Hitch Switch

After September 11th, Christopher Hitchens was one of the left-wing writers who veered hard right. He tirelessly defended the war in Iraq in the leadup to the invasion and has never stopped, even after all the pretenses that were use to justify the war have been shown to be faulty (WMD), mendacious (9/11 connected to Iraq) or overstated ("beacon" of democracy).

And yet we now see that Hitchens is praising the Democratic nominee for President for his rhetoric and policy with respect to Pakistan. In Slate, he writes that

Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.