December 23, 2003

Hitchens on Qaddafi

Christopher Hitchens thinks that "disarming three rogue regimes in under one year isn't bad". The fact that Qaddafi and the Iranian mullahs are rethinking their weapons programs leads Hitchens to warn:

If riff-raff like this can be so convinced of our resolve, then we really must make sure that our resolve is as steely as they think it is.

And unlike certain British politicians , Hitchens doesn't think the timing of these moves is coincidental:

In the Middle East perhaps more than in any other region at present, people are acutely sensitive to which is the winning and which is the losing side. The mullahs have run Iran into the ground over two decades, and Qaddafi has been in power since I was an undergraduate. Their rule is condemned by actuarial calculations as well as by moral and political ones, and it's now quite possible to envisage a future without them. The tipping point in all this is, and has been, and will be seen to have been, the liberation of Iraq.

As Qaddafi reportedly told Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi:

"I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

Posted by dan at December 23, 2003 11:09 PM