Why Hitch Drank The Neocon Kool-Aid
If you can get past the subservient fawning of Johann Hari, this is an interesting interview with Christopher Hitchens about why he seemingly changed course radically after 9/11/2001. Now I don't claim to be up on the intellectual "elite", but in the battle of the think tanks, I would like to see some mutually assured destruction taking place. If you give these guys any sort of power, as we have seen the past 4 years, disaster usually results.

At any rate, a couple of points of disagreement for the sake of brevity: I really don't think any sane person can be found in the US who wanted to "do nothing" after 9/11/2001. Maybe "the Left" whatever that is, but I am talking about regular people. The question was HOW to go about it. And I find it hard to believe that WHOEVER was president at the time would have tried to arrange talks with Bin Laden in lieu of invading Afghanistan to take him out. The problem with the Bush administration is that it didn't want to finish the job in Afghanistan because it had other things on its plate. And invading Iraq was one of them.

Which brings me to my second point of dispute: invading Iraq was a part of the neocon plan of action from before Bush was elected. This is not in dispute. The problem was, they used "the war on terror" to justify that plan. Saddam Hussein was a threat to his people and human dignity, but he was no threat to anybody else thanks to 12 years of sanctions. The neocons believed that it would be a cakewalk to take over Iraq, turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy overnight and use it as a base for military operations in the Middle East and as an example of what's in store if the rest of the neighborhood did not play nice with us. That's the kind of "think tank" idea that gets the eyes rolling at places like The Pentagon.

The dangerous thing about these people is that they love to play war with other people's lives. To them, war is not a last resort, a means of defense when all else fails. It is a tool to affect global change to the way they think the world should be. They are out of touch with reality. To wit: "So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." And WHO takes the risk?

To see/read a person of Hitchens supposed intellectual heft defend these people because he actually met a few and found them to be great chaps even knowing the jaw dropping failures and mistakes in the Iraq invasion/aftermath...well to use his words "has lost all moral bearings."