Writer Christopher Hitchens continues his one man war on trying to rebuild his credibility after wholeheartedly supporting the brutal, nation-smashing Iraq War, and backing President Bush ,throughout most of 2002 and 2003.
Christopher Hitchens was one of the most foul and odious of all the major mainstream media commentators who ceaselessly raged against any and all who thought invading and occupying Iraq might be, you know, a really bad idea.
In this piece for the UK Guardian's Comment Is Free, Hitchens now rages against President Bush, and his recent highly controversial attempt to draw comparisons between what happened to the Vietnamese after the pullout of American forces in the early 1970s, and what are the likely scenarios for Iraq, and the Middle East, if the US were to withdraw in the next year or two.
Hitchens uses Bush as a ram rod to try and clear the minds of readers of the reality that he was all for the war, before it went bad. But it's President Bush's alleged religious beliefs that truly infuriate Hitchens the most :
How do I dislike President George Bush? Let me count the ways. Most of them have to do with his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a virtue. This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure.
Hitchens is utterly envicerated by more than 100 commenters following his CIF piece, who rip apart his facetious arguments sentence by sentence. Hitchens has fooled nobody, it seems, not even himself with his fact-challenged, weak, hollow attempt to wall himself off from the tragic legacy of President Bush's adventures in Iraq.It explains the way in which he embraced ex-KGB goon Vladimir Putin, citing as the basis of a beautiful relationship the fact that Putin was wearing a crucifix. (Has Putin been seen wearing that crucifix before or since? Did his advisers tell him that the President of the United States was that easy a pushover?)
It also explains the unforgivable intervention that Bush made into the private life of the Schiavo family: leaving his Texas ranch to try and keep 'alive' a woman whose autopsy showed that her brain had melted to below flatline a long time before. Here is a man who believes the 'jury' is still 'out' on whether we evolved as a species, who regards stem cell research as something profane, who affects the odd belief that Islam is 'a religion of peace'.
And then of course there is this chunk of mea-culpa from Hitchens :
I always agreed with him on one secular question, that the regime of Saddam Hussein was long overdue for removal.Bush didn't publicly claim that the Iraq War was worthwhile because it led to the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime until months after the war began. The key thrust for the war in the first place, all through 2002 and early 2003, when Hitchens was one of its most prominent supporters, was to disarm Saddam Hussein of non-existent WMDs. And Hitchens knows it.
As do most of the commenters on CIF.
Hitchens has fooled no-one, but, perhaps, himself.
