After his general argument, Hitchens turns to his 10 specific reasons why the war on Iraq should be celebrated. Hitchens' first point is that Bush has overthrown Talibanism and Baathism, and has exposed "suggestive" links between the two, who he says had formed a "Hitler-Stalin pact." His attempt to tie these ideologies together is absurd, but he goes through the motions because he wants to hide the Iraq disaster under the U.S. achievements in Afghanistan -- which he overstates. In fact, the secular Arab nationalist Baath state had nothing whatsoever to do with any radical Islamist movements, including Talibanism. Talibanism is a variant of the Deobandi school of revivalist Sunnism deriving from British colonial India. The link Hitchens suggests is the Jordanian terrorist Ahmad Fadil al-Khala'ilah, known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who went off as a teenager in 1989 to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, but arrived only in time to wave goodbye to them. He later had a vigorous rivalry with Osama bin Laden and refused to share resources with him. It is not clear what his relationship was to "Talibanism"; he appears to be a radical "Salafi" in the Jordanian Sunni revivalist tradition.

Hitchens writes that Zarqawi "moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention." In fact, Zarqawi moved to Iraqi Kurdistan, over which the Baath Party had no control after the United States imposed the no-fly zone. Hitchens wants to use Zarqawi's ties in Kurdistan with the tiny Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, which he asserts Saddam supported to fight his Kurdish enemies, to prove that there was some kind of connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. But the allegation that Saddam supported Ansar has never been proved. In any case, Zarqawi was not even in Iraq before 9/11, so his presence there can't be used to prove that Saddam was involved in 9/11. Hitchens also claims (who knows if it is true) that Zarqawi recently renamed his group "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia." But that is no proof of a link between Talibanism and Baathism. This fallacy is known as anachronism: Later events do not cause earlier ones.

The truth is, Bush squandered his victory over the Taliban by failing to follow through at the crucial moment, and by diverting needed military resources into a disastrous second front in Iraq. He allowed bin Laden and his key associate, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, to escape, probably into the lawless mountain regions on the Pakistani border, from where they put out videotapes encouraging the later bombings in Sharm El Sheikh and London. He diverted the resources that could have been used to put war-torn Afghanistan back on its feet instead to a costly imbroglio on the Tigris. After the successes in fighting narcotics trafficking in the 1990s, nearly half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product now derives from the poppy trade, which shows up as heroin in Europe and raises the specter of Colombian-style narco-terrorism. Remaining Taliban are adapting to Afghanistan the techniques of roadside bombings and shaped charges honed by the guerrillas in Iraq, with whom they appear to have established tenuous links. Politicians with ties to the Taliban are likely to do well in the Pashtun regions in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.

Hitchens next lists as an achievement of the Iraq war the "capitulation" of Moammar Gadhafi's Libya over its weapons of mass destruction programs. But Hitchens offers no proof whatsoever that Libya's overture had anything at all to do with the Iraq war. Rather, it is quite clear that Libya is a case where the European and U.S. economic sanctions placed on the country to punish it for its terrorist activities actually worked as designed. (European sanctions had already been lifted, in return for a change in Libyan behavior, in 1999. U.S. sanctions had not.) Moreover, al-Qaida leader Anas al-Libi had Gadhafi in his sights. Gadhafi, influenced by North African Sufism and millenarianism, is no fundamentalist. He saw an opportunity to end the U.S. sanctions, which were harming Libya's economic development, and to form a common front against radical Islamism. All he had to do was give up his rather insignificant "weapons of mass destruction" programs.

Hitchens does not do us the favor of admitting that the tiny country of Libya, despite its past involvement in serious acts of terrorism, was not exactly a dire menace to Western civilization. Gadhafi no longer needed the chemical weapons he is alleged to have used in the Chad war, since it had wound down. His nuclear ambitions had never advanced from the drawing board. So he made a small concession and received huge rewards. There is no reason at all to believe that without the Iraq war this breakthrough, years in the making, would have been forestalled. This fallacy is known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc," that is, "afterward, therefore because of." Not every event that occurs after another is caused by its predecessor.

Hitchens is correct in asserting that the Libyan breakthrough led to the unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network, which illegally transferred nuclear technological know-how from Pakistan to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But since the breakthrough itself was not a consequence of the Iraq war, the unmasking cannot be credited to the war.

Having committed the fallacies of anachronism and questionable cause, Hitchens now goes on to some other points that I think are too trite to spend much time on. He says that the Iraq war helped to identify a quasi-criminal network within the United Nations elite, referring to the oil-for-food scandal. But surely we did not need to send 140,000 young Americans to war in Iraq in order to carry out some basic investigations with regard to United Nations officials resident in New York? This fallacy is known as a lack of proportionality.

He then goes on to suggest that the Iraq war had caused President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany to admit that nothing will alter their "neutralism." He suggests that their current alleged insouciance with regard to Iran is of a piece with this neutralism. This argument contains an ad hominem fallacy, since it seems to suggest that their political stances simply derive from their being craven men. Hitchens neglects to address the obvious rejoinder that the Bush administration failed to make a convincing case to them that Iraq posed an imminent danger to Europe or the United States. It might also be that no convincing case has been made about Iran as yet, either.

Hitchens then argues that the ability to certify Iraq as truly disarmed, rather than having to accept the representations of a "psychopathic autocrat," is a benefit of the Iraq war. Yet the American public spends over $30 billion a year on our intelligence agencies. Why should it have to be necessary to launch a costly and possibly disastrous war in order to find out something that a few spies should have been able to tell us? Moreover, if Hitchens were not so contemptuous of the U.N. weapons inspectors, he might acknowledge that they could have answered this question themselves from February 2003, if only Bush had given them the time to perform their mission, which he asked the U.N. Security Council to authorize. The Central Intelligence Agency gave them a list of more than 600 suspect sites. Satellite photos of many of these sites showed "suspicious" activity, but it turned out that they were mostly just being looted, something easily certified when they were visited and found stripped. The U.N. inspectors had cleared some 100 of those before Bush pulled them out and just went to war.

The weapons inspectors were all along far more professional and far more capable than anyone gave them credit for. It was they who had dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program after the Gulf War. We did not need a war to discover whether Iraq was truly disarmed. Hitchens has here attempted to turn Bush's enormous blunder, of invading Iraq on suspicion of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, into a virtue. "Well," he says with a smirk, "now we know for sure, don't we?" This fallacy is called the "false dilemma," since Hitchens has left out the possibility of our knowing with fair certainty -- by methods other than warfare -- that Iraq was disarmed.

Recent Stories