Hitchens on Kerry.

Christopher Hitchens brilliantly calls John Kerry out for the repulsive isolationism implied by his complaint about "opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America." This is especially striking:

A few years ago, many of the same liberals and leftists [who now argue against spending money on reconstructing Iraq] were quoting improbable if not impossible numbers of dead Iraqi children, murdered by the international sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein. Even at its most propagandistic, this contained an important moral point: Iraqi civilians were suffering for the sins of their dictatorship (and from the lavish corruption of the U.N. supervision of the "oil-for-food" program). OK, then, we'll remove the regime and lift the sanctions. Happy now? Not at all! It turns out that 1) the Saddam regime was only a threat invented by neo-cons and that 2) we don't owe the Iraqi people a thing. Also, we could use the money ourselves.

This would mean that all the protest about dead and malnourished Iraqi infants was all for show. Surely that can't be right?