An interesting exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Doug Ireland. I have excerpted below the two most interesting comments, but the entire thing is worth reading. The first comment is Hitchens defending his statement that he would vote for Bush if the election were held tomorrow. To see a man that has written in defense of Marxism and only recently given up being a Socialist admit such a thing is kind of shocking.

Hitchens:

I would probably vote to re-elect him [Bush] as president if the election were to be held tomorrow; but that wouldn’t prevent me (now would it?) from voting for all manner of local and congressional progressive and humane and honest and enlightened types lower down on the ticket(s). Except there aren’t any. Worse than this realization is my awareness that many of those who lay claim to be such have also shown a fundamental, nay terminal lack of seriousness about the absolutely salient issue that faces us, which is the defense of pluralist society against both the theocrats and the surviving advocates of the militarist one-party state. This is not a "foreign policy" issue, as our hometown casualties confirm, and doesn’t deserve to be glibly balanced against such "domestic" matters as (oh, take your pick) on which only a fool would have trusted the Democrats in the first place. And you, my dear, have always been among those who warned that such Demoidiocy came from an eternal source of renewable liberal credulity. So don’t try and reinstruct a pupil as willing and eager as myself. Not at this stage, when all your predictions have come true. Where does this leave us? I cringe when I think of one of the few things that I can claim to have learned since the 1990s. This is quite simply that character matters. Why do the Dems now discuss candidates rather than issues? Because it has to be in that order. The "issues" can be spun, as with health care (measurably worse than when Clinton was elected), but the supposedly superficial "personality" cannot. I’ve been in Washington for two decades now, and every time I hear an easy laugh at the expense of Bush’s dimness I wish I could show people the general level of IQ in the Clinton administration, subjected to long division and subtraction for integrity. The collective candlepower of the current bunch, I would say as an objective matter, is noticeably higher. Nor are they as abjectly venal as the previous incumbents. (Difficult, I know, to match the heroine of Waco against the wonder of John Ashcroft. But Karl Rove as against Dick Morris? Colin Powell against Warren Christopher and Ms. Albright?) I have differences with all of the above that are wider and deeper than any quarrel I have with you. Most important to me, though, is a settled resolution to call the new fascism by something like its right name . . . You aren’t going to tell me that you wish Gore and Lieberman had been at the helm all this time. You just aren’t, are you? If not, you might want to see where the logic of this admission will conduct you. I don’t especially like the logic, but I don’t fight it and I don’t remember being offered any respectable alternative.

Ireland:

You know, J.K. Galbraith once joked that, if Marx (your former patron saint) said that government is the executive committee of the ruling class, in Japan it’s really true. We are coming perilously close to replicating that diagnosis here with Bush and his well-oiled cronies. Given your history and life’s work, it’s a grotesque alignment for you to choose. You say that Bush and none other takes terrorism seriously. (Duct tape, anyone?) But if Bush took terrorism seriously he wouldn’t be planning a first strike against Iraq absent an overt hostile action on the part of Saddam — because the mad act of an aggressive U.S. war will play right into the hands of Osama and the fundamentalist mullahs, confirm their most dire preachments to the Islamic world, and guarantee that the terrorists will have incomparably more fertile terrain on which to recruit for generations. I don’t expect an uneducated ignoramus like Bush to get this, but I fail to understand how someone as sophisticated as yourself doesn’t. I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ’04, as you claim. It seems to me that you are in contradiction with yourself. You may well say, with Whitman, So, I contradict myself. But it saddens me to see you put your feet so firmly in the camp of the paleolithic obscurantists who want to finish in a grand sweep the dismantling of the federal government which Reagan began and Clinton continued on a small scale, when this was a course you fervently denounced in previous presidencies. All the more so because, whether the U.S. and your (ex-?) compatriot Tony act alone or whether Dubya eventually succeeds in purchasing a Security Council majority, the coming war will destroy the oh-so-fragile moral authority of international law, toward the rule of which the planet has been making hesitant but positive steps in recent years (viz. the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda). And your comparison of terrorism to the fascist menace of five decades ago doesn’t hold water historically: Fascism had captured three world powers of the day — Germany, Italy and Japan; but the terrorists (now that Afghanistan has been bribed — for the moment — out of supporting a Taliban regime) are stateless, which is why conventional warfare won’t work against them.

I notice that Ireland trots out what I consider the most persuasive anti-war argument, which I first noticed from Micheal Walzer here. Essentially the idea is that if we are fighting for international law then we should be willing to follow the rules even when they don't coicide with our interests. That's a sucky summary tho, so just read the Walzer.