Charlie Rose

Check out the website full of Charlie Rose interviews. He might be the greatest interviewer of our time.

I watched the Chris Hitchens interview. I love listening to the guy talk about Iraq.

Hitchens admitted that we will probably leave Iraq because of the mounting public pressure to do so. He says it will be yet another example of the US abandoning our friends in the region to slaughter. It will again demonstrate that in the Middle East it pays to an enemy of the United States much moreso than being our friend.

Rose asked a great question - why has Hitchens been so unsuccessful at convincing his intellectual friends that Iraq was/is worth it? And I thought Hitchen's response was interesting...most people want to wish away the problem of Iraq and more generally, the problem of the Middle East, Islamic Terror, and the United State's incompatability with totalitarian regimes. They would just rather not have to think about it. But history shows that the United States and more generally, free societies are incompatible with autocratic ones...eventually, although we try to avoid it, it does come down to bloodshed and war.

He argued we should've dealt with Saddam in 1991 but acknowledges if we had, we'd still be dealing and debating the fallout. A lot of people would be bitching about the high cost and American lives and criticizing how the United States handled the situation. But by delaying what he believed was inevitable - confrontation with Saddam - we only made the situation harder to deal with because Saddam stroked ethnic tensions for ten more years, the sanctions failed to weaken his grip on power, and he was able to slaughter many of his political opponents in the meantime.

In any case, the man is always interesting to listen to.