Hitch Delivers

the political equivalent of the Maxell commercial. Just to calibrate you, this is perhaps one of the least remarkable of its paragraphs:

At once, one sees that all the alternatives [to the invasion of Iraq] 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. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

When that's the thin gruel, you need to sit down in your comfy chair and savor this work of art and logic for the better part of the day...