Notoriously ill-reasoned Bush apologist Christopher Hitchens continues to defend discredited facts long after they've been dismissed by everyone else. In the last two weeks he has concentrated his venom on Ambassador Joe Wilson who exposed the Iraq-Niger connection as nonsense.
Hitchens is insisting that, forged documents notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was desperately trying to purchase Uranium from Niger. And he is attacking Wilson primarily for making a laughingstock of such suggestions.
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson rather impolitely puts a boot up Hitchens' ass.
Saddam's ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, made a trip to Niger to, as a literate person can understand from Wilson's account, encourage African statesmen to break the diplomatic sanctions against Iraq which, along with their connection to all other UN sanctions, were devastating the country.
Hitchens' alternate theory is that Zahawie had no other business in Africa but to purchase uranium for bomb-making since poor Niger is merely:
a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore.
For a while Hitchens was saying that the ultimate evidence of Saddam's WMDs lay in the garden bed of Iraqi engineer Mahdi Obeidi. In his book The Bomb in My Garden (and soon to be a Johnny Depp-produced film) Obeidi tells of how he built a centrifuge prototype for Saddam in the 1980's, but buried it in his garden when UN inspections took force following the first Gulf War. Components and blue prints for the centrifuge prototype were abandoned and forgotten since 1991; any sane person would see this story as ultimate evidence of Saddam's impotency, not his danger. However, Hitchens has championed this book as the smoking gun in Saddam's quest for WMD. Compare the centrifuge prototype to Iran's functioning centrifuges. Then ask yourself what Saddam could have possibly done with any uranium, had he actually been seeking it. With only a prototype of an uranium enriching device buried in parts of a small garden, Saddam would have been better off mass-producing glow-in-the-dark Spiderman watches.
Of the many ridiculous claims Hitchens has made about Saddam's nuclear ambitions the fantastical Niger connection isn't even the most absurd. Hitchens' claim that Saddam was attempting to buy nuclear ICBMs from North Korea "off the shelf" stands in a class all by itself. Mind you, the "off the shelf" wording is what is most laughable. That North Korea is even capable of producing nuclear weapons is a source of some debate. The only people convinced of North Korea's bomb-making abilities are the same folk that assured us Saddam was days away from nuclear proliferation. Even sillier still, North Korea would have to create some kind of delivery system for a nuclear device for it to be even practical. North Korea's rocketry skills are commensurate to their skills at producing NBA stars.
If Christopher Hitchens imagines that Kim Jung Il is stocking his shelves with nuclear ICBMs for sale, there's almost nothing he can't imagine. Few are served when imagination is the crucial rationale in debates of war and conquest.