Someone Please Dig Up Christopher Hitchens and Show Him This Blog Post

Christopher Hitchens on Iraq, 2005:

The welcome that I've seen American and British forces get in parts of Iraq...I want to mention first because there are people who say that that never happened...where were the sweets and where were the flowers? Well I saw it happen with my own eyes and no one's going to tell me that I didn't...it was like this is the nearest I'll get to taking part in the liberation of the country, to ride in with the liberating army...I will not allow it not to be said that that did not happen.

The Financial Times on Iraq, now:

On Thursday night, the militants running Mosul marched through the streets of Mosul and residents say they went out to greet them in celebration.

“People threw them chocolates,” said one woman in a white veil, heading into the Kurdistan region. Like many fleeing on Friday, she said she was not fleeing because of the militants, but because she feared that Mr Maliki would launch air strikes.

There has probably never in history been an invasion where some people didn't give the invading army a warm welcome. For instance, here are some Poles and Ukrainians in 1939 greeting the Nazi army with flowers. And certainly there's never been an invasion where idiot propagandists like Hitchens didn't triumphantly celebrate it as vindicating the invasion's morality. In fact, I'm certain ISIS has its own idiot propagandists at work on this at this very moment.

—Jon Schwarz