After this article, I made the mental note to myself to be on the look out for good new stuff from Christopher Hitchens.    I didn't have to wait too long -- he reemerged in this article at MSNBC/Slate.

Hitchens starts with a recap of the Lefty Litany against Intervention:

FIRST, THE OPPONENTS of war say, why choose Saddam Hussein when there are so many other bad guys? Second (and related), why exempt Saudi Arabia, which has proven ties to al-Qaida? Third, what about Palestine, for which we already bear a responsibility? Fourth, haven’t the Republican establishment, from Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld, been the smiling patrons and financiers of Saddam in the past? There are other points, but you know the tune by now.

He echos many of the points that I've made in my "why intervene in Iraq" post including, in particular, the Humanitarian rationale.  He articulates another, unique rationale -- Managing Iraqi Implosion.

However — and here is the clinching and obvious point — Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway

...The choices are two and only two — to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business. (I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don’t respect them for anything but their honesty.)

Iraq will implode.   The added question for us is whether or not nukes are part of the Anarchy equation.   The line of discussion reminds me of several chapters in End of History where Fukuyama describes "the Weakness of Strong States"  -- StrongMen don't like to have other StrongMen around making the succession power vacuum inevitable.   Filial connections are about the only thing that's kept Qusay and Uday alive and we've got every reason to believe they'll be worse than Dad and will have quite a bout between them when he's gone.