Believe It or Not

Are you sure you want to keep saying we were fooled by Ahmad Chalabi and the INC?

By Christopher Hitchens - Nov. 14, 2005 - Slate

What do you have to believe in order to keep alive your conviction that the Bush administration conspired to launch a lie-based war? As with (I admit) the pro-war case, the ground of argument has a tendency to shift. I saw two examples in Washington last week. An exceptionally moth-eaten and shabby picket line outside Ahmad Chalabi's event on Wednesday featured a man with a placard alleging that Bush had prearranged the 9/11 attacks.

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But then there is the really superb pedantry and literal-mindedness on which the remainder of the case depends. This achieved something close to an apotheosis on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 12, where Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus brought complete gravity to bear.

Anyone who really wants to try and convince the world that we should not have gone to war against Saddam Hussein needs to remember that only the most gullible and partisan democrats (or even liberals) believes that. Christopher Hitchens is there to remind them that they are wrong, and stupidly so. His summation is classic Hitchens.

We can now certify Iraq as disarmed, even if the materials once declared by the Saddam regime and never accounted for have still not been found. Why does this certified disarmament upset people so much? Would they rather have given Saddam the benefit of the doubt? Much more infuriating about the current anti-Chalabi hysteria is this: He turns up in Washington with a large delegation of Iraqi democrats, including a female Shiite ex-Communist, several Sunni dignitaries from the "hot" provinces, and the legendary Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, who led a genuine insurgency among the Marsh Arabs for 18 years. And the American left mounts a gargoyle picket line outside and asks silly and insulting questions inside, about a question that has already been decided. What a travesty this is.

Travesty. That truly is the correct word. Anyone who tries to argue that we should not have invaded Iraq, or that we would be better off if we had not, is simply a traitor. And their argument is a travesty.