Nonsensical. Christopher Hitchens was never a Tory. Did you bother to read about him before ranting madly? Christopher Hitchens was a Marxist from a young age to the age he died. He did reduce his affiliation with that title as time went on, admitting late in life to being a conservative Marxist. Never once did he even step within several hundred miles of Center, let alone right of center. His support for both the Falkland Islands and Iraq came from a solely Left perspective, that the far right, consisting of Totalitarianism and Fascism, should be utterly destroyed. To paint him as anything but Left is to leave a rude and amateur canvas behind. Or were you unaware that the spectrum went further than Sky News?

[first off, any "overrated white dude that has Robert Plant & Paul Simon? George Lucas? We're in the Valley of the Who Cares here. And discovering Sid Vicious was overrated? Like there was any other point from the beginning? Perhaps someone needs a dictionary to explain "Punk", which is kind of the antithesis of punk itself. Define nihilism and crap exploitation  and sensationalism, and furiously anti-talent and effort? oh well, the clue train left a long time ago]

I view Hitchens as a male Maureen Dowd with a Brit accent and a self-glorifying drink problem who could occasionally write a useful or entertaining article if it weren't about politics.

For someone who started out a Trotskyite and ended up a racist, unapologetic imperialist, it's hard to take him seriously. All evil comes from religion, he contends, ignoring gulags, slaughter of millions of Georgians & Ukrainians, the millions killed from Mao's famines with his ill-conceived Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot's back to the rice paddies, and all those little petty killings from Shining Path and others who from my vantage point appear a lot like little inspired Al Qaedas running around. What's not to like?

He could have actually plotted out a middle way for Iraq that could have brought something new and different - say a precursor to the Arab Spring that he now contends his beloved Iraq invasion inspired. But for him, from his comfy office chair or place at the bar, peaceful revolution is better pushed from the barrel of a gun. Orwell dreamed 

But his Iraq invasion was just another British deja vu - after Britain overthrew the Ottoman empire, they installed their very own religious dictator to keep afternoon tea on schedule (pronounced 'shedule', mind you), and when that didn't quite work out, they invaded and put the boot in, as old Winny documents during his early career (when he was shedding the infamy of his cockup at Gallipoli). But not to worry - the Brits had a good unique plan - "Britain granted independence to Iraq in 1932, on the urging of King Faisal, though the British retainedmilitary bases and transit rights for their forces." Effing brilliant - I hope they built a huge armored embassy and arranged amnesty for any remaining troops.

Gitmo is just a natural bit of machinery in Hitch's world. Even 8 years after the Iraq invasion, he was still preaching endless war and "the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming", unaware that most of the Arab world is much like him, just wanting to get the work off their desk and head to the local gathering spot to chat and be entertained, only they didn't have getting sloshed as an obligatory ingredient.

My guess is Hitchens hated the tee-totaling aspect of religion more than relition. After all, he's a grand lover of superstition, that a US/British invasion would uphold the rights of the poor and downtrodden than local dictators, despite the evidence of hundreds of years with the Raj (think Mountbatten would wipe the poor's asses like Mother Teresa did? Did she steal more money than the East India Tea Company or then the occupying forces in Iraq making off with billions in cash loaded on pallets?). And is Hitchens going from cocktail party to cocktail party somehow coming up with a better solution for the folks who have to suffer army units breaking down their doors or flattening their houses looking for "terrorists", as if that menace would be worse?

While there is certainly hypocrisy in the Catholic position on poverty and abortion, who is he attacking? The church, the idea that a religious group would wash the dying, or just the idea that Mother Teresa might not have spent all those donations well? I remember chuckling over his comments, for a short bit, but it's not like there's an end to poverty in India, and if she did embezzle donations, for what purpose? She wasn't driving in limos like Baghwan or Sai Baba or our American preachers. 

Mostly, Hitchens just liked to say rude remarks and take contrarian opinions, though not as nicely as the rudepundit. Still, occasionally he had a funny line, such as:

"The thing about mine fields is that they're very easy to lay, but they're very difficult and dangerous, and even expensive to get rid of' - the perfect description of Prince Charles's first wife."

But when you've built that humor around a horrid illegal but worst, bungled invasion that simply spread more imperialism and suffering than finding a solution for what you think is a huge problem - well, you're an asshole. Certainly Hitchens was in no danger of having his apartment flattened in the name of stopping terror, and he's unapologetic about... anything. He couldn't even define a legacy aside from obnoxious contrarian, though prolific should at least be ascribed. Oh well, Andrew Sullivan will probably heap praises on him long after he's been made lunch. Sorry, no drinks to follow.

Oh come on, that's been a conservative red herring.

We drove Bin Laden out of Sudan - rather gracelessly, but we did.

We protected Kosovo from the air and got Milosevic to trial in the Hague - a fact the Bush administration downplayed because they didn't like the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Our efforts in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine got a pro-democracy government in place, and our efforts supporting nascent democracy efforts in Iran were relatively successful, with a reformer in office (Bush playing hardball later helped put the hard-line Ahmadinejad in place). We had a good agreement in place with N. Korea - bribery, for sure, but it worked.

We contained Hussein's progress for 10 years at minimal cost - maintaining overflight zones - and the only real issue was not having inspectors on the ground to make sure it was successful. Once we got that, even the skeptical Hans Blix realized there was nothing there.

Much of tracking Al Qaeda remains a police & intelligence issue, not military action.

We helped get N. Ireland settled down, and get the ETA situation stabilized. Qaddaffi was pretty tame by inauguration 2001. 

As for Assad, Bush Sr. did nothing to push out Assad's father after massacres in 1990 & others. Clinton helped a number of talks between Syria & Israel during the 1990's, and the last US-Syria talk was under Clinton. The Damascus Spring was going on when Clinton left office, and died out under Bush.

Bush came in and screwed almost any positive effort to contain dictators that was going on - his push for more military engagement, and less diplomacy, the  "speak tough and refuse to get anywhere" policy.

Yes, Democrats have a foreign policy that addresses foreign despots. Without spending trillions, causing huge numbers of deaths in "liberating", and making us slash our basic services at home.