I don't know if he still trots this one out since I try to make sure I never hear his views on Iraq since they're so damn frustrating, but Hitchens used to justify the chaos we unleashed in Iraq by saying it was good practice for the army to learn how to fight insurgents.

Scott Horton had this on his blog the other day:

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."

– T.E. Lawrence, Report to the Sunday Times (London), Aug. 2, 1920.

Lawrence was beat by a couple hundred years, though.

“The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries.” – Robespierre (1792)

At the time, French revolutionaries dreamed of conquering monarchy in Europe through violent revolution. Ironically, the continuing state of war in revolutionary France helped set the conditions under which Robespierre himself acted as a tyrant.

1. This is what the noise machine does. It digs and digs and digs until it can manufacture a controversy. It's not coincidence that when Glenn pointed out that the Malkin-sphere bloggers are hypocrites (they were generating another "scandal" over some professor having left -after being provoked - creepy comments at a blog while at the same time one of them was calling for the death of a Supreme Court Justice) the immediate response was to dig into his personal life and generate a "scandal."

This is how they operate - it's a 24/7 operation to maintain themselves in epistemic Hell. It requires this kind of bullshit to make sure that cognitive dissonance is held at bay. Critics/opponents/Democrats are placed into their Manichean role and then its off to the races to see if they can make up some reason to hate them.

Notice also how Glenn was accused of "throwing under the bus" his partner - the very same thing that Obama is being accused of with his grandmother.

These people are broken records of phony outrage. Yet they continue to be allowed to set the terms of national discourse in the mainstream media.

2. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2008/03/precious_liberty.html.printer.friendly

The assumption behind the "if you have nothing to hide" claim is that the authorities will always be benign, will always reliably identify and interfere with genuinely bad people only, will never find themselves engaging in "mission creep" with more and more uses to put their new powers and capabilities to, will not redefine crimes, and even various behaviours or views now regarded as acceptable, to extend the range of things for which people can be placed under suspicion - and so considerably on.

It is all or some of naive, lazy and irresponsible not to be maximally vigilant regarding civil liberties and human rights, because it is a datum that the liberties of individuals are inconvenient for all states and their security services, and in dispensations where there are few if any restraints (think the Soviet Union, or even today's Russia - and China) it is liberty which quickly and comprehensively suffers.

Where an alert populace can use its liberties such as free speech to defend its other liberties vigorously, the universal tendency of states to increase their policing powers can be resisted: but even in such countries as the UK and US it takes real effort to mount and maintain such resistance. Consequently it is not acceptable to rest content with the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, for it is one of the most seductive self-betrayals of liberty one can imagine.

3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters

"The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defense of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to 'Defender of the Faith' than George the Third." - Thomas Paine, American Crisis II

This nation was very much born out of the Republic of Letters (see the Wiki entry.) Philosophes and other Enlightenment thinkers corresponding about the nature of what the best role of government should be, challenging and questioning existing authority, and spreading subversive ideas broke down the power of tradition and monarchy. It was partly for this reason that it was not uncommon for writers to adopt pen names to mask their identiy, so as not arouse the persectution of the state and religious authorities.

As you can see from the Paine quote, the Founders considered the Republic of Letters to be a primitive form of democratic deliberation.

And can you imagine that such a thing would have ever come into existence if the established authorities had the means to surveill every correspondence?

What is being done now ... this surveillance state ... it is antithetical to America at a fundamental level. It is poisounous. It will kill democracy.

I don't have time at the moment to scan the comments to see if it has already been mentioned, but "liberal hawk" George Packer who supported the invasion of Iraq, a few years ago released one of the definitive and most thoughtful accounts of the failures of the Iraq war/occupation.

Salon reviewed it.

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/10/07/packer/index.html