Quote of the day

How can anyone, looking down the gun-barrel into the stone face of Zarqawi, say that fighting him is a "distraction" from fighting al Qaeda?

- Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

The Hitchens piece today is excellent, and I recommend it highly. I think that he does a marvelous job outlining the issues facing us in Iraq, and the importance of handling them the right way.

...we can demand to know, of the wider international community, if it could afford to view an imploded Iraq as a spectator. Three years ago, the smug answer to that, from most U.N. members, was "yes." This is not an irresponsibility that we can afford, either morally or practically, and even if our intervention was much too little and way too late, it has kindled in many Arab and Kurdish minds an idea of a different future. There is a war within the war, as there always is when a serious struggle is under way, but justice and necessity still combine to say that the task cannot be given up.

Interestingly, I also think that John Derbyshire's piece at NRO yesterday (To Hell with the “To Hell With The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks” Hawks) is a good read with a good analysis. I tend towards the Hitchens position rather than the Derbyshire position, but these are both good articles that have good arguments to make, and make them well...



Technorati tags: Iraq, Hitchens, Derbyshire, war