Hitchy: Stay the Course in Iraq

As always, reformed leftist hero and libertarian-republican Christopher Hitchens offers fascinating and useful facts and logic pertaining to the Iraq situation. He predicts that the Shia-Sunni factional explosion would have happened eventually anyway, probably after the handoff from Hussein to either of his psychotic sons. And he wonders: Was it really preferable to hold these factions apart via a hellish dictatorship? At least under the present situation a free, liberal, prosperous democracy -- or at least the seed of one (see: South Korea and Taiwan 25 years ago) -- represents an option under consideration.

Hitchy informs us that prior to US voters registering their decision for a US pull-out, the various waring factions had been employing politics as a fall-back tactic when violence failed to produce their outcome... and indeed these two years or so sometimes the leaders of one faction or another would conclude just that. But until now, the violent nihilists in Iraq assumed that the US military would not leave. Thanks to the political success of Naidir, Tom, and other unreformed leftists, a new assumption has ascended: the yanks are leaving. Hitchy says that this now creates an incentive among the various competing tyrants stick with violence, and strengthen ties with the outside governments who are arming and financing their bloody destruction.

I remain uncertain of the best path, and hopeful that Bush picked a winning one.