The question Danner and Hitchens tackled Tuesday night at U.C. Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall was simple: “Has Bush made us safer?” Before turning to the rematch, it’s worth summarizing the first debate.

Danner argued that invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein was both unnecessary and too risky. Although he acknowledged that Saddam was a loathsome tyrant and he would have supported ousting him under the right circumstances, he maintained that the costs were not acceptable. Saddam did not, he said, represent an imminent threat: There was no evidence that he was connected to global terrorism, and aggressive inspections backed up with the threat of airstrikes would keep him in his box. As for the consequences of invasion, they could potentially be dire. U.S. invasion would require a prolonged occupation that would expose American troops to guerrilla attacks and could result in a fractured, failed state that would be a haven for terrorists. America, with its short attention span, was not good at nation building to begin with, and was facing an enormously difficult task in Iraq, an artificially created country divided along religious and ethnic lines that had suffered despotic rule for decades. Finally, invading a major Arab state would be certain to stir up Arab and Muslim rage against the U.S., leading to more attacks against us — just what bin Laden had hoped for.

Hitchens said that America had no choice but to invade, both because Saddam represented an imminent threat and because it was our moral duty to do so. Saddam was evil, unstable and connected to Islamist terrorists such as Ansar al-Islam. He possessed a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which inspectors would never be able to find, and had shown in the past that he was willing to use them. His eventual fall was sure to be chaotic and risky: It was better to seize the initiative and remove him at a time of our choosing. It was also essential to demonstrate to the bin Ladens of the world that America was not a paper tiger. The risks were not great: The war would be quick, the occupation relatively painless, we would be greeted by most Iraqis as liberators, and reconstructing Iraq would proceed apace. The rest of the Arab and Muslim world would not erupt: Indeed, striking down Saddam could help revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Above all, the U.S. simply had the moral responsibility to strike down psychopathic tyrants like Saddam Hussein.

Not surprisingly, as someone who opposed the war, I thought Danner’s points were more compelling. But several people I spoke to thought that Hitchens won. Hitchens had the advantage of the idealist’s lofty vantage: Danner’s plainspoken cost-benefit analysis was, inevitably, less stirring than his opponent’s call for America to unsheathe its terrible swift sword.

Many things have changed since that night, and few of those changes could have brought joy to the heart of the idiosyncratic British hawk. Hitchens correctly predicted that the invasion would be “rapid, accurate and dazzling,” but he was wrong about just about everything else. Saddam’s vast caches of weapons of mass destruction, which the Bush administration used to sell the war to the American people, have not been found. Securing and rebuilding Iraq has proved much harder than Hitchens or his fellow hawks acknowledged, not least because of the Bush administration’s shocking failure to prepare for it at all. The occupation has been bloody and will be incredibly expensive. And the situation is deteriorating, as terrorists and jihadis slip into Iraq, ordinary Iraqis — including, ominously, Shiites — grow increasingly angry, and a shadowy resistance movement kills Americans every day. Nor can the global fallout from the war be considered a resounding success. Hatred and enmity toward the United States is at an all-time high, not only in the Arab and Muslim world but in Europe as well. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis remains mired in a bloody dead end, and Bush’s recent call for the Middle East to embrace democracy fell on almost universally hostile ears in the region.

To no one’s surprise, the Bush administration and its allies, faced with this litany of woes, have refused to admit that anything is wrong. Driven by a radically militarist idealism that plays on post-9/11 fear and nationalism, the White House, like a shark, is designed only to go forward: Any acknowledgment of weakness would be politically fatal and ideologically disastrous. In the first debate Hitchens, too, played by this script: He deviated not an iota from the standard neoconservative line laid out by such intellectual authors of the war as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. One of the questions hanging over Debate 2, then, was whether and to what degree he would be willing to criticize his newfound right-wing brethren, admit that he or they might have been wrong about anything, or acknowledge that some of his founding assumptions were more problematic and complex than advertised. For those who entertained no hopes that anything of this introspective nature would take place, the question presented itself in a somewhat crasser form: How would the legendarily silver-tongued Hitchens talk his way out of this one?

Hitchens won the coin toss and chose to speak first. He began by attacking the idea that the war against Saddam was voluntary, a war of choice. In fact, he said, it was “inescapable,” because Saddam was so evil, insane and tied to Islamist terrorism that sooner or later we were going to have to fight him — and it would be better to take the fight to him at a time of our choosing rather than wait for a catastrophic implosion that would fracture the country and bring in Iran. Reviewing a statement made by George Bush Sr. in which he explained that invading Iraq after the Gulf War would have been too risky, he dismissed it as “pseudo-realism … it’s not as practical or as hard-headed or as prudent as it purports to be.”

The crisis, Hitchens insisted, had already been upon us. Iraq had been ready to explode. The “already lousy status quo wasn’t really a status quo.” The inspections and sanctions weren’t working: “Saddam was not in his box. The box was falling apart.” Continuing with the status quo ante bellum had a number of very obvious disadvantages. It left Saddam Hussein in power; it punished the Iraqi people with U.N. sanctions; it abandoned the Shiites and Kurds. Moreover, “It left the barbarous regime free to continue work on weapons of mass destruction, which we know for certain that the regime was doing on a very grand scale until at the very least 1999. And it left Saddam Hussein free to threaten his neighbors and to give support to jihad forces all around the world.”

Hitchens adduced a number of examples to show that Saddam, like bin Laden, was a practitioner of what he has termed “Islamo-fascism.” He said the dictator’s actions “were becoming ever more demented, ever more extreme, and ever more Islamist in their turn. The flag of Iraq was amended to include a very threatening verse from the Koran, gigantic mosques were being built in Saddam Hussein’s name, he financed openly suicide murderers in Palestine whose avowed objective is establishing a theocratic dictatorship over all, whether believers or nonbelievers.”

Those familiar with Hitchens’ longtime position as a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause were probably somewhat surprised to hear him use the expression “suicide murderer.” This rhetorical usage, a variant of the phrase “homicide bombers” favored by Ariel Sharon (and that Fox News has mandated be used in its broadcasts), removes the actions of Palestinian terrorists from any historical or political context, casting their perpetrators as Islamo-fascist evildoers driven only by religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism.

Hitchens did acknowledge the bad news that has come flooding out of occupied Iraq. He chided war supporters who “rest their case largely on the underreporting of good news,” acknowledging that those who would take praise for the war’s positive consequences — among which he listed the restoration of Iraq’s southern marshes, the reconstitution of its universities, its burgeoning free press, Kurdish autonomy and the opening of mass graves — also “automatically have to accept the blame” for the “huge lacunae in matters such as water, power and security.” He did not say that those critical problems exist in large part because of the war planners’ reckless optimism, bordering on criminal negligence — an optimism that he had shared.

Defending President Bush’s claim that post-invasion violence was a sign of “desperation,” Hitchens argued that the attackers “are making our point for us … There’s no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can possibly be left to the mercy of such people. And there never was any justification.” Hitchens closed his opening statement by criticizing “the tendency of today’s left to take refuge in neutralism and isolationism.”

In his response and throughout the debate, Danner played Sancho Panza to Hitchens’ Don Quixote, disingenuously praising his opponent’s splendid rhetorical raiment as fit for an emperor. And so Danner opened his remarks by saying, “Gosh, that was good. I feel saddened that I have to point out the distance of those beautiful remarks from the truth of what’s going on on the ground. It feels like, I don’t know, willfully destroying a masterpiece.”

Danner’s first move was to invoke the question under discussion: “‘Has Bush made us safer?’ I ask all of you to think of it in personal terms. My answer in personal terms is no.” He then recited a litany of ways that Bush had made America less safe. Bush had ignored Clinton’s warnings about terrorism, preferring to work on missile defense. He invaded Afghanistan, but then left it “as insecure as he found it, letting al-Qaida and the Taliban flow back into a vacuum that U.S. forces left.” He “debilitated the main arm of defense against terrorism, the U.S. intelligence agencies, which are now fighting in full-throated anger against the administration.” And, of course, “He started a preemptive war with Iraq that did not have to be fought, that in spite of everything Christopher just said was not necessary, was not forced upon the United States.”

Danner, who had just returned from a harrowing trip to Iraq — he said he was the first journalist on the scene after the Red Cross headquarters was bombed — then turned to the facts on the ground. “The war, as I can testify from personal experience over the past couple of weeks, is getting worse. When I arrived in Baghdad about three weeks ago there were an average of 15 attacks every day on American forces. When I left, the average had gone up to nearly 35. For all the talk about the fact that 89, 60, 95 percent of the country is perfectly fine and pacified, in fact the area in which fighting is going on, in which Americans and Iraqis are being killed, is steadily broadening.”

Danner went on to say that after extensive reporting, including lengthy on- and off-the-record interviews with top U.S. brass, it was clear to him that the military was “completely at sea. They don’t know how to fight what is a growing insurgency.”

Citing the missing WMD and the cooked intelligence used to claim that Saddam was an imminent threat, Danner said, “The citizens of the United States were essentially swindled into supporting a war that was not necessary. They were swindled into supporting a war that is getting more serious, more difficult by the day … In fact, I would argue that the country has become involved in a war that will end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was a war against terror? Well, you have a situation on the ground where more and more jihadists are coming over what are now more and more open borders into Iraq. Were we worried at the time that Iraqis were going to be killing Americans? Well, they are doing so, right now. Were we worried that there would be more suicide bombing? Well, we see it on our television screens every day.”

Danner closed by saying that Bush’s “foolish” war should not have been fought — because there was no proof that Saddam had threatened the United States, because young Americans are now dying every day (“and they are increasingly bewildered why they are there dying every day”) and because the invasion turned Iraq into an al-Qaida-friendly haven.

In his rebuttal, Hitchens scored a point out of the gate when he challenged Danner’s claim that Afghanistan posed a greater threat now than it did under the Taliban. “To say that we are less safe there would be the equivalent of saying that we were safer from al-Qaida before Sept. 11, when unknown to us — though apparently known to our vaunted intelligence services which have suffered so grievously under the Bush administration, though not passed on to one another or to the civilian leadership — was the fact that a secret army was being formed inside our borders, with support from foreign regimes,” Hitchens caustically observed. “That was known then. It just wasn’t considered to be worthy of any serious action. The security we enjoyed when al-Qaida and the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, when it must be admitted fewer Americans were then being killed and there was less violence, was the security of a fool’s paradise.”

He whacked his bête noir, Bill Clinton, saying Clinton “didn’t do much about Saddam, or al-Qaida either, except bombing the wrong target in Sudan, lying about it and letting Osama bin Laden get away while looking better by pursuing a Nobel peace prize for a futile Oslo process.”

Then Hitchens returned again to the theme on which his entire justification for war is based (leaving aside the moral justification, which in response to a later question about North Korea he tacitly acknowledged was not absolute): the notion that Saddam and al-Qaida are two fingers of one Islamo-fascist hand.

“Is there anyone who thinks that we have not been for some time at war with the forces of jihad and the totalitarian states that underwrite them?” Hitchens rhetorically asked. “Is there anyone who really thinks that the arrangement between the Baath party and the Fedayeen Saddam and the jihadis who are now coming into Iraq began only when the United States intervened? Nobody who’s studied the question could believe this for a second — the Ansar al Islam group formed in Kurdistan under Saddam Hussein’s protection, the subventions of money and propaganda support to jihad forces all around the world were an increasingly conspicuous feature of the Baathist regime.”

After arguing that the invasion of Iraq was “a fairly useful pedagogic example” that forced Iran’s mullahs to accept U.N. inspection of its nuclear program, Hitchens took up the theme of the debate (which he distanced himself from, calling it “the slightly fatuous rubric of our own self-regard and safety”), saying, “Yes, you are safer for the disarmament of Iraq. Yes, you are safer for the physical destruction of the Taliban-bin Laden regime.”

As for the embarrassingly missing WMD, Hitchens refused to back down an inch. “The Kay report … finds evidence of an enormous and consistent concealment program,” Hitchens said. “Call me old-fashioned if you will, but by my logic of induction, a concealment program is evidence in itself. No one has a concealment program to conceal nothing. Scientists were threatened, two of them were shot, for even considering cooperation with the earlier inspectors, not that I think the Blix team was really looking … Designs and plans for missiles were found by the Kay team — who are only a quarter of the way into their work — that far exceed, by thousands of miles, the limits that Saddam Hussein was allowed. Toxins have been found concealed in private homes. It’s quite extraordinary how far the depravity of the Saddam regime has been exposed in this matter of weapons of mass destruction by the Kay report.”

In his rebuttal, Danner moved to a higher conceptual plane, raising questions about what kind of government feels the need to lie to its people for their own good, and what kind of citizenry it is that is so readily convinced by those lies.

“I think we’re all faced with a question here, which is, are we citizens or are we dupes?” Danner said. “Do we have the ability to make distinctions? Can we read a newspaper, listen to the news, listen to our leaders speak to us and make judgments on our own? The evidence of the last few months gives us some pause. Christopher Hitchens was clearly one of the 69 percent of Americans who the Washington Post claims believe that Saddam was behind 9/11.”

Hitchens interjected, “If I had thought that I would have said it.”

“I would have been grateful if you had said it explicitly,” Danner replied. “You know, George Bush came out a few weeks ago after a particularly egregious performance by his vice president and said, ‘No, we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.’ I found it fascinating that he felt obliged to say this. Because the administration, over months and months of very clever statements, very clever terminology, very cleverly dancing around the issue, was able to convince the greater majority of Americans that in fact these two threats were the same thing. These Americans who were shocked by 9/11, as everyone was, who saw their fellow citizens being killed while they were having their morning coffee, were perfectly willing to support a war against Iraq that they thought was replying to that immediate threat. Now this kind of clever obfuscation is still being employed, every day. We’ve seen a little of it on this stage.”

Danner challenged Hitchens’ repeated attempts to link Saddam and bin Laden, although disappointingly he did not offer any substantive arguments on this crucial point. “Christopher’s imminent threat arguments rely on the perception that Saddam and al-Qaida are essentially the same. They’re not. They’re not. They weren’t the same. And the arguments made for supporting the war were misleading, obfuscatory and relied on premises that have since been disproven.”

He then reminded the audience of the uncomfortable fact that some of Saddam’s most evil deeds were openly supported by the United States. “Saddam attacked his neighbors — well, America supported him in his attack on Iran. The United States supported him while he was gassing his citizens. Does that mean he was not a threat? Not necessarily. But it does mean that when you hear people making these arguments, you should reach for your wallet and make sure it’s still in your pocket.

“Our argument tonight only marginally has to do with national security. What it has to do with is national integrity. Whether we as a democracy can make decisions based on fact, based on how the world actually is … without our leaders misleading us. It seems to me on this stage we’re seeing another example of such misleading.”

Hitchens responded to Danner’s charge that the Bush administration used clever language and underhanded tricks to create the impression that Saddam Hussein was the same as al-Qaida by saying, “The Bush administration never in fact made that claim, and has never made it, and has repeatedly repudiated it.” He did not acknowledge that Danner had argued that the claim was never made explicit.

Then he returned to his central theme that there was in fact a strong connection between them. “That there is a connection between Saddamism and jihadism I think need not be doubted, cannot be doubted. Ansar, support for the suicide murderers in Palestine, support for jihadis as a rhetoric and the consistent support by the Baath party ruling Iraq for Osama bin Laden as a front-line struggle against American imperialism.”

Turning to the ugly military situation, Hitchens grew bellicose. “The United States has absolute military superiority there. To listen to Mark Danner you’d think we were on the verge of a military defeat in a war that quite simply cannot be lost. The war has barely begun. I’m not in favor of the raising of any white flag.”

At this point, Hitchens’ tone changed noticeably. He became more aggressive and personal, more didactic, more accusatory, more moralistic. This was no longer just a discussion — it was something of a sermon, one that turned into a tongue-lashing of the liberals and intellectuals who had failed to grasp the threat of Islamo-fascism. “Let’s be clear what we’re talking about. Let’s not be flippant about matters of national security. There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism. It’s an honor to be on the other side from it, it’s an honor to have as many Iraqi and Kurdish friends as I can claim who have already decided to risk their lives fighting it, risking them for our sakes as well.”

Hitchens now descended into the basement of the liberal id and began prodding its termite-ridden foundations. “Since we’re talking about our safety, I want to put a proposition to you,” Hitchens said. “There’s a tendency in these discussions, one which I very much reprobate, and one that I find a good deal in the New York Times, and also the Democratic Party, to watch this outcome as if to say, ‘I wonder how it’s going to work out? I wonder if Bush is going to win? I wonder if the Fedayeen Saddam or al-Qaida are going to? Some days it looks bad for one side, some days not so bad.’

“Who is daring to look at this as if they were a spectator? Who is watching this as a neutral?”

He fired a shot across the do-good bow of the Berkeley audience, asking passionately why more people didn’t ask, “What can we do to help the people of Iraq?” The audience burst into brief applause.

Hitchens excoriated those liberals who failed to salute the efforts of Texan Red Adair, who put out the huge oil-rig fires set by Saddam Hussein as he retreated from Kuwait. “But everyone would prefer to sneer at that, wouldn’t they, and say that’s just profits for Halliburton and Bush’s cronies.

“What must not be and will not by me be pardoned in this debate is any flippancy of that kind, any paranoid conspiracy theory garbage,” Hitchens said sternly. “Or any view that we have any right to regard this struggle as if it was a matter of indifference to us, and we are able and willing to take bets on the outcome. Don’t let that be said of any of you here tonight.”

The schoolmaster had summoned the erring fifth-formers to the front of the class and administered a painful caning, but Danner was unintimidated. “We certainly aren’t spectators. No question about that,” he said thoughtfully. “I think Christopher’s appeal to the NGOs is very moving. Some of those people I saw on the way out of Baghdad. The NGOs are gone from Iraq. They’ve been attacked, they’ve been killed. The U.N. is gone. It’s an enormous fort now, surrounded by sandbags, by layers of concrete barriers, it’s an enormous wasteland. It struck me as, I don’t know, some kind of postmodern symbol for what we have become, that this is the United Nations in Iraq. So if you want to go help, you can.”

Of Hitchens’ remark that the U.S. had absolute military superiority in Iraq, Danner said, “This recalls a comment made over the weekend by a general who said these attacks that we’ve seen in recent days are ‘strategically and operationally insignificant.’ That’s not the case. No, the American Army is not about to be brought to its knees. But the American Army is not able to fight effectively against what’s happening there. It is simply going out on patrol — I went on a number of them — and waiting to be attacked.”

Danner warned that the Bush administration had created “what is coming to look like a failed state. A place where terrorists can enter the border at their will, carry out spectacular operations that are essentially a recruiting tool. These things are intended to build a movement, and by giving them a ground on which to do it and a clear front on which to face American troops and kill them at will, the Bush administration has helped in that recruiting tool.” And despite Bush’s repeated statements that the U.S. would never retreat in the face of the increasingly violent resistance, Danner pointed out that in fact it has “responded to each attack on the policy side by accelerating the movement to handing over security duties to Iraqis who are barely trained. They’re handing them over to civil defense patrols that have two weeks of training.”

That mattered, Danner said, because “the goal in Iraq is not simply to get out, but to leave a government that is stable, that doesn’t threaten the country. I’m not going to stand here and say we should get out of Iraq. I don’t think we can get out of Iraq. But I also don’t see the solution that would make the United States and everybody in this room and everybody we know and cherish more secure, safer.”

In his closing, Hitchens acknowledged that Danner had made some valid points but repeated his argument that “all of the things we’re now seeing in Iraq were things that we were going to see in any case. They are not the product of the removal of the Saddam regime.”

Turning to Danner’s point that the United States had supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran — what Hitchens called “one of Jimmy Carter’s great crimes” — Hitchens said this very fact was “one of the many reasons that I can’t desert my position in the regime-change camp. The egregious errors and crimes on the part of U.S. administrations commit us morally, and also politically, to undo the wrong that we have done. We have inherited Iraq as a responsibility. There was no avoiding the inheritance of that responsibility.”

As for the NGOs now fleeing Iraq, Hitchens accused them of abandoning their posts. He blasted “the disgraceful scuttle led by the United Nations but joined by the international Red Cross, both of these groups by the way with very spotty records in the past, in fascist Europe, in the Balkans and in Rwanda.”

Hitchens closed by saying that the two options of “nonintervention and neutralism … do not exist. They are not on the agenda. They are not open to us. Neutralism and abstention, non-intervention were never there as options.”

He argued that the intervention needed to be “more thoroughgoing, more thought out, and more, if necessary, ruthless. And all of this would have been possible I think if so many of the American intelligentsia had not decided about a year ago that Saddam was really none of its business. That its advice and counsel would be withheld. That period of neutralism and abstention has come to an end. So get ready to think about what you’re going to do about your own safety and also about the freedom and dignity and security of others. Internationalism is our only hope.”

After drily commenting, “That was rousing,” Danner said, “This is an intellectual’s war, an idealist’s war, no question about it. And you’re getting some of that idealism here. But the embrace of idealism and high-flown words doesn’t free us from having to look at the facts and the consequences of our actions.” He then rehearsed some of the gross failures of postwar planning, detailed in David Rieff’s damning recent article in the New York Times Magazine: insufficient and unprepared troops, the failure to stop looting, the decision to disband the Iraqi army.

These mistakes, Danner said, had helped create a situation that had no obvious solution, and Hitchens’ call for the intelligentsia to put its shoulder to the wheel was, however rousing it might be, meaningless. “We’re in a very messy situation in which the choice is no longer democracy or fascism, the choice is stability or chaos.” And if creating a stable government in Iraq was the necessity, “It is very unclear what path leads to that conclusion.”

He finished by repeating his point about lies and civic responsibility: “We have to look at this as citizens, as citizens who I believe were seriously misled about what our government was doing and about the consequences of its actions.”

So who won? The answer one gives depends, of course, on one’s ideological leanings. Hitchens’ most powerful argument was that Saddam represented a permanent threat, one that was only going to get worse. No one who has studied Saddam Hussein’s history and capabilities, as detailed in the most persuasive pro-war book, Kenneth M. Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm,” can deny that Saddam represented some type of threat, primarily to Saudi Arabia and Israel but to a much lesser degree the United States. In their well-founded outrage at the imperialist, militarist, unilateral bent of the Bush administration, and its equally well-founded fear that its Middle East policies seemed likely to make the U.S.-Arab/Muslim relationship indistinguishable from the Israel-Arab one, many on the left preferred not to consider the real dangers posed by a megalomaniacal regime in an age when the apocalypse can be packed into a suitcase. Saddam’s Iraq may not have been the imminent threat that Bush and Hitchens claimed it was, but to maintain that it was no threat is myopic.

It was equally obvious, however, that launching an invasion against a major Arab state, especially given the current administration’s total unwillingness to address the root cause of Arab and Muslim hatred of the U.S., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was extremely risky. The risk, of course, was that we would turn merely local terrorists into international ones — that we would succeed in bringing together Baath thugs, Yemenis burning to avenge Palestine, enraged Iraqi nationalists, and Islamist jihadis of all stripes, uniting these angry men and women for the first time against us and giving them 140,000 conveniently located targets.

Before the invasion, Hitchens and his fellow hawks either completely failed to acknowledge this risk, or downplayed it as a nonissue. And now that events have forced them to admit that, yes, Houston, we have a problem, they have a simple answer: They’re Islamo-fascists. They’re the bad guys. They’re al-Qaida, they’re Saddam. Kill them all and let Allah sort them out. This kind of thinking is attractive to those inclined to unitary answers, satisfyingly visceral responses to terrorist atrocities like 9/11 and grand moral causes. But one need not go as far as the Stalinist left — the ANSWER crowd is so historically ignorant and morally myopic that they refuse to acknowledge that ousting Saddam was a noble achievement and call those fighting the U.S. in Iraq “freedom fighters” — to recognize that simply calling our foes “terrorists” and lumping them all together as “Islamo-fascists” is simplistic.

The heart of Hitchens’ argument — one you’ll also hear from the neoconservative intellectuals who brought us this war, and from pro-war liberals like Paul Berman — is the concept of Islamo-fascism, an irrational, totalitarian pathology erupting from the backward Muslim/Arab world. In this view, Saddam and bin Laden and Hamas are merely different manifestations of that same threat. Thomas L. Friedman gave voice to a version of this belief when he wrote that we had to invade Iraq to “burst the terrorism bubble” — implying that al-Qaida, Palestinian terrorism and Iraqi totalitarianism are all related, that these Arab terrorists need a taste of the lash, that a decisive blow would show them that the U.S., contrary to bin Laden’s claims that we’re soft and cowardly, is tough. Friedman has shown considerably more awareness of what the U.S. needs to do for the Arab world than Hitchens or his fellow hardline hawks, but on the underlying concept they agree.

The problem is not just that Hitchens’ arguments for this crucial point are weak and unconvincing, but that he never even acknowledges that it is a controversial point — let alone that neither the majority of experts in the field (including pro-war analysts like Pollack) nor the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government agree with his position. The examples he gives are dubious: Saddam’s connection to Ansar al-Islam is highly questionable, his support for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers had nothing to do with Hamas’ Islamist ideology, and his Islamist rhetoric was merely part of his egomaniacal desire to portray himself as a legendary Arab hero. The only caliphate Saddam wanted to restore was the caliphate of Saddam. None of these questionable arguments justify Hitchens’ repeated assertions that the truth of his position is beyond doubt: “That there is a connection between Saddamism and jihadism I think need not be doubted, cannot be doubted”; “There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism.”

Hitchens derided the CIA, but never mentioned that this very issue is what caused the bitter break between the administration and the intelligence agencies. It was the hawks who demanded that the CIA find evidence of this alleged connection between Saddamism and jihadism — and when it failed to come up with even a shred of evidence that there was any such connection, those same hawks set up their own intelligence units to come up with information more to their liking. One would expect the zealots at the American Enterprise Institute to dogmatically insist on the truth of ideologically driven assertions for which there is no evidence; one would expect better from Hitchens.

A striking example of the crude arguments Hitchens adduced in support of the concept of Islamo-fascism was his characterization of Palestinian suicide bombers as having the “avowed objective” of “establishing a theocratic dictatorship over all, whether believers or nonbelievers.” This is only true of the Hamas leadership, not of secular militant organizations like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. And it is a completely false characterization of most of the Palestinians who carry out such attacks. As Amira Hass, the Israeli journalist who probably knows more about Palestinian suicide bombers than any other journalist, noted in a recent talk at Berkeley, religion is not the motivating force behind most Palestinian suicide bombers. Many of them may not be particularly religious at all, she noted, and most are driven by the desire for revenge.

In the end, what was disappointing was Hitchens’ failure to acknowledge the ambiguities and complexities of the issues at hand. There was no evidence that any doubts about his position had entered his mind: Indeed, he was more strident and accusatory than in the first debate, accusing the intelligentsia of a trahison des clercs. One does not expect the hawks in the current administration — the Rove-programmed, Lone Star-swaggering Bush, the choleric old rams Rumsfeld and Cheney or the true-believing Wolfowitz — to dispassionately examine their beliefs. But Hitchens is not an administration apologist, he is an independent thinker. And the role of independent thinkers is to question everything, including their own beliefs or those of their circle — to be “clear, dry, without illusion,” to cite Stendhal’s prescription for the novelist.

Yet for whatever reason — perhaps a conviction that the importance of the cause trumps all other considerations, perhaps continuing anger at the dogmatic leftists who turned on him in a fury when he dared to violate orthodoxy after 9/11 — Hitchens did not acknowledge any shades of gray in the pro-war position. Although he did offer several very mild, general criticisms of the Bush administration, he also went considerably further than necessary in defending it. And on several occasions — when he flatly denied that it had surreptitiously tried to pump up the connection between Saddam and bin Laden, and when he derided the U.S. intelligence services while refusing even to acknowledge that the Bush administration had cooked its own intelligence, to take two examples — he came dangerously close to sounding like a party hack.

As the occupation grinds on, the rhetoric on both sides is likely to become harsher, more dogmatic, more moralistic. This is not desirable. Hitchens and Danner rightly agreed that we are responsible for the broken nation of Iraq; I am sure they would both also agree that we are responsible for our own. Americans and Iraqis are dying, and many more will die. The road ahead is dark and full of danger. It will take all of our clarity of thought, unimpeded by rancor and partisanship, to see our way.

Apologists for the tarnished military commissions, like Attorney General Eric Holder and the sixth and current chief prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins, acknowledge that our regular federal courts are best suited for terrorism trials. Holder told an audience at Northwestern University in March:

Simply put, since 9/11, hundreds of individuals have been convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related offenses in Article III courts and are now serving long sentences in federal prison.  Not one has ever escaped custody.  No judicial district has suffered any kind of retaliatory attack. These are facts, not opinions.  There are not two sides to this story. Those who claim that our federal courts are incapable of handling terrorism cases are not registering a dissenting opinion – they are simply wrong.

After singing the praises of the federal courts – which really have been swift, severe and successful in comparison to the six and-a-half dubious trials completed over the past decade at Guantanamo – Martins and Holder pivot to polishing the image of the tarnished military commissions they argue are well-suited for a small category of cases. Martins told an audience at Harvard in April:

It is perfectly reasonable to ask why – with concurrent jurisdiction over offenses that can be characterized as both federal civilian crimes and violations of the law of war and with comparable procedural protections – we should invest great energy and resources in military trials. The answer is that there is a narrow but important category of cases in which the pragmatic and principled choice among the lawful tools available to protect our people and serve the interests of justice is a reformed military commission.

Beltway bureaucrats are prone to using buzzwords to shade the truth. For example, rather than saying “yes, it makes us look bad when we lock people away in prison for a decade without a trial,” some might soften it up by using more subtle Beltway language: “The optics are not optimal.”  The word “pragmatic” has become a favorite of the spinmeisters. In truth, being pragmatic has become a synonym for being a wuss. When a bureaucrat capitulates instead of confronting barriers standing in the way of doing the right thing, and then cites the barriers as an excuse for choosing the easier path, he is lauded for making the “pragmatic choice.” Others might say he simply wussed out. President Obama has been “pragmatic” far too often on national security choices in his first three years in office.

There is nothing pragmatic or principled about undermining America’s reputation as a champion of the rule of law and a supposed model for the world to follow. The apologists for Obama’s decision to embrace military commissions call attention to similarities between the commission rules and the rules in federal courts, and they claim those rules are essentially the same. They argue that the two systems are virtually identical and that trial observers will find trials in the two forums nearly indistinguishable. In some things, however, close is just not good enough. An O’Doul’s looks like a beer and has a beer-like flavor, but a real beer drinker would never argue that an O’Doul’s is virtually indistinguishable from a Sam Adams. Just as a near-beer is not practically the same as a real beer, neither is near-justice the equivalent of real justice. The apologists may think they are fooling the rest of the world when they say at long last military commissions do real justice, but they are wrong.

Holder and Martins justify the need for a second-rate military commission system by talking up the alleged realities of the battlefield that they say make it impracticable for troops to worry about doing rights advisements and establishing a chain of custody for evidence while in the midst of a war. Their general principle is entirely valid … but also totally irrelevant in the cases they intend to prosecute before military commissions. Few of the 779 men ever held at Guantanamo were captured by members of the U.S. armed forces and even fewer still were apprehended on the battlefield as that term is commonly understood by ordinary human beings. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, was rousted from a sound sleep and arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate based on information developed by our civilian Central Intelligence Agency. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged USS Cole bomber, was apprehended in Dubai, a bustling global business center in the United Arab Emirates that no one considers a battlefield. Hambali was arrested near Bangkok, Thailand, by Thai authorities and later turned over to the CIA. The truth is that not a single one of the 14 so-called high-value detainees was captured by members of the U.S. armed forces on a battlefield; in fact, none were even apprehended in Afghanistan. The perception of some inexperienced 19-year-old Army private trying to read Miranda rights to a captured al Qaeda fighter while hunkered down in a foxhole with bombs exploding nearby and bullets whizzing past overhead is a canard.

Military commission apologists should have the integrity to stand up and tell the public the truth about the small category of cases they believe are best-suited for the second-rate procedures of the tarnished military commissions. The truth is the reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence – abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country – that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side. A military commission may be a justice-themed theatrical production – complete with a script, actors, a sound stage and costumes that create a passable courtroom-like atmosphere – but beneath that facade is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ charade where, as the government admits, even if a KSM or a Nashiri is found not guilty he returns to a cell to continue serving what is likely a life sentence. That should not inspire anyone to wave the flag and shout USA! USA! in celebration of our vaunted exceptionalism.

Lloyd Cutler was the youngest member of the prosecution team in the trial of eight Nazi saboteurs captured, convicted by a military commission and executed in a span of six weeks in the summer of 1942. He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on December 31, 2001, nearly 60 years after his military commission experience ended and 10 days before the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Cutler said that how we prosecute alleged al Qaeda terrorists will say as much about us as it does about al Qaeda. He warned that success will be judged by our ability to show the world that justice is in fact being done.

Had we heeded Mr. Cutler’s advice back in 2001 we would not be where we are now in 2012, fumbling along more than a decade later still trying to mold a second-rate process to fit around sets of bad facts we created when we turned our backs on the law and our values.  In normal practice, cases are developed to conform to the court. Here, because of how we mistreated some of the detainees, we are trying to develop a court to conform to the cases. We are setting an example for the world, but not a good one.

Some similar exemption must also be made for the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was found, badly injured and barely alive, after a 2002 firefight between U.S. troops and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. (Khadr’s father, an al-Qaida supporter and fundraiser, had apparently dropped him off at a Taliban compound a few weeks earlier.) Based on what we see in the painful, revealing documentary “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” — the first film to show actual interrogation footage from inside the secret American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Khadr became a sort of ritual sacrifice by the Canadian government, an offering to its American allies and/or overlords. His case became a hot political issue north of the border, where Canadians pride themselves on a society that is more egalitarian, and more civilized, than that of their American neighbors.

Following a Canadian Supreme Court decision, most of Khadr’s seven-hour interrogation at Gitmo by CSIS officers — the approximate Canadian equivalent of the CIA — has been declassified, and veteran lefty documentarians Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez use that claustrophobic, low-resolution 2003 footage as the basis for “You Don’t Like the Truth.” That sounds like something the interrogators might have said to Khadr, but it isn’t. It’s what he tells them after realizing they don’t want to hear his allegations that he was tortured by American forces, and that all his supposed confessions about knowing Osama bin Laden and attending al-Qaida barbecues were made up on the spot, to stop the pain.

You won’t see Khadr suffer physical torture on these surveillance tapes, although the interrogators rely on time-honored tactics of psychological abuse, alternately berating him and plying him with Big Macs. You will see a teenager who speaks idiomatic North American English, and who is obviously relieved to see fellow Canadians, whom he naively assumes have come to help him. And you’ll see him go through a near-total breakdown, sitting alone in the room weeping for his mother, after he realizes that no one cares about what happens to him and that he’s only interesting to his interrogators as long as he keeps making up stories about Osama and al-Qaida.

I have no idea whether Khadr actually threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Delta Force soldier, as was alleged after his capture. (Khadr has consistently denied it, and photographic evidence suggests that he had been shot through the back and was out cold before the soldier’s death.) But the Canadian interrogators barely mention it, and it feels suspiciously like an inflammatory distraction, thrown in mostly to alienate all possible North American sympathy. At best it’s an ancillary question. If Khadr was a genuine military combatant, then he can’t be prosecuted for killing an enemy soldier in battle. Furthermore, he would have to be considered a child soldier under international law, which theoretically immunizes him even for war crimes. Convicting him on such charges, as the government eventually did in a secret court on secret evidence, required the finding that he wasn’t a soldier but a civilian terrorist (even though he was supposedly linked to two organizations, al-Qaida and the Taliban, with whom the U.S. government has repeatedly said it’s at war).

Côté and Henríquez intersperse brief and highly effective interview segments between snippets of the interrogation tape, with subjects ranging from former U.S. military officers (including Khadr’s lawyer and psychiatrist) to former Guantánamo inmates (including Moazzam Begg, now a leading British activist for other detainees) to Khadr’s mother and sister (wearing full-face Islamic veils) to Damien Corsetti, the much-demonized former soldier who knew Khadr as a guard at Bagram. What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr. He was a vulnerable and confused kid whose own government turned its back on him, which made him a perfect candidate to become one of the few Gitmo detainees convicted of something. He was 15 when he was captured, and will be 31 when he (supposedly) gets out.

“You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with more cities and dates to follow.

He was apparently killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, though officials would not describe the method since the program is classified. A drone strike was reported by locals on Sunday night.

The officials say al-Shahri worked closely with the Pakistani Taliban to carry out attacks inside Pakistan, and was also a contender to assume some duties of al-Qaida’s second in command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. Al-Rahman was killed by a CIA drone strike in late August.

U.S. officials believe they can cripple the core al-Qaida organization if they take out the top four or five figures, following the killing in May of al-Qaida chief Osama by Laden by Navy SEALs. Eight of the network’s top 20 leaders were killed this year alone, according to the Pentagon’s undersecretary for defense intelligence, Michael Vickers, in remarks this week. Vickers predicted that with sustained counterterrorist operations, “within 18-24 months, core al-Qaida’s cohesion and operational capabilities could be degraded to the point that the group could fragment and exist mostly as a propaganda arm.”

But Vickers and CIA director David Petraeus said al-Qaida’s offshoots will remain a serious threat to the U.S.

A Pakistani intelligence official says Pakistani operations chief al-Shahri was a Saudi national, who had lived in the tribal regions of Pakistan, bordering eastern Afghanistan, since 2002.

One of the U.S. officials said the same individual is No. 11 on Saudi Arabia’s top-85 most wanted terror suspects, where his full name is listed as Osama Hamoud Gharman Al-Shihri. The official said the same person is No. 68 on Interpol’s most wanted list, where his name was spelled “Al-Shehri” and his birthdate was listed as Sept. 17, 1981.

Al-Shahri engaged in liaison mainly with Pakistan’s Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan to conduct coordinated attacks against targets inside Pakistan, one of the U.S. officials said. But al-Qaida also inspired the Pakistani Taliban to undertake its first known overseas attack, when a U.S. based operative tried and failed to detonate a car bomb in Times Square last year.

Al-Shahri’s killing was first reported by NBC News.

Al-Qaida’s senior planner of global terror operations, Adnan Shukrijumah, remains at large.

AP writer Matt Apuzzo contributed from Washington, and AP writer Riaz Khan contributed to this story from Peshawar.

David S. Cohen, Treasury’s point man for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Iran entered a “secret deal with al-Qaida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” He didn’t provide any details of that agreement, but said the sanctions seek to disrupt al-Qaida’s work in Iraq and deny the terrorist group’s leadership much-needed support.

“Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today,” Cohen said in a statement. “We are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”

Treasury said the exposure of the clandestine agreement would disrupt al-Qaida operations by shedding light on Iran’s role as a “critical transit point” for money and extremists reaching Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“This network serves as the core pipeline through which al-Qaida moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia,” it said..

Treasury said a branch headed by Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil was operating in Iran with the Tehran government’s blessing, funneling funds collected from across the Arab world to al-Qaida’s senior leaders in Pakistan. Khalil, the department said, has operated within Iran’s borders for six years.

Also targeted by the sanctions is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, appointed by Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida’s envoy in Iran after serving as a commander in Pakistan’s tribal areas. As an emissary, al-Rahman is allowed to travel in and out of Iran with the permission of government officials, the statement claimed.

The sanctions block any assets the individuals might have held in the United States, and bans Americans from doing any business with them.

No Iranian officials were cited for complicity in terrorism. The others targeted were Umid Muhammadi, described as a key planner for al-Qaida in Iraq’s attacks; Salim Hasan Khalifa Rashid al-Kuwari and Abdallah Ghanim Mafuz Muslim al-Khawar, Qatar-based financial supporters who’ve allegedly helped extremists travel across the region; and Ali Hassan Ali al-Ajmi, a Kuwait-based fundraiser for al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The action comes a day after the top U.S. commander for special operations forces said al-Qaida is bloodied and “nearing its end,” even as he warned that the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come.

Navy SEAL Adm. Eric T. Olson said bin Laden’s killing on May 2 was a near-fatal blow for the organization created by bin Laden and led from his Pakistan hide out. He said the group already had lost steam because of the revolts of the Arab Spring, which proved the Muslim world did not need terrorism to bring down governments, from Tunisia to Egypt.

Treasury’s public allegations against Iran may reflect part of a strategy to expand the pressure on smaller, less well-established offshoots of al-Qaida as the weakening of the group’s leadership threatens to make its activities more disparate. Washington already has re-focused much attention on al-Qaida’s Yemen-based branch, which has attempted to bomb a U.S.-bound jetliner and cargo planes in recent years.

But the exact nature of Iran’s relationship with al-Qaida remains disputed in Washington, with different branches of the intelligence community disagreeing about whether Iran is supporting al-Qaida as a matter of policy, according to one U.S. official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Some hardline militants backing al-Qaida, members of Islam’s majority Sunnis, see the Shiite Islam dominant in Iran as heretical, and they view Tehran’s regional ambitions as a greater threat than the West. Sunni insurgents in Iraq have used car bombs and suicide attacks against Shiite targets, killing thousands since 2003, as well as targeting Shiite militias allied to Iran.

Since 2001, Iran has appeared a somewhat reluctant host for senior al-Qaida operatives who fled there after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, keeping them under tight restrictions. After an initial period of cooperation with the West, Iran now seems to be a more comfortable haven even if it remains on the edge of al-Qaida’s orbit.

Western officials point to the release earlier this year of an Iranian diplomat who was held for 15 months after being kidnapped by gunmen in Pakistan.

In negotiations for the diplomat’s freedom, they say Iran promised better conditions for dozens of people close to Osama bin Laden who were being held under tight security. These included some of the terror chief’s children and the network’s most senior military strategist, Saif al-Adel.

Still, the life of the al-Qaida-linked exiles in Iran continues to be very much a blind spot for Western intelligence agencies. Few firm details have emerged, such as how much Iran limits their movements and contacts.

Last week the officials were talking to the Wall Street Journal. They told the paper that Al-Qaida would likely be shifting the focus of its attacks to Western targets outside of the United States. They said this was because it had become too difficult for them to strike inside the United States.

The Wall Street Journal said the U.S. officials had come to this conclusion based on evidence gleaned from flash drives found in the compound where bin Laden was killed. Much of the information we are learning about bin Laden and Al-Qaida, in fact, is said (by U.S. officials) to be coming from those flash disks, as well as a computer.

It was from the computer, for instance, that U.S. officials learned that bin Laden liked porn. Everyone ran with that story. It was great story. Not only was it sure to drive traffic, combining two of the most searched items on the internet these days (porn and bin Laden), but it also tweaks the legacy of a man who claimed that a strict adherence to Islam is what guided him in his global campaign of terror.

It is reminiscent of the news, also released by U.S. officials, immediately following the raid that led to bin Laden’s death that, in a vain attempt to protect himself, bin Laden used his wife as a human shield. Not so heroic. That detail turned out to be false. As was news that bin Laden was armed.

The news that bin Laden liked porn also came from U.S. officials. They leaked it anonymously to Reuters and then everyone else reported the Reuters report (including GlobalPost). In fact, all the details about the raid, what transpired and what was found after, has come from U.S. officials.

The New York Times reported on May 6 that the details surrounding the raid and the discoveries that followed have been fluid in their accuracy. It partly blamed a ravenous media, itself included. But it also blamed a desire by the United States to spin facts in order to diminish bin Laden’s legacy.

Was the revelation that bin Laden liked porn part of that spin? What about everything else we are learning from U.S. officials? Is that spin too?

If it’s not spin, all the reports surely play into the hands of the U.S. government. Not only did the Wall Street Journal story infer that our defense measures are working but it justified our continued pursuit of Al-Qaida militants all over the world, both through the war in Afghanistan and the ramping up of drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia.

The Washington Post story, meanwhile, suggests that we have been successful in Pakistan, where drone strikes have been plentiful, but Al-Qaida remained strong in Yemen, where the U.S. plans to increase its use of unmanned drones.

Other things we learned recently about bin Laden: He was planning an attack on the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11, he had a “direct” role in the planning of the July 7 bombings in London, a belief that runs counter to previous reports, and he was actively planning any number of other attacks as well — all according to “U.S. officials.”

If you say so.