Good stuff from Christopher Hitchens’ (author of The Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq) at Slate:
The overwhelming consensus among inspectors and monitors, including Hans Blix’s sidekick Mohammed ElBaradei, is now to the effect that Iran’s mullahs have indeed been concealing an enriched-uranium program. For good measure, it is a sure thing that they are harboring al-Qaida activists on their territory. Will the “peace” camp ever admit that Bush was right about this? Or about the “evil” of North Korea: a demented starvation regime now threatening to export ready-to-use nuclear weapons (which Saddam Hussein, say, might have been interested in buying)? Don’t make me laugh: The furthest the peaceniks will go is to say that Bush’s rhetoric made these people turn nasty. I am not teasing here: The best of the anti-war polemicists is Jonathan Schell, who advanced this very claim in a debate with me earlier this month. Meanwhile, the overwhelming moral case for regime change in both countries is once again being left to the forces of neoconservatism, with the liberals pulling a long face while they wait to be reluctantly “persuaded.”
Here is another gem from Hitchens published in Slate:
The report of June 25 was followed by an article of extraordinary importance by Rolf Ekeus (“Iraq’s Real Weapons Threat,” Washington Post, June 29). Ambassador Ekeus was the chairman of the U.N. inspectors in Iraq between 1991 and 1997. He pointed out that Saddam’s chemical and nerve agents had a tendency to decay in storage and that the regime’s nuclear projects “lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design.” His conclusion, written just before the unearthing of the centrifuge but published just after it, was:
This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq’s chemical threat–its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism.