Thank you, Peter. Christopher, you have 10 minutes.

And I’ll take all nine and a half of them. It goes, by the way, if drunk with sight of power, we lose, L-O-O-S-E, wild tongues that have not thee in awe. Such boastings as the Gentiles use, and lesser breeds without the law. It’s the whole magnificence of Kipling that is exactly what makes people nervous about quoting him correctly. Because when you get it right, it’s unsettling. And lots of things about this are unsettling, and so they should be.

Peter’s military background

And it’s my duty, as well as my pleasure, to congratulate Peter on keeping things edgy for this evening. You didn’t come here, we hope, for a banal debate, ladies and gentlemen. Now listen, you can’t see underneath my shirt the garlic necklace. (audience laughing) And you have no idea that I’m fighting my way by Northwest Airlines back from here tomorrow morning to be in New York for the memorial service for William F. Buckley at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In other words, you’ve got no idea what I’ve been going through lately, and there’s no real reason why you should. But when they said to me this evening, “When you come out, do you want to be at the throne or at the pulpit?” (audience laughing) I did feel slightly discombobulated. And when I said, “Well, where’s the men’s room?” And they said, “It’s down there, and there’s men’s room, and then there’s women’s room, I understand that bit, and in between Sexton’s room.” I began to feel more discombobulated still.

And today is the anniversary of the day in 1945 when my mother and my father got married, after both of them having been through a very long war, a very long, brutal, cruel war that succeeded the long austerity, poverty struggle with which they’d had to beguile their youth in the 1920s and ’30s of interwar Britain. If you can even assume that people in Europe in those days lived between two wars rather than endured a long armistice between two terrifying resumptions of hostilities.

Every time you read fragile truths in the New York Times, think of that as applying to the 1920s and the 1930s in Europe, and you’ll get a better idea of what those resumption of hostilities were. And yes, I think if I look at my brother and think, “Well, our parents got married in this day in 1945,” that is a little unsettling. It’s also, I think, hope you don’t mind my saying so, rather reassuring. We are both here after all and determined to testify.

Now, on this question about the Mesopotamian War, (audience laughing) everybody knows why they oppose it, don’t they? Everyone’s clear on what their reasons are. We were told wrong things. We were given inaccurate information by dubious governments. We were sort of cheated into feeling that we, our delegations of the UN had overstated the matter of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. In fact, when you think about it, you’ll find that it’s probably even wrong to mention Saddam Hussein in the same breath as weapons of mass destruction or terrorism.

I have a couple of tests of my own where the people know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about Iraq. Anyone who says that Saddam Hussein was okay a bad guy doesn’t know what they’re talking about. You hear that said quite a lot. They don’t know. They don’t know what fascism feels like. They don’t know what it’s like to see families forced at gunpoint to applaud the torture and execution in public of their family members.

They don’t know what it’s like to see 180,000 members of the Kurdish people at a minimum killed by poison gas in the Northern provinces of Iraq. They don’t know what it took Anglo-American, British American policy to put a no-fly zone from 1991 onwards over those two zones to make sure that those two genocides could not be replicated.

They don’t know what it would be like to be a citizen of Kuwait or Iran seeing Saddam Hussein’s army coming over the horizon, attacking your civilians in that way, abolishing in one case the whole existence of a member state of the Arab League and of the Muslim, excuse me, the Islamic conference and of the United Nations, abolishing it, annexing it, making it part of Iraq. They didn’t hear the speech from Saddam Hussein saying the only mistake he ever made was that he invaded Kuwait before he’d finished the nuclear weapon.

He should have done it the other way around. First get the nuclear weapon, the Tawaitha reactor which we found as a result of the Kuwait war when we weren’t looking for it. Get the bomb first, then invade Kuwait, then ask them what they’re gonna do now now that I’ve invaded it. Don’t do it, don’t get it the wrong way around. We lived at this man’s permission for a long time. We lived by his warrant. Only his stupidity allowed us to be as complacent as we were.

In the meantime, fighters in Northern and Southern Iraq were fighting against a time that we should have been fighting ourselves. The liberation of Iraq, in other words, the decision that we had to move the Iraqi people and the region into a post Saddam era will stand, I’m convinced, as one of the greatest decisions of American statecraft, as one of the things that American soldiers, male and female, and politicians who voted for it, those who’ve defended it, would be proudest of in the future of any decision we’ve ever made.

Despite the ridicule, despite the incompetence, despite the failures, despite the disappointments, let us review what we’ve done. First, we have removed a keystone state of the Middle East from the control and sole ownership of a psychopathic crime family who owned all of Iraq and treated its people as if they were disposable citizens. I remind you that this keystone state occupies a choke point on the Gulf and an arterial carotid point in the world economy that cannot be left to the control of a fascistic mafia.

I remind you further that it exists between the exorbitant Sunni Wahhabi theocracy of Saudi Arabia and the no less exorbitant Shia theocracy of Iran, that it is the keystone that allows us, yes us, we who have the right to do this, we who have the right to insist on oil, we who don’t have to be ashamed of mentioning oil in the same breath as democracy, to say if we can recuperate Iraq, if we can recuperate its oil industry, if we can stop it being the private property of a psychopathic crime family, we can not only help the Iraqis, but we can undercut the monopoly or the duopoly of Shia Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone think this is a matter of indifference? Is anyone willing to get up and say, you sir, very good for you, I admire your nerve, I wouldn’t mind if you were the only one, as you seem to be, you’re indifferent to it. The rest of us here, voters and consumers, all believers in freedom, might possibly want to take the view that it can’t be for us a nothing question, what happens to Iraq.

Iraq’s environmental devastation

We’ll add, in the remaining time, that we have brought one of the great war criminals of the world to justice and put him and his crime family and his main complicit associates on trial, in public, in a country where, until recently, very recently, it was death, slow death, very slow death, to possess a cell phone or a satellite dish, that we have undone what UNESCO calls the greatest crime against the human ecology ever committed, the destruction of the marshes of southern Iraq, the oldest wetlands in the Middle East, the smoke and destruction of which could be seen from the space shuttle, so terrible was the environmental decay, that we have proclaimed the autonomy of the Kurdish people, the oldest and largest nation in the world, not to have a state of their own, and that where they live in their federalized, democratized provinces in northern Iraq, which were released from Saddam Hussein’s control a full 12 years before the liberation of the rest of the country, business flourishes, press flourishes, democracy flourishes, civil society flourishes.

The sooner, the earlier the intervention by the British and American forces in Iraq, in other words, the happier, the sooner, the greater, the deeper, the more enduring, and the more useful in the future is the outcome. I’m willing to defend, because I’ve just seen time, I’m willing to defend and underline and repeat and restate and emphasize everything I have said so far. So all of you who’ve come here under the pathetic illusions peddled by Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and moveon. org have all your work still ahead of you, and you thought it was gonna be easy, didn’t you? Bye now.

Well, it’s obviously come to the actuarial. Seems a waste of Hitchensism in a way to just reduce things to the balance sheet, but we do balance sheet, we do balance sheet properly. Let me suggest some things to you first. Everybody knows that there isn’t a single clever person here who doesn’t know, is there, watching this on a webcast, who doesn’t know that you can’t mention weapons of mass destruction and Saddam in the same breath, even though he used them against Iran and against the Kurds, wrongly described as his own people within the borders of his own country, and was continuing to incubate and maintain the capacity to recover them.

However, for actuarial purposes, let me just say that having enforced the resolutions that governed this question in the case of Iran, we forced the capitulation of Colonel Gaddafi, whose stock of WMD we had underestimated. When he came in, and he didn’t surrender, I might add, to Kofi Annan or Jack Chirac, where did Colonel Gaddafi come the few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, to say, okay, you can take all my stockpile now and put it in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it now is, which is where it should have been. You can come to Kofi Annan.

Hold your applause, comrades. I know I’m never gonna get any from a, (audience laughs) but thanks for trying. I sort of appreciate it. You can come to Kofi Annan or Jack Chirac, or the equally-prostituted Gerhard Schroder, the real blood-for-oil pimps and prostitutes who constituted the leadership of the antiwar movement in European politics. No, he came to Tony Blair, and he came to George Worsh. I give up. Okay, let’s have a look at this big stockpile that Colonel Gaddafi’s got all this time. It’s bigger than we thought, much bigger than we thought.

We accused him of a lot. It was much worse than we thought, as it had been with Saddam Hussein at the time of Kuwait, much worse than we thought. Well, let’s have another look. Where’s he got it from? Where’s it come from? It’s come from North Korea, and it’s come from Pakistan, Pakistan, our ally. So by walking back the catch, as it’s called in Washington, we discover from this capitulation, the A. Q. Khan Network, we shut it down, or at least we put its leader under house arrest, at least for now.

At least we put the North Koreans in the frame, and they know we’ve got them. This is the biggest nonproliferation victory there has ever been for any U.S. administration ever in history. That’s the first thing. The second is we catch the guy who rolled Leon Klinghoffer off the deck of a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, who avoided arrest when he was caught, had to be released, because he was traveling on a diplomatic passport. A what passport?

A what passport? A diplomatic passport. What diplomatic passport? An Iraqi diplomatic passport, just like Abu Nidal had been traveling on, just like every other terrorist gang you’ve ever heard of in the Middle East had been headquartered in Baghdad. We shut that down too. You think this is nothing? You think it’s nothing? You want to sneer at it and say, Bush says mission accomplished?

Sneer, go on, sneer. These achievements are real. There are four, four reasons for which a state, previously sovereign, may lose its sovereignty, may be deemed to be outside the law. They are four. I’ll recite them quickly. One, violations of the Genocide Convention, which we have signed. And by all means, let’s impose this on Sudan. And by all means, let’s impose it on them for Darfur, and on China for many other offenses too, because just as China has backed Saddam Hussein, and just as it backs Robert Mugabe, and just as it’s backed the worst elements in Burma, so it has been behind many of our woes in the Middle East.

So that’s the first thing. The Genocide Convention may not be violated. We’ve signed it. It mandates that you must move to punish or prevent genocide. Second, a regime loses its sovereignty if it violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iraq has used weapons of mass destruction on its own territory and on the territory of others. Third, you may lose your sovereignty if you give aid, comfort, and harbor to international terrorist groups.

Iraq is multiply convicted of this, and fourth, for occupying and invading the territory of other nations, which Iraq had done several times, continued to do, and was intending to do again. This is not, unfortunately, the case with all the despots we’d like to get rid of. The cheap point that Peter ends with, saying if you’re gonna do Saddam Hussein, don’t you have to do anybody, must reach the critical standard I’ve just mentioned, the four great offenses, repeated, flagrant, gross and intentional, and going to be repeated, all of them again.

It was essential that we move Iraq and the region into a post-Saddam Hussein era, and the woes that have fallen upon us, the second thoughts we’re bound to have, the worries about the blunders that we made while doing it, none of which I would deny, and some of which I know more about than you could dare to know. I know things about what went wrong that would curl your hair. Still, none of these can impeach the idea that we did it not too soon, but much too late, and that only therein lies our shame.

The debate on God’s existence

Well, since Peter went first on the previous question, Christopher will go first on this one. Christopher, 10 minutes.

You mean you’re ready for another burst from, okay, from CH. There’s something wrong with this coin toss business. Okay, let me see.

I don’t think that’s gonna take 10 minutes to disprove the existence of God. (audience laughing) The atheist proposition is the following. Most of the time. It may not be said that there is no God. It may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one. That was the situation after Lucretius and Democritus and the original anti-theistic thinkers began their critique of religion, and I would just ask you all, ladies and gentlemen, to bear in mind a mild distinction while we go on.

You may wish to be a deist, as my heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were, and you may not wish to abandon the idea that there must be some sort of first or proximate cause or prime mover of the known and observable world and universe, but even if you can get yourself to that position, which we unbelievers maintain is always subject to better and more perfect and more elegant explanations, even if you can get yourself to that position. All your work is still ahead of you.

To go from being a deist to a theist, in other words, from someone who says, God cares about you, knows who you are, minds what you do, answers your prayers, cares which bits of your penis or clitoris you saw away or have seenn away for you, minds who you go to bed with and in what way, minds what holy days you observe, minds what you eat, minds what positions you use for pleasure, all your work is still ahead of you and lots of luck because there’s nobody, there’s nobody, even Aquinas had to give it up.

There’s no one who can move from the first position to the second. So I could, and I’m actually strongly tempted to, I can leave it right there, but then it’s not in my nature to let off a captive audience so easily. (audience laughing) So I’ll add a couple of things. The reasons why I am glad this is not true would I suppose be the gravamen of my case. Some people I know who are atheists will say they wish they could believe it.

Some people I know who are former believers say they wish they could have their old faith back, they miss it. I don’t understand this at all. I think it’s an excellent thing that there’s no reason to believe in the absurd propositions I just admittedly rather briefly rehearsed to you. The main reason for this I think is that it is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave.

It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you, who must indeed subject you to a total surveillance around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life, I say of your life, before you’re born, and even worse than where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true?

The tyranny of totalitarianism

Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I’ve been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president. Kim Jong-il is only head of the party and head of the army. He’s not head of the government of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father. Kim Il-sung. It’s a necrocracy. A thanatocracy. It’s one short of a trinity, I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved.

But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea. Does the Quran, does the Quran or the Bible offer you that liberty? No. No, the tyranny, the misery, the utter ownership of your entire personality. The smashing of your individuality only begins at the point of death. This is evil. This is a wicked preachman. So that’s the first thing. Second, it attacks us in our deepest, in our deepest most essential integrity. It’s an insult to us in other ways.

It says that we, you and I, could not individually or collectively decide upon a right action or a right thing without celestial divine permission. We would not know right from wrong if we did not have heaven’s permission to do so. Where else, how else could we know? Our human solidarity, our innate knowledge of right and wrong, our acute awareness of what is fair and what is unfair, what is just and worthless to us, these come to us also as gifts from the great unassailable dictator enthroned. What could abolish our integrity?

Religion as a first version of truth

What could abolish our honesty, our decency, our dignity more than that? The second, third, is a little more pragmatic. Religion is our first, that’s why I’m so fascinated with it. It’s our first version of the truth. It’s our first attempt as a species. It’s what we tried when we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know we lived on a spherical planet. We didn’t know that our planet revolved around the sun. We didn’t know that there were microorganisms that explained disease. We thought diseases came from curses or witches or ill-wishing or devils or dust devils.

We didn’t know anything from the childish, terrified, ignorant origins of our animal primate species we come to religion. It’s also our first attempt at philosophy, our first attempt at morality, our first attempt at healthcare actually, but because it was our first, it is our worst. We now have better explanations for all these dreads and we have cleared up all of these mysteries, yet we still dwell.

And in some countries, in some societies, not just dwell, but live under a totalitarian regime that forbids us to think about the progress that has been made or denies us the knowledge that these advances have in fact occurred. So it has become, where once it probably was an aid to our survival, a really great peril to our continued ability to live as a civilized species.

Thus, it seems to me that in point of its proposing of a totalitarian solution to what is after all a real problem, to its ghastly reliance upon the supernatural rather than the much more miraculous, much more beautiful, much more elegant, much more numinous, much more harmonious natural explanations. Think how much lovelier Einstein and Darwin are. Think how much more elegant and persuasive they are than the idea of the burning bush or the demand that without circumcision there can be no redemption. Just picture it and then I’ll give you one final thought experiment.

This is what you have to believe now if you’re a monotheist. ‘Cause we now know things we didn’t used to know. We know that the human species could be as much as 200,000 years ago. Did it become separate from the Cro-Magnons and the rival pre-human species? Could be as little as 100. Richard Dawkins thinks 200,000, Francis Collins who did the Human Genome Project, who’s by the way, CS Lewis kind of Christian thinks 100,000. All right, I’ll take 100. I’ll take 100. Here’s what you have to believe.

Human intervention in Middle East

For 100,000 years, humans are born as a primate species. Expectation of life, what, 25 years for the first few 100,000 years? First few tens of thousands. Infant mortality, rife. Microorganism disease, terrifying. Earthquakes, volcanoes, extraordinary. But, and fights over land, over territory, over food, over women, over tribalism, frightening too. For 95, 96,000 years, heaven watches this with folded arms, with indifference, with coldness. And then around three to 4,000 years ago, but only in really barbaric, illiterate parts for the Middle East. Not in China, not in China or where people can read or think or do science.

No, no, no. In barbaric, illiterate, backward parts of the Middle East, it’s decided we can’t let this go on. We better intervene. And what better way than by human sacrifices and plagues and mass murder. And if that doesn’t make them behave morally, we just don’t know what does. If there is a single person in this room who can bring themselves to believe anything remotely like that, they convict themselves of being first, very stupid, and second, very immoral. And thus, it seems to me that the case for divine intervention and for the supernatural falls and that we should be glad that it’s fallen. And thank you.