I bought this book when it came out in 2003 and then let it sit on the shelf gathering dust because it seemed like a reminder of the unjustified optimism I had had about nation-building in Iraq. After seventeen years, my embarrassment had worn off, so I decided to give it a go this week.

And I was surprised! (This, even though I had probably read much of this book in the form of the original columns on Slate.) Hitchens did not, in fact, promise us a rose garden in Iraq. Throughout the book, even as he is arguing for military action to implement regime-change, he does not shy away from discussing the difficulties involved.

I think that the title was not meant to emphasize the rapidity of the coalition's military advances but the long period between evicting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 and the final removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

Having just read The Trial of Henry Kissinger earlier this month, I don't think Hitchens was entirely consistent between the two books (published only two years apart). In the Kissinger book, Hitchens mainly argued the law, while in the Iraq book he mainly argued the facts. I'm okay with that. I can't remember reading any book that in such a small space so effectively discussed the morality of war as A Long Short War does.

One thing that I think is hard to deny is that Hitchens loved the Kurdish people. It might have been impossible for him to analyze the situation unbiased by that love. ( )

"Much depended on how smart the second wave would be." (pg. 99)

At the start of this short book, Christopher Hitchens writes that, "at the evident risk of seeming ridiculous… I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously" (pg. 4). It is an effort that, for the most part, he succeeded in carrying out in his career, and much of his work – even his topical stuff – can still be enjoyed now, some eight years after his death. Unfortunately, one of Hitchens' strongest advocacies was for the Iraq War, something that has most definitely not aged well. As always, he writes good polemic (the 'appointment in Samarra' analogy, used at the end of the book, is quintessentially Hitchens) but it is not edifying to see Hitchens with his pants down. It is no wonder that Regime Change (published as A Long Short War in the USA) is one of his more obscure books, and long out of print.

It is chastening to read the book, knowing that Hitchens is making arguments on the Iraq intervention that proved to fall woefully short in subsequent years. If something can be said in their favour, it is that they are honestly made, which is a rarity for those who debated the Iraq question. Not for him the seedy evasions of a Chirac or, on the other side, the intelligence-gaming of a Blair (who stoked the fires of war whilst simultaneously cutting the defence budget, a borderline criminal act on the part of the Labour government that meant British soldiers faced IEDs in unarmoured Land Rovers and were reliant on the Americans for helicopter med-evac). Hitchens counted a number of Kurd and Iraqi dissidents among his personal friends, and perhaps he was too close; a self-styled witness to history whose friends failed to claim their moment when it came. He was right that Saddam deserved toppling; it is easy to forget, post-Abu Ghraib and post-ISIS, that Saddam was the go-to ghoul of the Nineties (remember the South Park movie?) and that Iraq was "already deeply traumatized" by his reign (pg. 71). Hitchens yearned for the overthrow of Saddam years (perhaps decades) before it became a neo-con cudgel, and was willing to back Bush and Cheney when they took it up. It is ironic that on page 22 he quotes G. K. Chesterton, saying that "when a man thinks that any stick will do… he is likely to pick up a boomerang." Hitchens' arguments here are not dishonest, only unfortunate. His book is not the shambles other reviewers have depicted it as, even if it does find itself arguing for a viewpoint that would soon play out into clusterfuck.

And that, really, is the crucial point. Had the intervention been a success – or, more accurately, had the initial successful invasion been followed up by a less abject occupation and reconstruction – then we might have been looking at this book as a principled and validated stand. Unfortunately, Bush and his administration won the war but lost the peace, and everyone who had supported it was damned by association. That stick came back a boomerang for Hitchens, at least on this one issue.

It is a shame that the book is so tainted in this way. Even if it's not his best writing, Hitchens' typically pugnacious rebuttals against the anti-war types land, and can still be enjoyed. He recognises that the Western Left had become "a status quo force, relativist and neutralist about totalitarian dictatorships" (pg. 90), and deconstructs many of the lazy arguments about the 'cowboy' Bush (9/11 could have "brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson" (pg. 58)) and the 'smear' of 'unilateralism'. He also sticks it to the duplicitous French. We forget nowadays how seedy the international scene was in the immediate post-Cold War period, particularly when Western intellectuals provided (and still provide) cover and delay for despots, with questions "posed by people who would not stay for the answer" (pg. 35). If those smug, anti-war types were right, it was largely on the stopped-clock principle, as their arguments cannot bear the weight of all the garlands heaped on them since (there's a reason they didn't carry the day in 2003). Hitchens is damned not so much by the war as by the arena: it is all but impossible for a Western democracy to prosecute a war in the modern age, under the holier-than-thou media glare and the obstructionist critics "demanding the impossible" (pg. 101). Even today, President Trump is condemned just for authorising the use of a MOAB, or tweeting his satisfaction that an ISIS leader is killed, when once war meant drinking from the skulls of your enemies. Every action, or inaction, becomes a failure in such an environment. Hitchens attempts to cut through all the euphemisms, non sequiturs and pious dishonesty which regularly characterise 'debates' in International Relations, where every mouthpiece seems to be paid by one NGO or another to advance a certain pre-conditioned viewpoint. It's no wonder he got bruised.

Even with this sympathy for the author, it's hard not to feel some embarrassment. I opened this review with a quote that much depended on how smart the second wave in Iraq would be. Unfortunately, it wasn't very smart, and it swamped its advocates. No doubt feeling vindicated after a successful initial invasion and overthrow of Saddam, a punch-drunk Hitchens hastily crows at detractors' claims of a "military quagmire" (pg. 101) and scoffs at the prediction that "Baghdad would become another Stalingrad" (pg. 84). A year later, the name Fallujah would be spread across the news. Such lines cause a pang and, however earnestly they were composed, these are sentences which do not benefit much from being read posthumously. ( )

This is an unbelievably terrible effort at polemicisism by a usually brilliant journalist. Hitchens was, and still is in favor of regime change in Iraq. He accepts the hard-line Neo-Conservative agenda of Wolfowitz and Cheney, and doesn't seem to have any problem with accepting each and every one of their lies.

-To begin, Hitchens has no problem with the knowledge that the US has supported Hussein throughout his worst atrocities, and somehow believes that the sudden desire to remove him is the product of noble and benign humanitarian intervention.

-Yet later he seems to have no problem with the knowledge that this war is about oil, writing "of course it's about oil, stupid." Hitchens thinks oil is worth fighting for. Are we supposed to accept this from a former Trotskyite? It is worth sacrificing human life for the sake of oil profits for the whores at Halliburton? This is sheer nonsense.

-The book is replete with dated material. Hitchens believed that Hussein had WMD, that he had well established ties to Al-Queda, and that the removal of Hussein was necessary for the stability of the region. This is utterly ridiculous.

-Long, Short, War is easily Hitchens' worst work of writing, and you shouldn't believe a word of it. The Iraq war is a miserable failure motivated by the forces of greed and barbarity. Hitch never should have stooped to the low level of Bush, Cheney, and all the rest. May he redeem himself in the future and admit the error of his ways. ( )

Weak. This book is Christopher Hichens putting out a quick diatribe of his opinions. I expected more from him. ( )