On April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam was pulled down in central Baghdad, Hitchens wrote, “So it turns out that all the slogans of the anti-war movement were right after all. And their demands were just. ‘No War on Iraq,’ they said—and there wasn’t a war on Iraq. Indeed, there was barely a ‘war’ at all. ‘No Blood for Oil,’ they cried, and the oil wealth of Iraq has been duly rescued from attempted sabotage with scarcely a drop spilled.” That July, Hitchens and a few other reporters flew to Baghdad with Wolfowitz. “It’s quite extraordinary to see the way that American soldiers are welcomed,” Hitchens told Fox News upon his return. “To see the work that they’re doing and not just rolling up these filthy networks of Baathists and jihadists, but building schools, opening soccer stadiums, helping people connect to the Internet, there is a really intelligent political program as well as a very tough military one.”

Three years later, Hitchens is still on Fox News talking about the Iraq war. He has not flinched from his position that the invasion was necessary, nor declined any serious invitation to defend that position publicly, even as the violence in Iraq has increased, and American opinion has turned against the intervention and the President who launched it. In this role, he has presented himself with an immense test of his rhetorical mettle—one can say that without doubting his sincerity. He often seems to have had more at stake, and certainly more oratorical energy, than anyone in the government. (In recent months, the trope of “Islamic fascism,” which Hitchens has used frequently since his 2001 Nation column, has reached the top layers of government—in August, Bush said that the country was “at war with Islamic fascists”—and he has had to deny the charge that he is writing Administration speeches.) Today, he always carries with him—like the Kurdistan flag in his lapel—debating points, worn smooth with use: Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, took refuge in Iraq; Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam’s senior physicist, had centrifuge parts buried in his garden; as late as 2003, Iraqi agents were trying to buy missiles from North Korea; Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, offered Hitchens’s friend Rolf Ekéus, the weapons inspector, a two-and-a-half-million-dollar bribe. “I feel like Bellow’s Herzog, writing crazed letters,” Hitchens said, smiling. “The occupation has not turned out as one would have liked, but the main problem is to have underestimated the utter evil of the other side. I wouldn’t have believed they could keep up a campaign of murdering people at random.”

Hitchens asks his opponents this: “We should have left Iraq the way it was? However I replay the tape, however much I wish things had been done differently, I can’t get to that position.” He acknowledged that his support of the war had caused him some intellectual discomfort. “The most difficult thing is having to defend an Administration that isn’t defensible,” he said. On television and radio, he explained, “you’re invited on to defend the Administration’s view on something and then someone’s invited on to attack it. You don’t want to begin by putting distance, because then it looks like you’re covering your ass. You take the confrontation as it actually is. I’m not going to spend a few silky minutes saying, ‘You know, I don’t really like Bush and his attitude toward stem cells.’ No. Wait. The motion before the house is this: Is this a just and necessary war or is it not?”

He went on, “I’m open to the prosecution of the Administration, even the impeachment of some members, for the way they’ve fucked up the war, and also the way they exploit it domestically. But do not run away with the idea that my telling you this would satisfy any of my critics. They want me to immolate myself, and I sincerely believe that for some of them, when they see bad news from Iraq, the reaction is simply ‘This will make Hitchens look bad!’ I’ve been trying to avoid solipsism, but I’ve come to believe there are such people.”

Hitchens finds support on the right, of course. Peter Wehner, a deputy assistant to the President and the director of the office of strategic initiatives in the White House, invited Hitchens to give a lecture to White House staff a few years ago, and now jokingly addresses him as “Comrade” in e-mails. Wehner admired Hitchens as a “fantastic political pugilist” even when they were on opposing camps in the eighties. Now, he said, “On the issues of greatest gravity and historical importance—the war against global jihadism and the liberation of Iraq—I am thrilled to be on the same side of the divide as Christopher.”

To Hitchens’s left, there is enmity and derision. This summer, a mock-obituary, published online, described him dying in the manner of Major Kong: riding a warhead out of a B-52 in a future American war in Iran. Another Internet tribute posted a photograph of him with the caption “Hitchens: ‘I’ll Kick Saddam’s Fucking Teeth In.’ ”A parodic MySpace page introduces Hitchens this way: “I am a man of the Enlightenment. Words fall from my tongue and you eat them up like a starving kitten on the street.” Last year, Hitchens was jeered when he debated the British M.P. George Galloway in New York. When he appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” this summer, Hitchens said “Fuck you” to a hostile crowd and, to Maher, “Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything, is frivolous.”

Many friends and former friends have been watching Hitchens’s progress with disappointment, or something sharper. Colin Robinson, his former publisher at Verso Books, said, “I hope it might be possible to save some bits of Christopher. It’s a terrible loss to the left—it’s so rare to have someone in the mainstream media who could go out and give the other side a dusting.” Using a similar tone of regret, Eric Alterman, a Nation columnist and an estranged friend, called him a “performance artist.” Alexander Cockburn told me, “Between the two of them, my sympathies were with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Calcutta, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?”

Hitchens claims to be unperturbed by his critics. “You’d think I’d driven over their pets and abducted their daughters,” Hitchens said. “I’d like to know what brings that on.” A pause. “So I could do it more.” He added, “People say, ‘What’s it like to be a minority of one, or a kick-bag for the Internet?’ It washes off me like jizz off a porn star’s face.” (Thomas Cushman, one of the editors of “Terror, Iraq, and the Left,” said of Hitchens, “What’s great about him is that being despised is actually the source of his creativity.”)

I asked Rushdie if recent events had taken their toll on his friend. “Christopher is well equipped to take care of himself,” Rushdie said, “but I do think that some of the people that he is now aligned with are not really people that he’s like. That must be very strange for him, and I worry about that.”

When I told Hitchens that some friends were worried, he smiled through his annoyance. “I suppose it’s nice to be worried about,” he said. “It’s almost like being cared about.”

In 1982, Hitchens wrote an essay for The Nation about Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” and the point he was most keen to make was that although the First World War predates the action of the novel, it remains at the center of the story. Hitchens quoted at length from Waugh’s honeyed description of the excursion made by Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte to the Venice of the early twenties, a passage of champagne cocktails and gondolas that ends with Sebastian saying, “It’s rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.”

I asked Carol Blue about this passage. She said that her husband, who was brought up in an English military family in the years following the Second World War, had an aspect of “those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been. There’s a whole tough-guy, ‘I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die’ talk, which is really key to his psychology—I don’t care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing.”

The Second World War was “the entire subject of conversation” when Hitchens was growing up, he told me: “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else.” Every Boxing Day, the family would toast the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst. Portsmouth, where he first lived, was still scarred by Nazi air raids. Hitchens’s father was a career Navy man from a working-class family who reached the rank of commander and, with that, a foothold in the middle classes. He met Hitchens’s mother, who was from a lower-middle-class Liverpudlian family, during the war. Commander Hitchens was not a garrulous man, but some observations of his have stuck with his son. “They are all kind of solid,” Christopher said. “He said, ‘Beware of girls with thin lips’; ‘Don’t let them see you with just your socks on’; and ‘Socialism is founded on sand.’ ” His father also said that “the war was the only time when he knew what he was doing.”

His parents, Hitchens said, were of a class that “resent but sort of envy the rich, but they’re terrified of organized labor, and feel themselves to be the neglected, solid citizens.” Commander Hitchens was a conservative of the peeved, country-going-to-the-dogs sort—a Thatcherite in waiting. Christopher abandoned that conservatism as a boy but perhaps absorbed the lesson that politics is a form of anger. “My father was not a misanthrope, exactly, but he thought that the whole thing”—that is, life—“was a bit overrated.”

Commander Hitchens had a Baptist-Calvinist background. His wife was Jewish, but she never told her husband or her children. Hitchens learned this about her—and himself—only long after her death. (“On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased,” he has written.) She was more social than Hitchens’s father, and more alert to signs of class slippage: it was vital to decant milk into a jug before taking it to the table, and to avoid saying “toilet.” Hitchens once overheard an argument between his parents about the cost of boarding school, in which his mother said, “If there is going to be a ruling class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.”

She succeeded: Christopher was privately and expensively educated (as was Peter, his younger brother, who is a prominent right-wing newspaper columnist in London) and now has the accent—and white suit—of the English upper-middle classes. Ian Buruma detects in Hitchens some mix of regard and disdain “for the ‘real’ officer class. Waugh had a bit of that, and Wodehouse—Christopher’s favorite writers—which is one reason that Wodehouse ended up in America. America allows you to play the role of the fruity upper-class Englishman, whereas in En-gland you’d feel vulnerable to exposure.”

Hitchens went to boarding school, in Devon, at the age of eight. He was happy, but, he said, “a radicalizing thing for me was the realization that my parents had scrimped and saved to allow me to be the first member of my family to go to boarding school. I was surrounded by these sons of Lancastrian businessmen who thought it was their perfect right to be there. That had a huge effect: these fuckers don’t even know when they’re well off.” He also saw through Mrs. Watts, his instructor on religious matters, “who told us how good it was of God to make all our vegetation green, because it was the color that was most restful for our eyes, and how horrible it would be if it was orange. I remember sitting there, in my shorts and sandals, and thinking, That can’t be right.” Hitchens has just finished a book informed by a lifetime of steely anticlerical thought, “God Is Not Great,” to be published next year, which begins with Mrs. Watts, and goes on to say of his religious friends, “I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar-mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to ‘respect’ their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate prophet, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction. . . . Religion poisons everything.”

Hitchens used to have, at times, a “pronounced” stutter. “One way of curing it was to force yourself to speak in public,” he said. In his first school debate, Hitchens spoke against new immigration restrictions (nobody else would), and found that the techniques required—such as charm and the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm—came naturally to him. His later success in America derived in part from his bruising rhetorical talents. In Britain, such qualities are on show every week at Prime Minister’s Question Time, but in America Hitchens was a novel act. “It’s extraordinary,” he said. “I’ve been invited onto shows like ‘Crossfire’ and told, ‘Can’t you hold it down a bit?’ ”

In 1964, he ran as the Labour Party candidate in his school’s mock election (again, nobody else would). He lost, but the Labour Party won in the country. The new government quickly proved itself to be, in Hitchens’s words, “completely corrupt and cynical”—backing President Johnson on Vietnam, for example. His response was to join the Party, thus starting a career of antagonistic idealism. “That’s why you join a party, to take up the struggles within it,” Hitchens explained. “And that’s what pushed me to the left—the humiliation of the Labour Government.” By the time he came to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Balliol College, Oxford—semi-official motto: “Effortless Superiority”—he had been invited to join a Trotskyist group, the International Socialists. (He was spotted while skillfully heckling a Maoist at a public meeting.)