I think Hitchens fails to make a strong argument here. As he points out, many arguments can be made about Iraq that seem to suggest ambiguous results: maybe the invasion was moral or maybe it wasn't; maybe it was a dramatic change in policy or maybe it was the inevitable extension of prolonged policy; maybe more lives were saved than not or maybe more lives were endangered; maybe the political structure of Iraq is better or maybe it's just more fragile; and on and on...

The problem with this maybe/maybe-not argument is that war (not anything resembling war, but physical boots-on-the-ground invasion) itself is not normative. By default, war is a failure unless a dramatic, clear, incontestable success results. War carries an exceptionally high burden of success because the tactic is among our most monstrous. Iraq has failed to meet this burden.

Make no mistake, as any student of history can tell you, wars are chock full of the questions that you believe are not "normative": Should we or should we not be allies with Stalin? Did Allied operations kill more civilians than it saved? Did we have to drop the bomb? Did providing a "free" security umbrella for Europe for sixty years yield anything of value for our nation? Why are we still occupying Germany and Japan? Does WWII meet your definition of success? When does that judgement get made and by whom?

You are deluding yourself to think that war is an allegory with neatly defined characters. The "normative" state of war is a near-chaotic series of gray areas and questions. What you display is the Utopian mindset that allows for no intervention period, so why not just some out and advocate just that? You've also bestowed upon yourself the grand duty of declaring when we get to judge the conflict. We are clearly not out of the woods in Iraq, but we have not failed yet. Anyone who says so is declaring themselves the Historians of the Future, which I should remind you, is physically impossible...At this time anyhow.

"America loves a winner, and will not tolerate a loser" - George S. Patton

Patton's observation can be applied to every side of every war.

My point isn't that I think it is or isn't a success. WWII was a success because there was a profound absence of doubt in its success. Iraq may yet be a success. For now, it isn't. The burden of victory is high.

I'm sorry you wasted so much of your time arguing with someone who doesn't exist. You should try to rely less on mind-reading. You're not very good at it.

Henry Fielding defined wisdom as the art of never paying too dear a price for anything. To decide whether the invasion of Iraq was wise, one needs to know what has been paid--in blood, treasure, political capital, lost opportunity, etc.--and what has been gained. The trick for advocates of the invasion is to remind most Americans that it has cost them nothing: our taxes have been cut, no one has been drafted. That sets the "what has been gained" bar pretty low. If one has lost one's life (I hear no arguments either way from that group), one's home, family, livelihood, limbs, eyesight, etc., the bar is raised considerably. I suggest that only the opinions of actual stakeholders should count, which I guess disqualifies me as well as Mr. Hitchens, whose opinions on most matters are well worth hearing.

By declaring that World War I didn't really end in 1918, but is the same extended conflict we're fighting today, is a kind of intellectual relativism that can be used to explain why, say, a pigeon is really a dinosaur. You could make a case for it, but the reasoning is all convoluted hindsight. As evidence, I present the fact that there are no mustachioed field marshalls walking around the Middle East wearing spiked helmets. We can debate when this war began but a full scale military invasion is a pretty good place to start. No amount of rationalization can explain away the mistaken assumptions, the wishfull thinking, the lack of planning, and the breathtaking incompetence that characterizes this whole shameful episode. Hitchens seems to echo the lame argument that Bush is beginning to make--that history, some day, will judge the Iraq war as a moral and necessary undertaking. Well that judgement certainly won't come in his lifetime. And if Bush and his apologists were students of history, they'd understand that there are some events with which no amount historical revisionism ever redeem.

Why do you have to be so pessimistic? Iraq democracy is not out of the question in this lifetime. Look at what happened in Nepal, a place with very good people, Iraq is a place with very good people too. I still think the war was a bad idea, but given time I may change my mind whereas you seem to have decided you never will. I am swayed more to Hitchen's side when I hear him talk about our legal responsibility in funding a violent dictator, and that it made us, legally, liable to Hussain's weapons program. Our continued funding of his regime after it was discovered was going to weapons, would have made us legally bound to his use of the weapons by victims saying "Look who funded the insane man, and his insane successors."

Don't miss the gist of Hitchen's argument, which is clearly that our responsibilities to the world require that we look at the Hussain regime as a criminal kingpin headquarters we helped create and do more than sit while they reap in millions every day.