When Christopher Hitchens died he was a year older than I. For most of my life I’d never heard of him. Then 9/11 happened, and he was all over the TV screens advocating for war, not with regret but bloodthirstily. Here, for example, are his thoughts about cluster bombs:

If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

That way of thinking is abhorrent to me.

Hitchens was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq War, long after many other former supporters had begun to have misgivings about it. Those of us who opposed it from the beginning were, in his view, appeasers.

The only Hitchens I know is the one who showed himself in his public pronouncements following the tragedy of 9/11, and I didn’t like that one. So all these eulogies for the “brilliant polemicist” leave me cold. Shouldn’t the polemicist be held to account if his positions are unconscionable?

Glenn Greenwald has more.