You hold to the increasingly isolated position that the war in Iraq was morally and strategically justified. How many casualties would it take for you to change your mind?It was the casualties, in a way, that persuaded me in the first place. I mean, if there’s going to be a body-bag argument—which, incidentally, I don’t completely think there should be—but to the extent that body bags weighed with me, it was because of the cost of the survival of the Saddam Hussein regime. Which was very severe, and was being borne mainly by Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds. Not much less than a million, we reckon. Which is to say nothing of the suffering of the people who weren’t being killed—who were being tortured, or being forced to lead meaningless lives under a dictatorship. And the possibility that that could get worse, if the regime ever reacquired nuclear and other capacities. So I thought the Baathist regime was too dangerous to be allowed to carry on. The number of casualties incurred in removing it will never ever, ever, ever catch up, can’t possibly catch up with the number of casualties that were necessitated by its continuing in power.
Also, why Hitchens cautiously supports Obama:
I wasn’t completely bewitched.... But one of the things I’ve learned is something I never should have not known: How important character is. Nobody says it isn’t, of course. But you used to hear serious people saying—and I would probably have agreed with it for quite a bit of my life—“Let’s talk about the issues, not the personalities.” But I’ve never heard a politician say that who didn’t have a very strong interest in people ignoring the question of his personality. And I liked what I knew of Senator Obama. And, by the way, I still do. There are things about him that I don’t like, but there’s nothing diseased about him. As there is about Mrs. Clinton, for example: People go running for therapy and ego. One thing that impressed me about Obama is that it was quite clear if he lost the election, it wouldn’t be the worst day of his life. And I noticed something a while back that is impressive exactly because no one, including me, remembers it most of the time: namely, the decision to rescue the captain and crew off the coast of Somalia.Right. The piracy bit.
Yes. Now, someone must have come to him and said, “Mr. President, we have two, maybe three options. We can try and run out the clock on these guys; we can try and negotiate with them and their onshore Somali backers; or we can ask the Navy SEALS to do a maximum of four head shots, and put an end to the whole standoff.” He must have said, “Tell the SEALS to go get it done.” Which, with amazing forensic selectivity, they were able to do. But that’s not what impresses me so much. It’s that he didn’t make a speech saying, “Hey, look what I just did.” Imagine what Reagan would have said. You’d never have heard the end of it. Obama basically thought, “You can draw your own conclusions. People who need to know, now know.” I like that combination of qualities. That’s what I want in a president.
Christopher Hitchens


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