EVERY week or so, the good people at Amazon send me an e-mail with suggestions of new goodies I might buy.

It is an experience I share with tens of millions of people, and I have no doubt that each e-mail is lovingly composed by someone who's thought long and hard about exactly which 10 of their gazillions of products matches my precise mix of tastes and interests.

And, at least in my case, pretty much every e-mail includes the suggestion that I buy something written by Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens, who died this week after an 18-month battle with oesophageal cancer, was the most celebrated and influential essayist in the world, and I am regularly entreated to buy something he wrote: his memoir, Hitch 22, or his anti-religious screed, God Isn't Great, or his assault on Bill and Hillary Clinton, No-one Left to Lie to, or any of the collections of his essays and criticism dating back to the 1970s.

Why the constant promotion of Hitchens? Because the good elves at Amazon, you see, remember that the very first book I bought from them was Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters.

I bought Why Orwell Matters in 2003, when I was writing my first book. At the time I'd become addicted to Orwell's essays and was using them (even overusing them) as a vehicle through which to describe - of all things - South African policing.

Even then, it seemed a stretch, but Orwell's insights, courage and eloquence helped me impose some shape on a book that had been on the verge of defeating me.

It was also the year in which the US invaded Iraq, and, like liberals of a leftish persuasion everywhere, I was having a hard time figuring out whether I was for or against the war.

Hitchens, whose views on Iraq had became extraordinarily influential, was having no such trouble.

As far as he was concerned, the US, Britain and anyone else inclined to ending a horrendous dictatorship and creating the conditions for democracy to emerge in the Middle East should invade forthwith.

The pacifistic Left, he insisted with great vitriol, was coddling a monster who was responsible for filling mass graves, using chemical weapons on his own people and building a regime founded on torture chambers and rape rooms. Should they obstruct his comeuppance, the Left would share responsibility for his crimes.

I'd read a lot of Hitchens's polemics. They were compelling, articulate and provocative. And, in the end, he (and others like him) persuaded me. Saddam had to go. The Americans knew what they were doing. Democracy might bloom in the stony soil of Iraq.

While it may be generations before anyone can fully assess the many effects of the invasion on the history of the Middle East and beyond, it isn't too early to know that much of what was said in the lead-up to the war was flat-out wrong. Nor is it too early to say that the reason so much of what was said was wrong was that people in power were lying.

These facts have led many of those who once vociferously supported the war to recant their views. Not Hitchens, though. Just a few months ago, for example, he made the case that, but for the invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring could not have happened.

Writing in Slate, he asked if "anyone [could] imagine how the Arab Spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbours' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family?"

Strong stuff. Not as strong as Hitch, as he was apparently known, could get. This, after all, is a man who famously called Mother Teresa a "thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf".

Hitchens's unwavering support for the Iraq war demands an explanation.

How could a man so smart never concede that much of what he had said was baseless? How could he fail to acknowledge, even during the disastrous few years immediately after the invasion, that he could not possibly know how the war would shape the future?

How could he continue to insist obsessively that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger long after US and British intelligence services had declared the claims to be false? How could he have been so sure of himself?

They're important questions, both about him and about every sentient being who had an opinion about Iraq in 2003.

Or now.

I can't pretend to have an answer. But I want to offer a speculation about the roots of Hitchens's hawkishness about Iraq and, indeed, his hawkishess about America's "war on terror".

I think it's Orwell's fault.

One of the tropes in the Hitchens obituaries that have emerged in the last few days has been the extent to which Hitchens viewed Orwell as a role model.

I suspect that Orwell's most important influence over Hitchens wasn't literary, but political: Orwell, a paid-up member of the British Left in the first half of the 20th century, was the most articulate opponent of leftist pacifism in the face of the threat of fascism.

At a time when, at the behest of the Soviet Communist Party, the international socialist movement was agitating against preparing for war against Germany (whose leaders had signed a pact with Stalin), Orwell offered full-throated support for arming Britain and preparing for war.

Hitchens's identification with Orwell was strong. So strong that he cast himself in Orwell's role in relation to what he came to think of as a global struggle against what he called "Islamofacism" or "fascism with an Islamic face".

While I'm not enough of a Hitchens scholar to know precisely when this began, the issuing of a fatwa calling for the murder of Hitchens's friend Salman Rushdie (and the Left's failure to condemn same) seems to have been a turning point.

But, after 9/11, all bets were off: following Orwell, Hitchens felt it his duty to prepare his country for war.

In retrospect, no one doubts that Orwell was right. Only time will tell if that's true of Hitchens.

What is certain is that Orwell's rightness was visible almost immediately. However intelligent, erudite and compelling his writing, you can't quite say the same of Hitch.

• Antony Altbeker is author, most recently, of Fruit of a Poisoned Tree: A true story of murder and the miscarriage of justice