Hitchens was for the Iraq war and his last column indicates that he wouldn't mind seeing Iran in the crosshairs next. His heart doesn't bleed so much for those slaughtered in Iraq as it does for those slaughtered in Vietnam. But which country posed the greater threat to the U.S.? IMO, sending American soldiers to either one was folly, but North Vietnam was under the grip of a totalitarian system with a universalist ideology seeking to take hold in every nation. The communist Vietnamese were a client of the USSR and thus had access to modern weaponry and a supply line that Iraq didn't have. In terms of freedoms offered, Saddam's police state was on a par with the USSR only with more economic freedoms. The Iraqi Baath party supported pan-Arabism but, unlike communism, didn't seek to stick its nose in every other country in the world. But for Hitchens, one war is good and the other one bad. Is it because the Iraqis are religious and communism is godless? In any case, if and when Christopher Hitchens and Richard Nixon appear before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I don't think it will take any longer to review Nixon's sins than Hitchens'. I'll say both men genuinely believe(d) in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. On "hate", Nixon said others may hate you but they don't win unless you hate them back, then you destroy yourself - Hitchens apparently embraces his pure and undiluted hatred. I see the Republican and Democratic parties as two wings on the same bird of prey (to borrow a phrase), but I don't see the connection between Nixon's musings and the current Republican party. Maybe Hitchens thinks some old-fashioned Nixon bashing will get some of his lefty readers back..

"Hitchens was for the Iraq war and his last column indicates that he wouldn't mind seeing Iran in the crosshairs next."

I have not seen evidence of Hitchens wanting to launch military action against Iran. Although he grasps that Iran is a danger to US interests in Iraq and the region, does not mean he is for a military action against the government there.

"His heart doesn't bleed so much for those slaughtered in Iraq as it does for those slaughtered in Vietnam. But which country posed the greater threat to the U.S.?"

Without arguing for the Iraq War, at least appreciate that it was exactly because of the suffering of Iraqis that Hitchens has been an outspoken proponent of "regime change" in Iraq since back when W was still snorting coke and pretending to run a baseball team. And, of course, the question of a people's suffering and strategic threats to the US are not necessarily connected.

"IMO, sending American soldiers to either one was folly,..."

Me too.

"...but North Vietnam was under the grip of a totalitarian system with a universalist ideology seeking to take hold in every nation. The communist Vietnamese were a client of the USSR and thus had access to modern weaponry and a supply line that Iraq didn't have. In terms of freedoms offered, Saddam's police state was on a par with the USSR only with more economic freedoms."

It is hard to compare threats posed by client states of a Cold War adversary with what Iraq had become by the time of the US invasion. For all of the threat, the former was stable and the threat was predictable.

It was the instability of Iraq by the time the US invaded (and it was unstable to a great degree due to the 12 years of sanctions imposed by the UN) which made it dangerous not just to the US, but to the region and much of the world. That is such a volatile region. Although Saddam had been defanged in the conventional sense, he was not "in a box"; he was shooting at US planes nearly every day in the last five years of Clinton's presidency; he was gaming the Oil for Food program and enriching his regime and his family while the economy and infrastructure decayed at an alarming degree. Failing states are like drunks stumbling through a crowd with a chainsaw.

The invasion and occupation of that country by the US, under the circumstances that W. launched that mission, was calamitous. I do agree with Hitchens, however, that Iraq was a problem that the world was going to have solve at some point in time, and if we think that was going to be done without a shot fired is not realistic. Saddam's Iraq was not going to end prettily.

Hitchens was famously a self-described "Trotskyist" during much of his adulthood, so no doubt his outrage about the US mission in Vietnam was mostly about his communist sympathies and his belief that the US was a brutal oppressor preventing the Vietnamese from self-determination. In fairness, his loathing of Saddam had everything to do with Saddam's brutal oppression of Iraqis and their own lack of self determination.

"Maybe Hitchens thinks some old-fashioned Nixon bashing will get some of his lefty readers back."

After 9/11 Hitchens broke with his comrades on the left and charged them with abandoning their principles entirely. The left could not invent a more illiberal enemy than the Islamist jihadist one, and after 9/11 not just an enemy in theory but bloody reality. Back in the '30s leftist internationalists went to Spain and gave their lives for a liberal/left cause. But not two days post-9/11 lefties screaming about American and Western guilt and letting us know that we're, as always, the "real" problem.