Even a stopped watch has to be right twice a day, though if Hitchens were a watch, no one would accuse him of contradicting himself. The fact is that only a couple of weeks ago Hitchens penned a venomous column entitled something like "Of Course Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda", directing his diatribe against Democrats and leftists who, according to him, were claiming that the fight in Iraq wasn't really against Al Qaeda. Of course, what they were actually saying, and have been saying for years, is exactly what Hitchens seems to have come around to right now. If he does not directly contradict himself, he does so in spirit: in that previous column he did his utmost to relay the message that the war in Iraq WAS primarily a war against Al Qaeda. Not to mention that Hitchens and his ilk have countless times derided the media's use of the word 'insurgents' as some sort of over-tolerance, when in fact it was used precisely because of the need to differentiate between Al Qaeda terrorists and sectarian fighters.

The bottom line is that once you have conceded that there are three separate wars going on, you can no longer use the same blanket justification for us staying there. If our main focus is the war on Al Qaeda, that purpose would be served best by more intelligence deployments and small, concentrated strike forces, not having hundreds of thousands of highly visible troops as sitting targets. If, on the other hand, our military is supposed to be the entire country's police force to prevent a sectarian war, we're gonna need a hell of a lot more people (and a hell of a lot more convincing of the public).

As for Kurdistan, I wonder if you consider the reversion to a tribal Islamic culture and the re-emergence of honor killings as a smashing success:

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Cheerio, Hitch