 | To my knowledge, I am the first SOLOist to change my mind about the war in Iraq. My unease with my anti-war position had been going on for some time and a discussion with SOLOist Joe Rowlands when he last visited New Zealand was crucial. But I have to say, this book was what really did it. If you thought Lindsay Perigo hated Saddam and the anti-war crowd, wait till you read Hitchens! Hitchens is a leftist British journalist, an admirer of George Orwell, and a believer in the principle that "Fascism Means War", i.e., that fascist states are by nature aggressive and must be dealt with on our timing and our terms. It was only when I read Hitchens that I fully grasped this principle. If, like me, you were looking for the WMD and couldn't see any, this book points out a real case for the war. Iraq *did* have a weapon of mass destruction. His name was Saddam. Saddamism *was* a threat. Perhaps not to mainland USA or the UK, but this was a regime that encouraged Palestinian suicide bombers, had a history of toying with inspections programmes, daily fired at US/UK aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone to stop Saddam from butchering the Kurds and the Shiites any more than he already had. As Hitchens points out, the Gulf War of 1991 launched when Saddam invaded Kuwait never really ended--until 2003. |
A Long Short War - The Postponed Liberation of Iraq by Christopher Hitchens
