Christopher Hitchens engages in breathtaking and broad stroke, decades long perspective in cataloguing the burning of world war through the 20th Century, from the beginnings of World War One through World War Two through to the conclusion of the Cold War, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Yet he dates this Iraqi Twin War Conflict only to 2003? Christopher my Boy, can you not at least grant us the courtesy of dating the start of this warfare to the start of Desert Storm by Daddy Bush and General Schwartzkopf and Company? Get a clue: Colin Powell was a central and televised Actor in both Acts of the Same Play.

Not being Shakespearean nor Oxfordian myself, I take the liberty of dating the current conflict earlier by three or more alternate methods: 1) Please consider that the date of commencement of these hostilities, dates at least to the arrival in command of Saddam Hussein in Iraq 30 years before his assisted demise as Head of State. He was a good buddy of both America and Great Britain for at least 20 of his 30 misbegotten years of misrule.

2) By another measure, this war started in the Fall of 1980, when Ronald Reagan won election as U.S. President, with the Republican commitment to engage our U.S. Foreign Policy and warmaking apparatus in the service of obtaining oil from all necessary foreign sources, and quite literally from the devil himself, as necessary, rather than engage in pusilanimous gas lines, shortages, price controls or alternative energy developments a la Jimmy "Log Cabin" Carter.

3) By yet another measure, we started this war when the conservative, Republican, Jewish, pro-Israel so-called "Neo-Conservatives" including Dick Cheney and his Wife Liz won the debate as to how to proceed in Iraq. Remember, Junior Bush as our President Elect let this Cheney fellow successfully recommend Himself (Cheney) as Vice President when Bush Senior and Junior commissioned him (Cheney) to vet the varied candidates for that high office. The list of names must have been astonishingly short. Thus Dick Cheney as Vice President proved in advance the gullibility of the silver-spooned Boy Bush before he was so easily and permanently persuaded and set on this course of war "in perpetuity" or "pre-emptively." These words mean, respectively and in other words, permanent war without a specified nation state enemy on the march against us. Tell me, Mr. Hitchens, is this what we Americans elect our Presidents to do? Is this what the British investitures of monarchs is for, Sir Hitchens?

4) Why stop now? Speaking of British Petroleum, this war started after I worked on typesetting financial documents intended to propose and raise massive funding for a huge oil pipeline project across Iraq and Turkey, to the Eastern Mediterranean.

5) This war started, when President Harry Truman let his former haberdashery business partner, a Jewish American businessman (named Sam?) serve as personal intermediary to persuade him to commit American post-war foreign policy to the support of the formation of Israel by the stateless Zionist Movement, which led directly to the loss of statehood by those living in the British Protectorate, Palestine, at that time. The are now known as Palestinians, and the current American position favors "a two-State solution" to this intractable Middle Eastern conundrum which General George C. Marshall among others warned Truman against.

6) This war started, similar to Vietnam, when not the French, but the British, suffered a military colonial defeat, and in response partitioned the territory into what is now called Iraq, and called on America's foreign policy apparatus to sustain it.

We Americans under President Eisenhower did not agree to the aggressive and military move by France and Britain to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt. In fact, we told them in no uncertain terms to "back off" or there would be war between them and us. Since both France and Britain were forced in an open and publicly humiliating way by the Americans, to take their thieving Nations' hands off the Suez Canal, maybe it is poetic national justice, that two of America's worst foreign policy fiascoes, Vietnam and Iraq, were handed off to us by France and Britain, respectively.

Personally, I think America should play up this history in the Arab world, to show that we came to the aid of Egypt when it was vulnerable to foreign predation.

We should also point out the extent to which Iraq was a client state of the Russian Soviets, before we arrived.

As to Hitchen's reference to suicide bombers post-invasion as a justification pre-invasion, I fail to see the logic, unless in Busby Berkeleyan terminology, the Mind of God not only perceives, but sustains, the follies of Men's thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and sense of time and dimensions, like the third and final act of a Hollywood musical film, or the eighth and blessedly final year of an American Presidency.