I’ve felt now and then like a lone voice in the wilderness shouting this particular stuff over and over for years (which isn’t really fair or accurate, of course, but what the hell), but now Christopher Hitchens has said it too, and said it well:

Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Munich and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose “operation” murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist “security” headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam’s regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as “threatening,” even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition’s presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)

Thus, in spite of the film’s loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable “warnings.”

And there you go. Anyone who continues to claim that Saddam was never a threat to the US, and had never really done anything to us, is an idiot. And if you don’t want to believe me (and the historical record), maybe you can believe Hitch.

The two things I highlighted above were plenty enough reason to remove Saddam. He was an active and dangerous enemy of this country for over ten years. He should have been dealt with long ago, as most Democrats were willing to admit just so long as a Democrat was running the show. Bush was right to remove him — period. Every attempt to claim otherwise is nothing more than partisan posturing, which makes every attempt to undermine the war in Iraq now simply and plainly unpatriotic by definition, because those people are putting the interests of a political party ahead of the interests of the country. We can quibble over how good a job Bush is making of it, and we should. We can argue over whether we should have dealt with Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iran before we dealt with Iraq, over whether one of those other approaches would have better served our long-term interest in the WoT, and we should. But there really can’t be any question of whether going to war with Iraq at all was justified in the first place. It was. That’s simply all there is to it.

Oh, and I can’t resist excerpting one more good bit from Hitch:

I have already said that Moore’s film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it’s much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” and the use of “spin” in the presentation of our politicians. It’s high time someone had the nerve to point this out.

Yes indeed. What a brave, courageous visionary the ignorant fat fuck Moore is.