Back in February, I spent a day in San Francisco talking with an old friend. We walked all around North Beach, catching up on our lives. The conversation kept returning, as it does these days, to the election in November. We talked about a couple of topics that have stuck with me — one was the future of liberalism in this country: what do we have to offer? In a more immediate sense, our conversation kept returning to Christopher Hitchens, to whose work my friend originally introduced me. Both of us had followed Hitchens’ work as an example of intelligent, critical leftist analysis. So we were amazed by his evident sea-change in favor of the war in Iraq.
In response to that conversation, I wrote the following in April of this year. Intended for publication, I never had the time to see it into the hands of a magazine or online forum that was suitable. So I’m posting it here, because I’m going to be writing soon on one of Hitchens’ key positions: that we are in a battle to preserve civilization against “clerical barbarism.”
Coming to Terms with Christopher Hitchens on Iraq (PDF, 165KB)
