"In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence." - Hitchens on Michael Moore

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"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." -GO

"There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement." - Hitchens on the "real" American villains, yet believes the following:

"Feith was and is very much identified with the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, and he certainly did not believe that Saddam Hussein was ever containable in a sanctions "box." But he is capable of separating his views from his narrative"

and despite all evidence to the contrary believes Feith when he claims that "It's also of considerable interest to learn that the main argument for adhering to the Geneva Conventions was made within the Pentagon and that the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld."

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"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." -GO

"To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof." -Hitchens on Iraq... does anyone besides Hitchens and Feith think Saddam was going to chair the UN Conference on Disarmament?

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"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." -GO

"

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner?"

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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -GO

"one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.

At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions." -Hitchens on Iraq in 2005, predicting what would happen if the US hadn't invaded, despite the fact that all of these things were to happen or had already happened.

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"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it." -GO