Christopher Hitchens' Unforgivable Mistake

[inademv]

2. I'll respond with a piece from Hitchens himself

"...
Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath Party to power.
...
Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.

Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.
..."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/did-i-get-the-iraq-war-wrong-no/story-e6frg73o-1111115840625

Additionally, I keep seeing lines asserting that Hitchens made a mistake in the matter while not adequately establishing exactly what the mistake was that he had made.