>Well, I don't think he really buys into the Bush rhetoric -- he certainly
>doesn't regarding Iran, as he pointed out to you. He has his own reasons for
>supporting Saddam's ouster, and he makes a much better case than does Bush,
>who relies on bluff and bluster.
But the only people around right now who are going after Saddam are the Bush gang, whether or not he buys into their rhetoric. And Bush doesn't want a democratic Iraq - he wants to make Gen Tommy Franks its proconsul. A democratic Iraq might be a very inconvenient thing, voting to ally with Iran, or choosing to invest oil revenues in Iraqi development rather than in U.S. Treasury bonds.
So Hitch is signing up with the same national security state that supported Saddam when he was hanging Communists and gassing Iranians, the same one that has for decades preferred Islamic reactionaries to secular leftists, the same one that funded the embryonic Al Qaeda. He's vocal about how icky Ramsey Clark is, but I hear very little about his new allies, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. He professes himself an anti-Zionist, but he's effectively allied himself with the most rabidly Zionist forces in U.S. politics. He can talk all he wants about his criticisms of Bush & Co., but he's effectively their boy right now - and broadly perceived as such.
As Orwell might say, Tommy Franks is a liberator.
Doug