We here at Hitchens Watch are continuing to quietly applaud our preening Popinjay for getting his feathers in a ruffle over Iran's nuclear program and squawking loudly about some sort of "confrontation" with that nation, even if he's not, alas, doing so with quite as much full-throated fervency as he did over Iraq in '03. You see, it's hard to imagine anything more out of touch, more flabbergastingly imbecilic, more crazed, more sadistic, more in vain, more repulsive—and therefore more effective at wiping off the map and from the page of time what remains of Hitchens' credibility and reputation—than for our psittacine to keep on shrieking for a war against Iran to all and sundry. Parroting the jingo-extremist line on Iran this earnestly has surely earned him a cracker or two from Norman Podhoretz himself. Bravo Hitch!

Now I think this goes to show you how sometimes you truly have to be an intellectual to say something so stupid. As even many hawks have conceded, an Operation Opera 2010 against Iran's nuclear facilities by Israel would, at best, delay their nuclear program by merely a few years, and a ground, or aerial, invasion by the US is virtually inconceivable considering how bogged down they are in Iraq and Afghanistan currently. Probably the main outcome of such an attack would be to rally the revolting Iranian population, and the Muslim world, around the regime in Tehran, and help to refasten the Mullahs' grip on power internally. It would be hard to present a better gift to the Ahmadinejads and Ayatollahs of that country than a futile and feckless war against, in effect, the people of Persia.

I had figured that if Hitchens was going to continue to play the Tough Guy Neo-Con role he would be at least calling for a little more practical mass murder, like say, desperately trying to convince us that Somali piracy is a form of Islamic terrorism and that fighting the Shabaab by proxy has demonstrably failed, but come on, seriously suggesting that the US should invade Iran now, after everything that has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan (which would be cake-walks in comparison to a successful war in Iran) is at this point pretty much a sign of bat-shit lunacy, or maybe even evidence of the onset of senility. And naming his upcoming memoir "Hitch-22" just reinforces our suspicion that he's nuts. Although there is a catch: Hitch has to be crazy to compare himself with that famous species of paradoxical military lunacy, but to implicitly describe himself and what he's been doing as crazy would show he's being pretty sane after all.

Flying Rodent, the brains behind the brilliantly satirical Decentpedia (the reports of its death being fortunately exaggerated) recently gave us his psychoanalysis of Hitchens' twisted mind on the topic of Iran. It turns out we are not the only ones deeply concerned about Hitch's mental health, and is worth quoting in full:

...And a belated happy new year to Chris Hitchens, who I'm starting to suspect is neither misguided nor a deluded optimist, but rather a brutal psychopath and a raving homicidal maniac.

The subject matter is, of course, the hated Iranian regime: aggressions and provocations by, and the tonnage of bombs we will have to drop on the Iranian populace in order to bring them the joy of freedom.

Today's tipple is Johnnie Walker Black Label, and the crimes of the mullahs - or the Revolutionary Guard, as Hitch now terms the Iranian regime - they go into countries where they're not wanted, arm violent insurgent groups and militias, shoot protestors in the streets, send death squads to the other side of the planet, seek nuclear weapons and they torture, rape and disappear prisoners. "The existence of such regimes is incompatible with us," Hitchens says, with a straight face.

Fear not, though - Chris has the solution...

"...If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them... They’ll say I’m asking for war, but I’ll say no. I’m not. I’m recognizing that someone is looking for war. We should be firm enough to say “Alright.” We didn’t look for it. We’ve tried everything short of war for a long time. Everything..."

Reel your eyes back into their sockets, folks, because Hitchens is actually contending that the Iranians - whose experience of war in the last five decades was fending off a western-backed assault from our previous intolerable modern Hitler, Saddam Hussein, at the cost of half a million lives - are gearing up to make war upon their neighbours. This aggression will not stand, man.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that we, the injured and passive western democracies, have actually attacked, invaded and currently occupy the territories immediately to Iran's west and north, not to mention bombing Yemen to their south. If we include the Israelis in our thinking - and we really should - we can add Lebanon, Gaza and Syria to the list of local countries we have been forced to attack.

Should we mention that two of the US presidential candidates threatened to attack Iran with nuclear weapons during the recent primaries; and that prominent public figures have been calling for war with Iran for most of the decade?

Still, let us not forget that the Iranians are warmongering, irrational lunatics who cannot be deterred.

Other readers might notice that our attempts to democratise Iraq and Afghanistan have been a long, outrageously expensive and horrifically bloody nightmare, and that Hitchens is one of the few commentators who has refused to budge an inch from his previous, lunatic aggressiveness. Thank God, Hitch knows how to avoid a re-run of our hideous failures...

"(We'll say) ...We're not going to stay. We're handing the country over to you. We're not occupying... (Earlier) ....How many Iranian dissidents are going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?"

How many indeed? Perhaps our troops will be greeted with flowers and our not-occupation will pay for itsnotself during this hypothetical war, in which we might as well clad our soldiers in natty white uniforms with red crosses on the front. Where these soldiers are going to come from is another matter, but not one that I expect to trouble Hitchens' fevered dreams of explosions and righteous violence.