Christopher Hitchens, thanks for joining us again.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Nice to be back.

TONY JONES: The first time...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Or still here, whichever it is.

TONY JONES: Definitely still here.

The first time I met you face-to-face was on September 11, 2002 and as you will recall we were sitting on a building across from that awful hole in the ground that once held the Twin Towers...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...And at the time I can remember you describing to us that it took that event to totally transform you into an American. Tell us why.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I had by then lived about a quarter of a century in the United States with a Green Card - Platinum Green Card, as a matter of fact. It was so old it didn't run out. They now need to be renewed.

I had a European Union passport, had an American wife, American children - three of them.

I thought I could carry on the rest of my life like this, being, if you like, an Anglo American or an Englishman in America. But I began to feel that I was in a sense cheating on my dues a bit, that what was being attacked in America was what I liked about it.

Many things that I didn't - that I had been a leading critic of, in fact - those aspects were in some people's minds a good enough excuse for an attack to be made. But not me.

I thought what is really being attacked here is the pluralism, the openness, in some ways the hedonism, if you like - the idea of the pursuit of happiness - all of these things, as well as my favourite city in all of the world - New York.

I, if you like, took it personally. I am not ashamed to put it like that.

And it was really that form of initial solidarity plus a revulsion for the anti-Americanism that was being put around so cheaply at the time. I realised I couldn't bear any argument that made the assumption that the United States had invited or let alone deserved this atrocity.

And I also realised that as well as involving the things that I like, or love, it also very much conscripted in one thing all the things that I hate - theocracy, cult of violence, anti-Jewish paranoia, worship of a leader, supreme sheikh - all of this sort of hideous imagery which I summarised in a column I wrote at the time as fascism with an Islamic face, which has contracted a bit into an expression I don't like: Islamo-fascism, for which I am sometimes placed.

But you can't say "fascism with an Islamic face" every time, so shorthands do occur.

So I decided to take out the papers of citizenship.

TONY JONES: So let's talk briefly about that day September 11, 2001.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: You described it very tellingly soon afterwards, if not on the day, as it being as if Charles Manson had been made God for a day.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Mmm. Yes, I remember thinking that as I watched this huge cloud of filth emerge from the wreckage, as the towers sank, up came this sort of billowing cloud of ordure and wreckage and including the shredded remains of about 3,000 of my fellow creatures.

This is a really evil looking cloud. There was shot from a helicopter above Manhattan showing it sort of spreading on this really beautiful day all across the southern tip of my favourite island. And I thought "it's as if Charles Manson is giving orders today, yes".

TONY JONES: The other...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That's how it felt. I think about it every day, still.

TONY JONES: Take yourself back then to watching it. Because one of the most horrific images - and I think you actually described this as one of the most horrific images that still remains in your head that you have ever seen and that is, the burning people falling or jumping, in fact, from the towers before they collapsed.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

Yes - hesitating between jumping to their deaths or being burnt alive and getting both - jumping while burning.

And a terrible little shrill cry that was overheard on the streets of Greenwich Village by a school teacher who was trying to escort some children along the sidewalk and one of them pointing and saying, "Look, teacher, the birds are on fire".

A childish attempt to rationalise what was going on, make sense of it or, if you like - the wrong word but to humanise it.

That stayed in my mind as well. Still does.

TONY JONES: One of the more remarkable things that happened in the aftermath was the reaction of some on the Left - and I am sure this rather helped your - or helped galvanise the transformation that you were already undergoing - particularly from the reaction from people like Noam Chomsky.

Tell us a little bit about that.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, once I had sorted out my various impression of the day, which I had in common with everyone else - and which also included the realisation that a friend of mine had just been flown into the walls of the Pentagon.

I felt, with that additional horror, much as everyone else did, to discover, work through shock, rage, fear - not so much, oddly enough. I didn't feel I was frightened by it but I was very powerfully shaken by it.

And then - I wasn't sure whether to trust myself with this but I actually have to admit it - a sort of sense of exhilaration coming from, "Okay, it's everything I hate versus everything I love".

It's a summons of a sort. It's "Okay, now if you don't recognise this as a crisis, when would you recognise one?"

And then very soon succeeded by the realisation - I then had been working for The Nation magazine as columnist for the flagship journal of the American Left for upwards of two decades - immediately realising I wasn't going to like what a lot of my comrades were going to say.

And I remember thinking of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, and a few others. They would find a way of explaining this away.

And that I wasn't in the mood for it. And I don't just mean mood for that moment. It wasn't a temporary sort of eruption of my digestive system or anything.

I wasn't prepared to tolerate that.

TONY JONES: It's interesting because your memoir - particularly the last chapter or not only the last chapter but all through the memoir, this is a recurring theme. You talk about mutating from one identity to another. And in fact the last chapter deals with people changing their minds on big issues.

Are you trying to deal once and for all with your reasons for moving away from the Left.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. I suppose I am. But I am trying to do it in such a way as not to seem to follow - or indeed to follow at all - a script. And I think everyone knows in their mind that roughly speaking, people are sort of idealistic lefties when they're young and they become paunchy and compromised and cynical and they become more conservative and so forth...

TONY JONES: What your friend, Julian Barnes, the novelist actually wrote about - wrote about you in this regard...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, he doesn't say me.

TONY JONES: He doesn't, but you identify it as being you, as...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I decided to pick a fight on it. Yes.

TONY JONES: ...as having made a "ritual shuffle" from left to right. You strongly objected to it.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I objected to it but only because it was phrased so perfectly for that script. Ritual - in other words, something completely predictable. You're following a prearranged schedule, or schedule - I never know how to pronounce that as an Anglo American.

And second, "shuffle" has this sense of the senile, whinnying person in a walking frame following the arrow marked "This way to the right wing".

Well I can't be judging my own cause and I don't know how I look to other people or how I seem on the page but I think I'd have a fair chance of beating that cliche rap. I'm not a reactionary; I have never been any kind of conservative.

I think the positions that I hold against Islamic theocracy are - for example, and especially its extension by criminal violence - are defences of the enlightenment, which is the most radical conclusion humanity has yet reached and the greatest of this radical achievement.

I won't enumerate them. I just assume people know what I mean by that.

That these things probably do need to be defended every generation - that this is our call for that. I don't want to be found wanting.

The reactionaries, I think, are those who try and accommodate themselves to it, or try and make excuses for the use of promiscuous violence or the existence of or proposal for, say, something like the re-establishment of the Caliphate.

What could be more conservative than saying that not just an empire should be established - religious one - but a former empire should be re-established. I mean, imperial nostalgia as well as imperialism.

That gets subsumed into the more general view that, "Well, the real enemy is globalisation and the United States".

TONY JONES: It's your experience of reporting in Sarajevo under siege - I think that was back in 1981...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...that seems to have transformed your ideas about using military power, and particularly using American military power against the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I decided I had to go to Bosnia to see if it was really true that mass murder on the basis of ethnicity was being employed as a tactic in Europe.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall. With NATO doing nothing about it. And the United Nations and the EU powerless to do a thing.

Is this really happening? Can we actually be watching this as spectators?

I went to Sarajevo and saw it happening - modern, sophisticated, cosmopolitan city with no defences being bombed and shelled around the clock by militias trying to carry out what they themselves call - the propaganda term was not used against them, it was coined by them. They said they were "cleansing".

It was really happening, it was really true that no European country and no international body was willing to do anything to arrest it. And I thought "Well the only power that can possibly stop this or turn it back is the United States".

TONY JONES: In fact, as you watched mortars hit the great library...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The National Library of Bosnia.

TONY JONES: The National Library in Sarajevo...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Deliberate destruction of the cultural patrimony of one of Europe's most beautiful cities in broad daylight - unrebuked, unpunished.

I thought and what ... I agreed with what most of the Bosnians, I knew wanted to see. They wanted to see the USAF appear in the skies and blow those militias off the mountain and get rid of the Milosevic regime.

And I should just add - because it is not a detail - in the end we did win the argument.

I came back to Washington and I joined the faction that was arguing for this intervention. We took a long time to persuade Clinton. I don't say we did it but we were among those who tried.

Tony Blair was very important, too, in persuading him, I think, to adopt this policy.

Here was an intervention that stopped the recrudescence of fascism in Europe, stopped the spread of a terrible war, put an end to an absolutely obscene dictatorship and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people - returned them to their homes and put the war criminals in the dock.

And most of the Left - not all because people like myself and Susan Sontag and David Rieff and the tribune group in the British Parliamentary Labour Party and many other honourable Leftists were for it. The majority of the Left was so to say anti war - in other words, either neutral or in some cases at least sympathetic to Milosevic's serving socialism.

And I thought that, now to me, has become a reactionary position.

And if I had been anti war at this point, I'd want to look back and ask myself "am I so sure of the rightness of the policy that would have left Milosevic in charge of two cleansed and bombarded provinces and him as dictator of Serbia, the greater Serbia?" No.

But this, um, outbreak of self-criticism has yet to occur among many of my comrades, I'm sorry to say.

TONY JONES: There are some extraordinary moments in your journey away from the Left.

Tell us about the voice message left by the old communist diehard Dorothy Healey after you volunteered to testify against Bill Clinton and his aides, accusing them of lying...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...when they said they were not slandering privately and defaming privately Monica Lewinsky.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Slandering and defaming Monica Lewinsky and several other truth-telling female witnesses, I might add.

Well, I can't do Dorothy's wonderful old rasping straight street fighter voice but she was a veteran Stalinist who could claim credit among other things for recruiting Angela Davis to the Communist Party. And she and I had been friends of a kind.

But she thought that to offer to tell my side of the story to a house hearing on the impeachment of the president was like my going to volunteer to testify to the McCarthy hearings or something.

There is somewhere on the Left a deep belief that you're a stool pigeon if you're willing to give evidence.

TONY JONES: Can you remember what she said because it began with you...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well pretty much. I can't do her voice...

TONY JONES: It began with "you stinking little rat".

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I can't do her rasping street fighting voice so I won't even try but it was, "Hey, there you scab and stooly and rat fink. I hope you die. There's no hell too hot for traitors like you".

I mean, going on in this absolutely amazing way. I mean, she'd by then lost most of her communist convictions - as who had not by then. But something of the old real party line spirit was still alive in her and she thought she had identified a rat fink and it sort of made her feel all her brave days were back again.

TONY JONES: On a serious note, the Clinton episode had a searing effect on your friendship with Sidney Blumenthal and I am wondering if now there could be any chance of a reconciliation?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Um, I rather tend to think not.

He considered himself to have been injured by me and I can perfectly see his point of view. When he told me that Monica Lewinsky was stalking the president - and I remember thinking even as he was telling me "how can a president be stalked in his own White House. If he doesn't want to see her he sure doesn't have to". What nonsense.

But when he told me this, it hadn't then become a public issue, as it did in the impeachment hearings. It then became a question - had the White House used executive power to defame a potential witness.

So I had been told it before it was, so to speak, so toxic. But I thought if I was asked I wasn't going to say I hadn't been told because I would have been suppressing evidence, among other things, which I am not prepared to do.

But it did put Sidney in a bad position and he is entitled to resent it. Though I think he should resent the president who put him in such a false position, having hiring him for his brains - which are considerable - and his political insight - which is likewise, not negligible - prefer to use him as a dirty trickster, as has since has his wife.

Most of the slanders against Obama that were circulated in the last election have Sidney Blumenthal's fingerprints on them, I am sorry to say. We wouldn't have much to talk about if we were to meet again.

TONY JONES: We were talking about the transformation that you underwent in Sarajevo, the sense that the use of military power against despots is necessary.

The war in Iraq was probably the biggest experiment ever - maybe the biggest we will ever see - in regime change in nation building. But it does appear to have been a failure.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well it depends how you quantify it. I mean, it's a terrible disappointment. And of course "disappointment" is too neutral a word because that suggests no one is really responsible for it and there were some things that couldn't have been foreseen about Iraq but there were some that could, for which no provision was made at all by the American planners.

And that is - I describe it in my book as an impeachable culpability. There were also things that were not just not done but were done, such as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib for example - which again one would qualify as impeachably culpable.

And damnable.

But there is the unquantifiable, which disservice more attention than it gets.

Our Iraqi friends have written a federal constitution, inscribing rights for national and religious and ethnic minorities, where differences are to be settled by parliamentary election - of which there have been two, both in the teeth of appalling odds and intimidation, both of them so far with very disappointing outcomes.

There's a Supreme Court, there's a free press - or the simulacrum of one, the idea of one and quite a lot of the practice of it. Almost every Iraqi now has a cell phone. They were illegal until quite recently.

Huge number of Iraqis can connect to the internet. They have a convertible currency. They have diplomatic relations with other countries now, which were impossible under the UN rules of the old regime. Iraq was sanctioned almost out of its sovereignty because of the crimes it had committed and not uncommitted.

It's still a maimed and traumatised country coming out of three and half decades of war and fascism and the political class is made up of pygmies.

Saddam Hussein made a sweep of the intellectuals or any possible rival.

But it has a pulse now. I can't say that I know that the Iraqis will take advantage of all the wonderful enactments they've made but I still think it's an inspiring thing to see - to have seen - and for the very small part I can claim to have played in advocating it, I would say I was proud.

TONY JONES: But if you want a policy of US intervention to bring down despotic regimes, to move countries towards democracy, to build nations, you actually have to prove it'll work. And that seems to be the big problem here because one cannot imagine any more the United States committing itself to this kind of experiment in regime change. So it's over.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: You're quite right. That is probably not the least of the casualties of the things. Though when one says casualties one mustn't forget the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered, most of them by people who we wrongly call insurgents - that is to say, the hired international psychopaths of Al Qaeda in an open, very cynical alliance with the riff raff of the previous Baathist regime who know where the bodies are buried, who know where the weapons are, who know where everyone lives still, a lot of them - and have been able to do, in proportion to their size, fantastic damage to the Iraqi society, never giving it a minute to try to recover its breath.

But, yes, again non-quantifiable casualty - complete collapse of any will in the United States to have another such confrontation, great scepticism in the international community about taking on any such undertaking.

And as a result - I feel like I can sense it. At the moment there's a real sense of impunity and confidence and swagger among regimes like those in Burma and Zimbabwe and Sudan, and Iran. They all act not just as if "you can't touch us, we've got Chinese backing' - which of course is part of the story - but 'you can't touch us and we know you won't".

And that is a terrible thing. I was fervently hoping that the removal of Saddam Hussein would be the beginning of an era of democratisation and the realisation that the age of dictatorship is dead, that dictatorships are redundant, they're historically condemned as well as morally. Not so.

TONY JONES: You obviously watch the Tea Party phenomenon very closely.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: I was intrigued to see you referring to it as, in a way, White America comes to terms with the fact that it may - or certainly will - eventually be minority in this country.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well... I think one of the great latent causes of anxiety in American society at the moment is the realisation among white people that if they're not going to become a minority - I think that's the way they think about it. That's a long way off. But they will no longer be the majority. That is rather different.

They will be the largest population but they won't be the preponderant one.

And the various forms that this anxiety takes, the silliest of which is the Tea Party. And in some ways the nastiest.

I mean, I think obviously it’s a serious question, as is the decline of the United States and the Americans having to get used to the idea of being one power among many - something the Tea Party has nothing to say about, by the way.

They don't have a foreign policy. They don't discuss defence or foreign affairs. They don't know much about it or seemingly care. They are another incarnation of the old know-nothing isolationist tradition.

And that shows also in their domestic attitudes.

I mean, whatever tone of voice we're going to have to come up with to discuss the ethnic balance of the future of America - and it will have to be very careful and thoughtful, I think, and well mannered - we know what tones of voice you can't discuss it in and that's the tone of voice these people adopt, calling the president a secret Muslim or a closet Kenyan or ... believe me, this is said and widely disseminated - the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X.

Try anything once. Any old smear will do. It makes me very angry. I've seldom seen in my longish life grown-ups behaving as stupidity, as immaturely in the election as in the last cycle in this country.

TONY JONES: Can I bring you where we started with your illness and the affect on how you think. It's clear from the way you're talking that you're still engaged with the ongoing conflicts in the world around you.

I mean, is that necessarily part of your condition that you remain engaged with what is happening in contemporary politics in the United States, so you don't sort of drift away from that and start thinking only about the bigger issues?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I think...

TONY JONES: By which I mean life and death.


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. Well all the time I've been doing this - and I've always spent a good bit of my life on the political questions and trying to keep up with them and trying to influence the outcome as best I can - I've always known I am going to die.

And I've always known that in theory it could be any day so all I know is that, squared, now. It doesn't remove my interest, no.

Because if one wanted to become or had any tendency to become cynical or burned out, I think you are likely to do it when you've got a comfy middle age to look forward to it, as not.

I hope that's a fair answer.

TONY JONES: Christopher, we're really very happy that you are able to keep your side of the bargain with us.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Very nice to offer.

TONY JONES: All I can say is thank you. And until next time.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, absolutely. Many more times.