Hitchens on the Kurd/special-ops joint raid on Ansar al-Islam terror camp

A popular movement of Iraqi rebels sends the forces of Saddam Hussein scuttling into retreat. It then cleans up a nest of bubonic rats, with open links to Osama bin Laden.

From the sky, precision-guided weapons assist the local insurgents with pinpoint strikes, while on the ground 1,000 elite coalition troops provide some muscle and back-up.

Chemical-biological kits are discovered in the abandoned camp of the foe. Soon, oilfields will be secured and much-needed medical and nutritional aid will start to kick in. Civilian casualties are virtually nil, while serious harm is inflicted on the functionaries of a tyrannical fascist party.

Of course, that's only in the north of Iraq. And the Kurdish forces are fighting to keep and extend what they already have. And there are no sandstorms. Nor is there enough confusion to create "friendly fire" disasters. Still, this part of the conflict is being fought under conditions that are otherwise disadvantageous.

There is no friendly or neutral country to serve as a rearguard, as there is in the case of Jordan and Kuwait, because the fools who run today's Turkey couldn't even be bribed to act in their own self-interest.

I hope I can pause to point out that the Kurds are as Muslim as any other participant in this struggle. Their leaders, however, announce that they fight for freedom and not for religion.

The Ba'ath Party announces that it favours holy war and the tactic of suicide-murder. It says it has been readying this response for some time.

But you can still meet people who say that there is no "proven" connection between Baghdad and the nexus of international terrorism. You can still meet people, too, who don't think that Iraq has any genocidal weapons. The discovery on the northern front of clear preparations for chemical and bacteriological warfare will not, I suppose, make any dent in this self-deception.

The daily work of coalition forces is to make sure that he never gets to brag Kim Jong-il style, or even to dare to use such stockpiles as he has left.

Having just been in southern Iraq and Kuwait, and seen things going much more hesitantly on the southern front, I stopped over in London and turned on the BBC. I saw a presenter introduce Dr Hussain al-Shahristani of the Iraqi Refugee Council. He, we were solemnly told, would explain why Iraqis did not welcome coalition forces.

Any critic of Saddam, he said, was immediately murdered by Ba'ath Party squads. Those who refused to fight for Saddam met the same fate.

Tribal elders were ordered to volunteer their kinsmen for the party on pain of execution. It was disgraceful that the coalition forces had not protected the inhabitants of every town and city from such reprisal, since they had become legally responsible for their safety.

This was not quite, perhaps, what the presenter had curtain-raised for us. But it was an excellent point, nonetheless.

I like seeing British soldiers bulldoze the murals of Iraq's "Dear Leader". I enjoyed seeing them supervise the delivery of food and water as well, even though it was sometimes haphazard.

I wish they were demolishing the Ba'ath Party system block by block, instead of brick by brick. And I can hardly say what I feel when I see them risking casualties rather than run the risk of inflicting them.

But all of this - all of it - argues for more intervention and more steadfastness and not less. In every detail of this campaign, Saddam's regime has shown that everything we even suspected about it was true.

The situation with the Kurds inspires me the most as I watch the war against Saddam's Iraq unfold. For a moment, I feared that Bush would falter and allow the Turks to have their way in northern Iraq. I should have had more faith in his commitment to liberty.

This is the America of our fathers. The Kurds are now our brothers in arms. On Deutsche-Welle TV, one of them said (translated), "I'll fight anywhere and anytime [Coalition leadership] asks."

That's how to build a nation: with people fighting for their own freedom.

Is Christopher coming to the Light side from the Dark side??? The Mirror will probably fire him to make room for Petah Arnett.

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