A fat neocon sot has written a book...

[Paul Rigby]

...here are some reviews of it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may...-22-memoir

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may...ens-review

The Grauniad/Observer crowd ordinarily don’t so much review a Hitchens as make love to it. Surprising, then, to find the following. Not so much a parody, as a puncturing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may...ested-read

Terry Eagleton was, at one time, the darling of Oxford’s marxisant literati. That explains the toothless inanity of his review:

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/0...-iraq-self

That Hitchens represents a grievous loss to the left is beyond doubt. He is a superb writer, superior in wit and elegance to his hero George Orwell, and an unstanchably eloquent speaker.

Memo to Terry: Hitch never was part of the left, as Warden Sparrow understood all those years ago.

By far the best of the bunch follows. There is even a whiff of Anglophobia about it. All the better. No sane American should be entirely free of it after reading Hitchens:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2010/0...index.html

That Hitchens wants to flash his friendships and credentials is of minor importance. That he wishes to justify his complicity in the disaster of the Iraq war is another matter altogether. "I probably know more about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left Iraq in the hands of Saddam," he writes. To which the proper response would be: It's a shame you didn't know less or you might have made a smarter decision. "If I was ever naive about anything to do with Iraq WMD" -- please, Christopher, don't pretend to be disingenuous, you know very well if you were naive about this -- "it was in believing that the production of evidence like that, or indeed any other kind of evidence, would make even the most limited impression on the heavily armored certainties of the faithful."

In other words, Hitchens wanted war against Saddam whether there were WMD or not, and that those who disagreed with his position were guilty of "heavily armored certainties to the contrary" on the subject. In which case one wonders why Hitchens didn't simply write at the time, "I'm positive Saddam has WMD, but even if I'm wrong you should agree with my position."

[David Guyatt]

It's a case of a paunchy pillock who deserves pillaring to puncture his pompous political pabulum.

Hitchins can go hang in haematobia heaven...