Not surprisingly, Danner responded to Hitchens' relentlessly optimistic assessment of the war and its outcome by casting doubt on just about every one of his assertions. Referring to Haiti, which has been bloodily jerked around by inconstant, ever-changing American policies, Danner said, "I've learned to suspect dreaming imperial dreams." In an eloquent excursus, he described American foreign policy as a spotlight: everything is fine when it's shining somewhere, but when it moves on, darkness falls and in that darkness you find death.

Danner expressed doubt that America would stay the course in postwar Iraq. In this context, one of the debate's more peculiar moments arose when he implied that the presence of big-thinking, "reshape the Middle East" neo-con hawks like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Richard Perle as counsels to Bush was a reason for optimism -- although he added that how much influence they had was unknown. The reason for this optimism: Their motivation, as opposed to the realpolitik motives of the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld, was to spread democracy through the region. Danner did not mention that the motivation beneath this motivation was to bring down the regimes that threaten Israel -- a fact which might conceivably affect their policies and their reception in various Arab states. (In a peculiar omission, neither Israel nor the Palestinian crisis was mentioned by either Hitchens or Danner.)

Danner went on to argue that the U.S.'s attempt to rebuild Iraq would confront struggles over retribution, the split between the persecuted Shiite majority and the Sunni minority (who dominate the Baath Party and the army), and all the other monsters that could climb in hideous Yugoslavia-like fashion out of the shattered Iraq. Iraq had been a despotic regime for decades: Such states have a very difficult time making the transition to democracy. And he argued again that we would be playing into Osama bin Laden's hands by occupying an Arab nation.

Hitchens replied that Danner's hand-wringing about the difficulty of occupation was unwarranted, citing the thriving Kurdish autonomous area as an example of what regime change actually looks like. It wasn't utopian to think that a rebuilt Iraq could look like this, Hitchens said: "The ones who are being utopian are the ones who believe that regime preservation can go on anymore." Saddam's regime was going to fall one way or the other, and the important thing was "to be ready with as large a force as possible, to begin the long process of the rehabilitation of Iraq. The United States is to be congratulated for preparing for this."

Then the once-more-into-the-breach Hitchens, the vehement denouncer of Islamofascism, emerged. Rejecting Danner's warning that Islamist radicals would make hay out of a U.S. invasion, he said antiwar ditherers had said the same thing about the invasion of Afghanistan -- and nothing had happened. It was time, he said, for Americans to stop worrying about what they thought of us and time for them to start worrying about what we thought of them. "And our reply cannot be mistaken for cowardice," he concluded. Without a strong military response, he argued, the Islamist claim that the U.S. was a paper tiger would be vindicated.

At this point, the fighters had exchanged jabs, thrown a few rights, gone to the body a couple of times: Now they started to pound each other with a little more oomph. Danner replied, "I have to think there's a kind of child psychology going on here." (To which Hitchens, who has known Danner for years, pricked up his ears, leaned forward and dryly said, "This had better be good.") Danner went on to say that the point wasn't whether we should think about them, or they should think about us, the point was "we shouldn't do it [invade] because it's stupid. ... Christopher Hitchens seems to say, 'It's a war of civilizations -- absolutely, bring it on.'" If someone had said after 9/11 that we should invade and occupy a sovereign Arab state, Danner said, he would have been laughed at.

Hitchens, removing himself from the Samuel Huntington clash-of-civilizations cabal, replied that the Arab world had many democracies. "It's not a war of civilizations, it's a war within a civilization. We need to be on the right side of the war within the Arab world."

He went on to enumerate a huge strategic reason to invade Iraq: Once we brought down Saddam, the "sadomasochistic Caligula, the Saudi monopoly on oil will be broken forever." This led up to this all-time Hitchens classic: "Some benefits of regime change can't be publicly avowed by Republicans, but they can be publicly avowed by me."

They jousted briefly over inspections: Hitchens said, "To inspect a country the size of Iraq you'd need to be the government of Iraq," to which Danner replied that the inspections had rid Saddam of his nuclear program in the '90s, that they were deterring him now and that a beefed-up regimen would continue to box him in.

The discussion on this key point remained frustratingly incomplete. It's true, as Bush pointed out in his State of the Union address, that Saddam has not accounted for some biological and chemical weapons. But it seems that the onus lay on Hitchens, as an advocate of war, to explain why a beefed-up inspections regime would never find those caches, or why in any case Danner's air-strike proposal would not suffice to keep Saddam boxed in indefinitely.

After Danner cited John Quincy Adams' famous warning to Americans not to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, Hitchens said, "I don't stipulate war, I don't stipulate occupation, I don't stipulate invasion. But everyone here knows that there wouldn't be inspections if it weren't for the presence of troops. This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention."

Danner broke in, "Orwell would be proud of that distinction."

Danner concluded by pointing to all the failed democracies we tried to build: Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba. Citing Napoleon's credo that "you can do everything with a bayonet except sit on it," he said, "Nation-building is something that I don't trust this administration to do." He urged the audience, despite the apparent inevitability of war, to keep debating and dissenting.

Hitchens finished by agreeing that the Bush team had come in skeptical of nation-building -- but argued that that should disprove that the administration had a "drive to war, the drumbeat of war. It's taken quite a lot to change its mind." Saying that he believed the U.S. now recognized that the old patron-client state relationship in places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan had born poisoned fruit, he said, "To the extent that the administration's vision has changed, that's a good thing."

Hitchens concluded the evening on a martial "Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"-like note. The endgame, he said, is upon us. "The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling ... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

Since the administration seems determined to go down the path of war, one can only pray that Hitchens is right. I respect his idealism. But he didn't convince me.

Recent Stories