Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War

Slate turns 10 this week, and to celebrate the anniversary, we've dug into the archives and resurrected a few favorite pieces. Some of the pieces come from The Best of Slate: A 10^th Anniversary Anthology, which was published this month. Others, including this piece, we chose because they highlight what Slate can do as an online magazine that print magazines, newspapers, television, and radio can't. These pieces mix media, promote interactivity, show off the conversational immediacy of the Web, or otherwise take advantage of the medium. You can see a list of all the republished pieces, as well as everything else related to the anniversary, here. This dialogue was originally posted Jan. 12-16, 2004.

Christopher Hitchens' historical analogy—Saddam is to Osama as Stalin is to Hitler (or should it be "as Hitler is to Stalin"?)—is more than a bit strained. But if the comparison is valid, then it follows that invading Iraq in response to 9/11 was like invading the Soviet Union in response to Nazi Germany's aggression against Czechoslovakia. Christopher also knows better than to accuse me of endorsing, as he puts it, "any policy that can be guaranteed as a painless victory in advance." As he well knows from our conversations at the time, I was (and remain) an avid supporter of the war in Afghanistan, which—given the Soviet and British experiences in that country over the years—was by no means foreseen (by me, him, or anybody else) as a sure thing.

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