Hitchens on "The Daily Show" and in The Weekly Standard.

Did you see Christopher Hitchens on "The Daily Show" show this week? It was a rather strange little interview in which Jon Stewart did most of the talking, asking really long questions that ostensibly begged Hitchens to explain things about the war in Iraq but left Hitchens with little time to attempt to do it.

Hitchens did manage to say he was going to have an article in The Weekly Standard on the subject. Now, the article is available.

An excerpt:

I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time....

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty....

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

Read the article.

I would love to have heard what Hitchens said about Jon Stewart after that interview. I wonder if it would have been something like this passage from the article:

There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side.

Too harsh for Stewart? Perhaps, but if he were interviewing any of Hitchens's gargoyles, I think he'd treat them far differently from the way he treated Hitchens.

UPDATE: Here's the video of the Hitchens interview, available at Crooks & Liars, which opines:

Jon was very focused tonight and made Hitchins lose his place a few times. (How did he ever do that?) When intelligence is met against blind ideology, intelligence usually wins. (I just made that up)

Gargoyles, indeed.