George Galloway, the anti-war Respect Party MP from Bethnal Green, is guilty of "sinister piffle". Christopher Hitchens, the pro-intervention polemicist who writes a column for Vanity Fair, practises "Goebbellian tricks".

The two rival titans of the raging row over Iraq engaged in an intellectual prize fight in New York last night that quickly degenerated into knock-down, drag-out bar-room brawl.

Before a jeering crowd of more than 1,000 in a college auditorium, the two men - once allies on the Left - hurled invective at each other for almost two hours, until exhaustion set in.

A scruffy, sweating Mr Hitchens accused Mr Galloway of being an apologist for dictators, fresh from Damascus where he had praised the 145 attacks a day by Iraqi insurgents on coalition troops.

"The man’s hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends," Mr Hitchens said. "The Soviet Union let him down, Albania’s gone ... Saddam’s been overthrown... But on to the next, in Damascus."

In an apparent Freudian slip, Mr Hitchens confused the Dundee-born politician at one point with Libyan leader "Mr Gaddafi".

Mr Galloway, inexplicably tanned and looking worthy of the nickname "Gorgeous George" in a well-pressed biege suit, denounced Mr Hitchens as a former-Trotskyist stooge for a reactionary government in Washington bent on dominating the Iraqi people.

"People like Mr Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood, " the MP said to wild applause."How I wish he would put on a tin hat and pick up a gun and go and fight himself."

Mr Galloway argued that the war in Iraq had made the world less safe and that Islamic fundamentalism was now on the rise with "10,000 new bin Ladens".

The show-down grew out of a clash between the two when Mr Galloway testified in May before a United States Senate sub-committee that had accused him of profiting from the oil-for-food scandal. At that chaotic meeting, Mr Galloway extravagantly dismissed the exiled British journalist as a "drink-soaked, former-Trotskyist popinjay". Mr Hitchens responded by challenging the MP to a proper debate. Mr Galloway accepted the challenge while on an anti-war speaking tour of America and promoting his new book about the Senate hearings, Mr Galloway Goes to Washington.

For the Americans in the audience, the debate offered a airing of differences by two British proxies for arguments over Iraq that are seldom articulated so vigorously in the United States. Though a vote was never taken, the motion before the audience was: "The war in Iraq was necessary and just."

Combat began on the pavement outside with Mr Hitchens handing out leaflets noting Mr Galloway’s more egregious tributes to Saddam, including the infamous 1994 speech in Baghdad in which he told the Iraqi strongman: "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."

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