Funny how it takes Christopher hitchens to acknowledge that none of the change in the Middle East would have been possible without President Bush's decision to invade Iraq:Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family? As it is, to have had Iraq on the other scale from the outset has been an unnoticed and unacknowledged benefit whose extent is impossible to compute. And the influence of Iraq on the Libyan equation has also been uniformly positive in ways that are likewise often overlooked.Along the same lines, compare how the press softsoaps the thugs we are aligned with now with the constant attacks on the former administration for aligning itself however briefly with Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi expats.(Read Full Post)