Hitch

Kevin Drum drops a rock on Christopher Hitchens’ head.

After all, Hitchens has chosen to ally himself with the most unserious group of war leaders this country has ever seen. They treated the runup to war like a marketing blitz for a new soft drink; they have trivialized critical issues of national security because doing so made them into better partisan cudgels for congressional campaigns; they have ignored the advice of military professionals because it was electorally inconvenient; they have repeatedly misled the American public even though they surely know that this is disastrous for long term support of the war; and they have refused to seriously address the exploding guerrilla war in Iraq for months because they’re afraid it might hurt their reelection chances.

Needless to say, Hitchens acknowledges none of this. In fact, later in the piece, he opines that “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist” than Osama bin Laden — without so much as a nod to the fact that we might have captured or killed Zarqawi two years ago but for Bush’s fear that doing so might interfere with his Iraq war marketing campaign.

Hitchens latest piece really is indefensible. He complains that Democrats are wishing that bad things will happen to Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and uses as evidence the fact that Teresa Heinz-Kerry speculated about an October Surprise. He then pleads that the left give up its contrarian objections to the Bush administration, and get with the plan.

Really, does this guy have any defenders left (I’m thinking of you, Matt)? As Drum points out, he has expressed unreserved support for the inept blunderers in the administration, all in the service of promoting “seriousness” about the War on Terror. Indeed, he kept defending administration policy in Iraq long after many of his fellow hawks had at least admitted that things weren’t going terribly well. He has been willing to cut George Bush more slack than most Republicans. And now, instead of writing essays about how the administration has fucked up and how it might do better, he spends his time mocking Teresa Heinz-Kerry and suggesting that everything would be fine if the damn left wingers just shut up.

UPDATE: Matt responds.