Defending the Iraq War

Christopher Hitchens is the indispensable man on the War:

Suppose a brilliant physicist were asked onto a popular comedy TV show to explain the theory of quantum physics in less than a minute while constantly being interrupted by gibes and hornblasts from the wise guy host.

For the past two months the columnist Christopher Hitchens has endured similar ordeals in guest appearances on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, Al Franken's Air America show, and other leftist political-comedy shows. Granted, defending the Iraq War policy is not as complex and tedious as explaining quantum physics, and granted Hitchens brings it on himself. No one is forcing him onto The Daily Show, but the lure of a national audience (Jon Stewart's audience: 1.4 million. Charlie Rose's audience: an insomniac in Fargo and his cat) is irresistible and Hitchens's real purpose is, after all, to hawk his latest book.

Nothing wrong with that. A freelance journalist, even the best, still makes beans.

But more than any Bush administration official, more than any Republican talking head, more than W. himself, Christopher Hitchens has been making a credible, practical, and important case for taking out Saddam. And the odds are stacked in the anti-war left's favor. The Cindy Sheehans and Jane Fondas have only to scream and chant a few vacuous platitudes or nursery rhymes for the evening news ("Wrong war, wrong time!"), then sit back and snicker as the regime-changers fumble to present the facts, explain the reasoning, the history, the threat, and the benefits to world peace and global stability of a democratic Iraq.

For the left, it is literally that easy. One does not need logic, facts, or an encyclopedic knowledge of world history to get his message out -- only shallow emotions, simplistic arguments and puerile chants like "Bush lied, people died!" (The irony is that many of these antiwar protesters are underclassmen or graduates of the supposedly elite universities where students were once taught to eschew simplistic arguments.)

Glad somebody's noticing. The Left lost whatever intellectual credibility they had long ago, when Lenin began murdering people by the bushel and the Western leftists made excuses for him.