Christopher Hitchens: or the Iraqi War Effort for Dummies
".......For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.

One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression....."

Hear, hear, Hitch. Most Dove-o-crats not only fail to acknowledge the brutalities of the Hussein/Baathist regime, they fail to acknowledge that their own bosses (ie. Hillarity, Di-Fi, Edwards, et al) in fact supported the war effort themselves. Agreeing in part with the Hitchens' sort of justification for the War Effort, however, does not imply one agrees to, say, the political and economic agenda of the Republican party, nor with BushCo's handling of the war (Hitchens might have addressed the tragic deaths of iraqi civilians a bit more in depth), or the "neo-cons." ("neo-con" now part of the DailyKOS-hack's neo-Doublespeak lexicon, sort of equivalent to what "petit-bourgeois jackal" was a few years ago. At least the marxists were a bit more honest than the new school of Byatch-o-crats).

Hitchens/WartoBeProudOf