Hitchens Wants To Invade Iran

"If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards get the bomb, they won't use it on Israel. They're not so stupid. They certainly won't use it on us," - Hitch.

But Hitch still wants a US invasion of Iran to remove the regime! Here's the money quote:

Hitchens: How many Iranian dissidents are really going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?

Totten: I don't think very many, but I could be wrong.

Hitchens: Would we have the nerve to say that was the objective, or would we simply say we're only talking about sites and don't care about Iranian freedom? We'd need to have a generous view of the situation, and we'd need to coordinate it with NATO. The people who most want this to happen are the Sunni Arab governments.

So even though he believes the US is not directly threatened and Israel is not directly threatened, he wants to commit the US (leaving aside the total unfeasibility of this, given what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan) not to a namby-pamby bombing campaign but a full-scale armed invasion in defense of ... Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and Qatar! I mean: is this supposed to be a serious argument? The point is capped off with this remark:

What's the point of being a superpower if we say to our allies there's nothing we can do about this, that they're on their own?

Interventionism to prove what a big dick you've got?

Yes, that's statesmanship. Speaking of American raw military power as if its profound limits against a global Islamist movement have not been revealed even to the likes of Stanley McChrystal?

As for the wider war on Jihadist terrorism, does Hitchens really believe that the US invading a Muslim country for the third time in a decade would help us drain the swamps of anti-American hatred? If it were done when Obama was president, what does Hitch believe would be the impact on global Muslim opinion - the critical factor in our war with Islamist terror? How does he square what would be a civilizational war in which every Muslim - Sunni and Shia - would unite in hatred of the US and the West? How many lives would be lost in this military tumescence?

Hitchens seems to have returned to the magical thinking that gave us the Iraq occupation:

I sat with some Iranians in Isfahan, with a family I was staying with. They were secular and they served me booze with one of their cousins who was there visiting. She wasn't wearing a full burkha, but a veil. She said the least during our discussion, but at the end she said the most eloquent thing, and she was obviously very tortured about it. She said, "Do you think the Americans could come just for a couple of weeks, remove the regime, and then go?"

A cakewalk, no? And cheap. And few lives lost.