Status Updates From Christopher Hitchens and Hi...

“It is impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, in their rule, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to their own Muslim people, what might they have in mind for us?”

The more I read of Hitchens the more I find fault

Making the case that the foreign fighters in Iraq are not religious 'radicals,'—'They went because they were angered by the US military occupation, as they see it, of a Muslim country'—Cole gives himself away by his final choice of adjective. Confessional imperatives were at the very heart of the insurgency: 'The United States has [not] killed [...] many of them, though hundreds have died as suicide bombers.'

Cole lists among 'the negative foreign-policy consequences of the war' (which Hitchens has not 'in any balanced manner addressed') 'the strengthening of the Iranian position when the Shiite religious parties came to power in the Jan. 30 elections.' Does he understand the implications of this line of thought, and does he know into which school it places him?

Cole defends the antiwar bearings of Schröder and Chirac on the grounds that 'the Bush administration failed to make a convincing case to them that Iraq posed an imminent danger to Europe or the United States.' This assumes they weren't convinced on their own accounts: German intelligence predicted in 2001 that Iraq would be nuclearised within three years.

Cole: 'In fact, the secular Arab nationalist Baath state had nothing whatsoever to do with any radical Islamist movements.' It sheltered Abdul Rahman Yasin and Abu Abbas; its leader had a Qur'an indited in his own blood; he added the words 'Allahu Akbar' to the national flag; alone even among Middle-East dictators, he publicly hailed 9/11.