Oh, Christopher Hitchens. I used to be your biggest fan. I hate Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton just like you. I even forgave your support of the war in the early days of the invasion, because I knew you sympathize with the plight of Kurdistan.

But you don’t return my e-mails or call. And then there was the Slate editorial on March 19th, which consisted of a series of anticipated questions on the fourth anniversary of the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history since Vietnam. I hope it’s not the final straw.

I could write a book in response, but I think I’ll settle for answering some of Hitchens’ questions:

Was the president right or wrong to go to the United Nations in September 2002 and to say that body could no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein’s open flouting of its every significant resolution, from weaponry to human rights to terrorism?

Wrong, for several reasons. First of all, in a purely operational sense, if the United Nations can continue to tolerate China’s rights violations, it could have continued to tolerate Saddam’s. Secondly, inspections had yet to reveal that Hussein was not in possession of WMDs,

Before I mention the third reason, I’d like to point out that Hitchens’ doesn’t take the easy way out and say “Was The United States right or wrong to go to the UN,” he asks about the president specifically. Bush’s appeal to the U.N. was a cynical ploy to cover his intent to go to war no matter what, as the Downing Street memos revealed.

Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

Here we have the classic problem of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Hitchens won’t accept Saddam’s word about WMDs because he suspected Iraq of systematic deception. But it turns out that the war has destroyed our credibility in the same way Saddam’s had been destroyed by… er, complying with the ban. But grudgingly so! Always beware those with grudges.

It occurred to me, recently, that in karmic terms, we seem to have achieved the same credibility in the international community we gave Saddam before the invasion.

Back to our mutual friend. The pretense of this question is a little off, too. Hitchens admits later that he wasn’t willing to give any inspections under Saddam any credit no matter what they said. It’s the same kind of cynicism that belies every action that the Bush White House undertakes when it comes to the U.N., including nominating a representative to said body. They don’t care for the the premise of the U.N. in the first place, so any overtures on our part are lip service by definition.

If you don’t believe in inspections, you don’t get to use them as a pretext for war. Same thing goes for the weapons ban—keeping the programs in cold storage but destroying the stockpiles of existing weapons is precisely what the ban is designed to do while in effect.

Also, Hitchens seems to think that Hussein Kamel’s testimony upon defecting to signify Saddam wasn’t complying with the UN resolution, while I took the testimony to mean that they had, in fact, destroyed their stocks. I guess the jury’s out on that one.

Actually, Hitchens makes an excellent response to his own question that I’ll use to string him up with later, so I’ll quote it now (emphasis mine):

Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD.

As I wrote back in 2004, war proponents are really treading a dangerous path by making such arguments. The worst-case scenario is that the WMD charges were accurate. If Saddam was hiding WMDs and we can’t find them, then the very thing we were trying to prevent from happening: the transmission of WMDs to non-state actors, i.e., terrorists.

You know, I can’t resist skipping to the last question:

So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?

Mr. Hitchens, if you truly believe Saddam retained unnaccounted-for WMDs, then you cannot answer this question in the affirmative. And for those who think I’m being hysterical over a minor point, I’ll let another one of Hitchens’ Q & A’s do the talking:

Was the terror connection not exaggerated? Not by much.

Now, I’m not the first to jump on my fellow former ISO member for the following obvious bullshit:

The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

But I will claim to be the first to offer the following defense: couldn’t it be, oh ye narrow-minded folk, that Hitchens is very specifically referring to the year 2005, only? Because they clearly did link Iraq and al-Qaeda explicitly in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. I suppose it also depends on how you define “had a hand.”

But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.

How on earth was this supposed to ‘forestall the next one?’ I’d get angrier, but in the wake of manifest disproof by way of the London Underground bombings, pretentions about the Iraq war being some kind of terrorist deterrent are pretty much moot—and tragic.

At any rate, just how much of the global jihadist movement was Saddam controlling or funding? And if eliminated, wouldn’t the deaths of Iraqi civilians motivate other Muslims to action as they had for Bin Laden?

Often I wonder about the civilian casualties of the invasion of Afghanistan, who far outnumbered those of 9/11 in a country a fraction of our size. I always thought the relative significance assigned to each set of deaths was a fair indicator of the difference in the price of life. This is the point I never understood about our strategy in the War on Terror. Hitchens himself notes,

A few points of interest did emerge from Powell’s presentation: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.

I don’t think Hitchens realizes ‘the full significance’ of Zarqawi’s presence in Kurdish Iraq. Here Zarqawi is a refugee from state-sheltering by the Taliban regime, being ‘harbored’ by those freedom- and American-loving Iraqi Kurds in a region which, due to the presence of U.N. military personnel (No-fly Zone), Saddam had no control over?

The way you view the issue of Zarqawi in Kurdish Iraq is a good indicator of whether or not you can justify the war. If you think it is possible to quash al-Qaeda by toppling governments, then the relative chaos of the no-fly zone is intolerable because it provides places for refugees from the War on Terror to set up camp with little interference.

If you think the very idea of quashing al-Qaeda by toppling governments seems to be contradicted by the fact that Zarqawi was able to escape to a zone where government control had broken down due to U.S. interference with local politics, well, you see where I’m going with this. And speaking of local politics—in light of his previous comment about how war in Iraq was supposed to be a magical talisman against ‘the next attack,’ shouldn’t Hitchens concede the point merely based on the daily suicide bombings against civlians in Iraq?

Was a civil war not predictable? Only to the extent that there was pre-existing unease and mistrust between the different population groups in Iraq. Since it was the policy of Saddam Hussein to govern by divide-and-rule and precisely to exacerbate these differences, it is unlikely that civil peace would have been the result of prolonging his regime.

If you want to start an analysis along these lines, why don’t you assign the blame where it belongs? It was the British who instituted the system Hitchens is describing. Only then, it was called ‘divide and conquer,’ not ‘divide-and-rule.’ It was a favorite strategy of the Empire to employ a minorty as an administrative class to maintain balance in multi-ethnic colonies.

Perhaps war supporters should have brought up some of the many examples of multi-ethnic states with colonial borders who didn’t try to dissolve into component nations after the deposition of a dictatorship in the last fifty years. Oh, wait—there aren’t any.

Finally,

Indeed, so ghastly was his system in this respect that one-fifth of Iraq’s inhabitants—the Kurds—had already left Iraq and were living under Western protection.

If you want to start measuring ‘ghastly’ by the fraction of population fleeing the country…