In an interview in Salon last October, Christopher Hitchens said that the September 11 attacks created a "feeling that there has to be a stand made against the worst kind of tyranny that there ever could be, which is religious, the one that the socialist movement came into being to oppose, the religious worldview, it's what we exist to oppose, so people can actually emancipate themselves." Last month, in Slate, Hitchens declared himself "a member of Atheists for Regime Change" and said of religious opposition to the Iraq war that "it shows yet again that there is a fixed gulf between religion and ethics." I wonder how Hitchypoo will feel if this comes to pass:

About 5,000 Shia Muslims - 20,000, according to one Arab television station - marched through Nassiriya, one of the bigger towns on the banks of the Euphrates, shouting: "No to America, No to Saddam".

Like many Iraqis, they are ecstatic that Saddam Hussein has gone but they do not want the US either. They do not refer to "liberation" but to "aggression".

One Nassiriya resident said the demonstrators wanted not western-style freedom but government by their ayatollahs.

Is theocracy in Iraq's future? The author of that Guardian story doesn't pretend to know. But it's an interesting question, isn't it, Hitch?

(Guardian link also from the Rational Enquirer.)