Christopher Hitchens talks about his past tour and takes questions at the AAI 07 conference in Washington, D.C.

Part one:

Part two:

Quoting from this video* — starting at 18:18 and ending at 24:48 –

Q. Since the Iraqi war came up, I can’t help asking what your rationale is for the fact, we all agree that Islam is a very dangerous religion, that it’s going to take some time [unintelligible]. I can’t understand why you would defend us going into Iraq rather than Iran, and why you would think that we have any hope in a confrontation in winning without some really horrendous results.

H. Let me see if I understand you, or rather let me be sure if I understand you correctly: are you in favor of a confrontation with the Iranian theocracy?

Q. No, I am not.

H. No, you’re not. I thought not. You’re just using it, okay, as a means of ridiculing the confrontation with Iran. It’s not — you’re saying we went into the wrong country, so you should go neither. Well, I’ve met people like you before; it’s easy to read.

Q. –that was not religious, controlled by a religious figure, and create chaos–

H. Yeah.

Q. –rather than going into one that does have a religious figure. I’m not for either one, but–

H. All right, okay, I know where you’re coming from, as they say. An easy way to tell if someone doesn’t know anything about Iraq at all, is if they’ll say one of two things about Saddam Hussein: one, “Well, okay, he was a bad guy”, then you know right away they don’t know anything about him. No one who knew anything about the Saddam Hussein regime would content themselves with saying that, and second to say he was a secularist. I can tell right away. People have no idea what they’re talking about when they say that.

Saddam Hussein’s campaign of genocide in Kurdistan was called the Anfal campaign after a sura of the Koran about the spoils you may take from the victim, the devastation that you may inflict on them. It was Saddam Hussein who, sensitive to the charge from Iran that he was a heretic or an unbeliever, put “Allahu Akbar” on the Iraqi flag — that was fifteen years ago — who forced all members of the Baath party in the last ten years to undergo compulsory religious education, who pumped out on radio and TV Baghdad and throughout his embassies around the world, you all saw it, a constant stream of jihadist propaganda, who undermined the secular PLO by paying, paying for the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and paying a bounty for every suicide bomber which we found confirmed in the Iraqi bank records, was the patron of jihadism in the region.

It was well beyond time that he was removed from office in Iraq and I think the Senate did a good thing in 1998, and the House, on the initiative of President Clinton and Vice President Gore to pass the Iraq Liberation Act saying that year that it shall be–

Q. –you’ve not answered my question–

H. I’m coming, I, I’m, I am answering your question, sir.

Q. No, you’re not.

H. Well, wait, I’m denying the assumption of your question that Saddam Hussein was secular, and I’m coming to Iran in a second.

Q. Okay.

H. It was quite right the Senate to pass without a dissenting vote, by the way, the Iraq Liberation Act long before 9/11, and said it shall be the policy of the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Now, it seems to me, to come to Iran, that the Iranian theocracy is bent on a course of confrontation with us, it’s resisted enormous bribes and inducements, from the European Union, from the United States, and from the U.N., to allow us to be certain that its nuclear program is not directed at the acquisition of thermonuclear weaponry. There’s a very suspicious course of conduct. And all the evidence for its cheating on this comes, not from the C.I.A., but from the International Atomic Energy Authority, from the European Union, and from others. We have them cold on this point.

Second, they are conducting a campaign of murder and assassination in order to help Syria gain control of Lebanon. No journalist or politician elected in Lebanon can hope to turn on their car in the morning, if they’re opposed to Syrian occupation and the Iranian backing of it, without the risk of murder.

They’re the patrons of Hezbollah. Their agents have been found trying to kill a novelist in London, blowing up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aries, murdering a Canadian journalist of Iranian extraction, and seeking for confrontation also in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems that they think they can fight and win a confrontation with secular civilization that they so much despise.

And it seems that the hubris that underlies this ridiculous campaign — after all, thanks to theocracy, Iran is a country where nothing works except the secret police and the nuclear reactors, nothing works. The country is bankrupt. It makes, it exports just what it did at the time of the theocratic revolution: pistachio nuts and rugs — while a secular country like Turkey is practically a member of the European Union and has no oil.

How do they think they can do this? Because they think the Twelfth Imam is coming back. Because they, too, have a messiah. Because they, too, have an apocalyptic sense of the future, and pretty soon a messianic regime is going to get hold of an apocalyptic weapon. The very moment we’ve all been dreading all our lives. That this would happen: a regime that doesn’t understand deterrence, that doesn’t understand self-preservation, that has a religious world view will also have apocalyptic weaponry. Well, are you prepared to wait and see this happen? Or do you think that it would be worth fighting to stop that eventuality? I have no doubt. Anyone who wanted to guess my opinion would be insulting me. (Applause)

I live, I live, I live to fight people like that, and I think the United States military has no higher calling than to destroy the regimes and disperse the armies of governments that threaten us in that way.

And so, I hope very much, that though you, sir, used Iran purely as a means of ridiculing the attempt to liberate Iraq, that you will find that the confrontation is both inescapable and just.

Anfal campaign

Allahu Akbar

Iraq Liberation Act

* (Thanks to John for the transcription).

Bonus Utube here: