Hitchens still idiot on Iraq

Slate recently asked a number of its writers to contribute columns on the five-year anniversary of invading Iraq. Here's Christopher Hitchens at his snarling self-defending best.

Snitchens morphs George Bush in trying to claim he was right on invading Iraq.

Read this howler:

Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law.

Get that? Even though Saddam Hussein didn’t have “weapons of mass destruction” (which Hitchens knows is itself a misleading term), it had “latent WMD capability.” Funny, Bush and Tony Blair never mentioned that idea to the U.N.

Then there’s this:

The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush administration had ever suggested.

If he’s talking about the current rash of suicide bombers, he’s just lying.

Next, we have this:

Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates.

Really, Gen. David Petraeus Hitchens?

The only thing one can say about Hitchens compared to Bush is that he at least doesn’t mangle the English language when he’s lying.