

I've seen it happen now in Beirut and in Bosnia and in Belfast, in the three Bs. Nobody wants to have the finger pointed and hear we had it and we lost it. Somehow it doesn't start again. Usually, alas, it doesn't stop until people have more or less burned everything they can burn and killed everyone they can kill. It has to burn itself out.

No, I think that because of that and because of the European context in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and now both for political reasons members of the same European community stand to gain a lot for a peace settlement in terms of financial and economic aid.

The forces ranged on the side of the ceasefire are pretty strong and the arguments for keeping Ireland divided or its community divided are correspondingly very very weak.

CAPEN: What will you work on next? I'm sure you've got nineteen different projects in the works at the same time.

HITCHENS: As a matter of fact, no, at the moment I haven't, I wish I had. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next. I don't even know what I'm going to do for my next column. I'm in a very fallow mode. I'm probably going to write about Oliver Stone's Nixon for my next Nation column. A terrible movie, incidentally. I don't know why he wants that kind of respectability.

To describe Nixon as a complex sort of Shakespearian figure is just simply wrong.

The remarkable thing about Nixon I think throughout his entire life was the consistency and simplicity of him as an individual, a very ordinary average criminal type who if he had come from a slightly lower social class would be doing life. No one would miss him. Nothing complex. To compare him to a sort of Shakesperian figure is to insult the whole idea of complexity both in plot and personality.

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