TONY JONES: “Christopher Hitchens, a final question, if I can. Has your own faith – and I do suspect I know the answer to this, but has your own faith in the righteousness of this war been shaken at all by the way in which the US has handled the post-invasion phase?”
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: “Well, the two things don’t really relate to each other, do they? I mean, one can be absolutely convinced that it was both a just and necessary war, as I am, and be fairly voluble about the immense failures of post-war planning and the immense continuing risks. My support for it doesn’t depend on how well it’s going. I think it’s an inevitable confrontation that was put off too long. That’s partly the reason it’s going so badly now. But I’m on the other hand very heartened by the developments among Iraqis, by the extraordinary attachment to democracy and liberty that they show, by the way they refuse to turn on one another in spite of many provocations to do so, the way that predictions about fratricide haven’t been fulfilled, and I wouldn’t consider it decent even to suggest abandoning them to the sort of fate so that the so-called insurgents – who are in fact the secret police of the former regime allied with the scum of the earth from foreign jihadists – have in store for them.”
Hitchens lives in an ideological world completely divorced from reality. Sounds like somebody else we know.