<http://www.msnbc.com/news/868138.asp?0cv=OB10>
I have no problem with going after The Sacred -- indeed, I insist on it. (There's that wonderful anecdote about Cockburn's dad Claud when he was part of Private Eye's editorial circle. The boys were looking for a holy target, someone suggested Albert Schweitzer, and Claud remarked, "OK, let's have a go at old Schweitzer.")
And I like the way Hitchens ends here:
"But this latest garbage is a very timely caution against our common tendency to make supermen and stars and heroes out of fellow humans. Iraq is not Saddam any more than Zimbabwe is Mugabe, and being on the right side of history once is no guarantee that the subsequent fall will not be from a very great height."
You can put anyone's name in there, Hitch's included, and it holds true.
Hitch understood the Great Power cynicism last time around. He analyzed it and debated against it brilliantly, but here takes it at face value. Yes, an overthrow of Saddam is progress, but on what terms and to what end? To me, what's happening is the logical completion of a largely successful imperial project. Saddam has served his purpose and now must go. He is in the way. They put him on probation, it didn't work, so now we come to this.
Saddam is a US client gone wild. Left alone he most certainly would become dangerous again, and not only in the grand geopolitical sense of the word. So the US gets to use him, then dispose of him, all in the name of "freedom." Hitch believes that this will result in a multiethnic, democratic Iraq, that the mini-Kurdistan under US/UK protection will spread its riches nationwide. We'll see.
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