Hitchens vs. Sanity and Sobriety

Who better to respond to a Nobel Prize winning economist than a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay" with the power of non-statistical argument by analogy?

Okay, lot's better, but Hitchens doesn't know anybody that could argue any better, as you see him admit in his Slop-Ed.

What I cannot get over is the fact that, as awkward as it may have been, the containment via no-fly zone may have been imperfect but it worked as intended and it cost in 2000, $1.4 Billion a year.

We now spend, thanks to the Glorious War, Hitchens cheered on and now justifies in between whiskey gulps and oxygen shots, that amount EVERY THREE DAYS.

Meanwhile, Eugene Robinson notices what this blog has the last few weeks...the Surge is not only not really working, what it actually has accomplished is coming apart at the seams.

When the Bush administration celebrates a 60 percent reduction in overall violence in Iraq, it's easy to forget that this is compared with June 2007, when the sectarian civil war was raging and bombings with scores of victims were a regular occurrence. The surge managed only to reduce the level of violence from apocalyptic to agonizing -- and now even those gains seem to be slipping.

Bush's surge was designed to give the Iraqi government the necessary breathing space for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to reach vital compromises. President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki showed their gratitude this month by rolling out the red carpet, literally, for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Bush's Middle East policy is designed largely to blunt the influence of Iran, which seeks a dominant role in the region. So it must have been galling to the White House to watch as Ahmadinejad swept into Baghdad in a ceremonial motorcade and toured the city with fanfare. Never one to miss a chance to stick in the needle, Ahmadinejad questioned the motives of those who "visit this country in a stealth manner."

He was referring to the fact that Bush has to fly into Iraq unannounced and can stay for only a few hours. It would be far too dangerous to let citizens know in advance that their liberator was coming to check on their welfare.

So violence seems to be creeping back, the Iraqi government is showcasing its developing friendship with Iran, and -- oh, yes -- these achievements are costing American taxpayers around $12 billion a month, according to a new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes. The authors estimate that by 2017, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the nation between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion.

As this blog, and many smarter people have stated before, the result of these trillions of dollars is going to produce one clear winner in the Middle East.

Iran.