Tim Blair posts Christopher Hitchens’ list of questions for anti-liberationists:
1. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein?s regime was inevitable or not?
2. Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better?
3. Do you know that Saddam?s envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March?
4. Why do you think Saddam offered “succor” (Mr. Clarke?s word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York?
5. Would you have been in favor of lifting the “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original “Gulf War”?
6. Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us?
7. Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?
To this I would add:
Do you think Saddam’s treatment of the Iraqi people was acceptable and should have been allowed to continue until the UN broke with precendent and acted, for the first time in its history, to overthrow a tyrant?
The thing about these questions is, of course, that they’re rigged. It would be as if I asked:
1. Would you have been as keen to bomb Iraqis if it meant you’d have to see them playing soccer with a GI’s head in a year?
or
2. If you had known that a destabilized Iraq would become a nexus for terrorists, would you have supported the war?
The only decent question of the group is your own, and it’s really the $64,000 question. It’s not a question that has a particular answer–it’s a theoretical question about one’s orientation toward war. It’s the question we didn’t have before the war because people were busy asking bogus, rigged questions, and one we can’t ask now because all the people who fell in line behind the original bogus, rigged questions (whether hawks or doves) must now defend them.
(My answer to the question is: are you mad? It’s a policy of humanitarian intervention, one that coheres only infrequently with the US national interest. If we start cracking down on countries because they’re run by dictators, expect a few decades of quagmires.)