This isn't just Hitch. The people who voted for Bush on terrorism/security/Iraq are all trying to figure out what to make of the fact that their co-pilots are the religious right--something that many of us have been trying to tell them for months.
Some of them are actively denying it, some of them are shrugging at it. Hitch is the only one brazen enough to pull an Orwell (bad kind) and say that up is down and down is up and Bush is really a hard-core secular humanist even though he doesn't know it.
Simple paradigm: kill one militant, create one stinking corpse and at least one more militant. We played this game 35 or 40 years ago: kill a Cong, make a Cong. Add all the religious rehetoric you want, but whack-a-mole is just one more manifestation of the law of diminishing returns.
Not surprisingly, we're paying Iraquis to tote guns who tell us, were we not paying them to tote on our behalf, they'd be toting for bin Laden or whomever. I doubt these guys are extremists; I suspect they're just (a) otherwise unemployed and (b) angry.
This snake has swallowed its tail and it's the goons inside the Administration (think Wolfowitz) and their toadies in the cheering section who have conned the electorate into paying them for four more years to sort out this mess they've created.
Our job is to ensure that this foolishness ends with Iraq. No more "Crusades" (thank you, Mr. President, that was damned diplomatic of you), a clamp on the Cheney-Halliburton-no-compete-contract connection that would appear to put money in the Vice President's pocket (let us bow our heads in memory of Spiro Agnew), and a jack russell terrier-like ripping at Republican heels every time they speak of their popular agenda, their mandate, or (God help us) their landslide.
Fun ensues.