Atheist Heroes?

[The Grand Nudger]

I think I do. I think I need that explained. Assassination compared to occupation is a smaller shit in the bed. Yes its still quite a big shit with a litany of political consequences but its not the horrific explosion of feces that occupation is. Occupation rarely goes smoothly even under the best circumstances. These were not the best circumstances, it wasn't that huge of a surprise when it was botched. There are so many other options before you get to that one and noone ever really went down a checklist to explain why none of them would work, including Hitchens.

Doesn't sound like you need that explained at all, you understand why we don't wan't to be seen assassinating foreign leaders.  For whatever reason, though, a formal declaration of war is seen as more acceptable and legitimate than assassination.  We did try other things, in case you have a short memory.  Decades of sanctions, ultimatums, demands, threats......we even invaded once before.

Hitchens didn't alter his opinion to account for the fact we had been lied to. He doubled down. If he didn't have a handle on all the facts he shouldn't of entered a horse into the race instead of dancing around the gaps in his knowledge. The fact of the matter is he launched directly into a pro-war position immediately after 9/11.
I am not saying there isn't a fantastic case to be made for war or even the way it was waged. I'm simply saying he is not the one who made it. In almost all cases he referred statistically to the evils perpetrated under the regimes in an emotional appeal which in no way attempted to explain why an all out war was the best way to deal with the situation. Thats missing a pretty important stepping stone.

He did, perhaps you should read his articles rather than op eds written by other authors about his articles?  If you mean, that he still felt that Saddam needed to be removed, yeah, that stayed the same, and he explained why he held this opinion.  Obviously, I agree with him on that count.  We got lied into a war for the wrong reasons, and what makes that even more unfortunate is that we had plenty of reasons to do what we did without that lie.  We'd been threatening to do it for a long time, and the credibility of a nation is important, just for starters.

Compared to the arguments he made for most other subjects it was entirely sub-par and made an inordinate amount of appeals to emotion. Prime example; his debate with George Galloway was just a mud-slinging match and frankly it was sad to watch. George Galloway is not a clever man, it was not a debate befitting of the subject. The person on the other side to present the anti-war case should not have starred on Big Brother in an attempt to appeal to the youthful demographic and it should not be necessary to fill time with a ad-hominem backstory of your opponent. It certainly shouldn't be required to give people defaming leaflets before the debate regardless or not whether they're true. 
The points should of spoken for themselves but they didn't. They either couldn't or weren't allowed to. I found that frequently in his war debates.

Debates are theatre Raph..... Again, perhaps you should have read his articles?  We gave our word, we made threats, we tried many things over the span of decades.  We invaded once, and nothing improved or changed.  Iraq was a failed state, and we'd already committed to resolving that situation, or, if you prefer, attempting to.   We failed horribly, but doing nothing would have been failure all the same. If we, as a country, only used our military to depose tyrants - that's not exactly the worst use of our forces, agreed? That;s what we were supposed to be doing, and that's what Hitchens was advocating for. The single, longest running current in his literary life, was a seething hatred of despots. His position on iraq was most likely informed by that, and probably more than a -little- bit emotional on account of it. I'm not sure what's going on here, though. You're telling me how you didn't like some debate he had, but what does that have to do with any intellectual dishonesty in his stated positions, and when will you be referring to his stated positions, any deficiency in his explanations for those positions?

Iraq was a failed state. We had an obligation, we had the means. This was his position. Do you disagree with -this-? Is there some dishonesty or deficiency, here, that you'd like to point out? Mind you, I'm not trying to sway you into agreeing with his position, you don't have to. I'm just wondering where you're getting your ideas about his position from, the man was a prolific author, he reiterated this over and over again, in his typical style, really driving the nail, as it were. Yet, for some reason, you seem to be under the impression that he was advocating for the death of civilians, or that there was no number of civilians which he would have felt was too many, as a sacrifice in service of regime change. The very reason he advocated for regime change, was the well being of those same citizens....... Is it somehow his fault that we fucked that up? Do our military blunders lesson or demean his position, or the reasons he assumed it?