Christopher Hitchens has a piece in Slate, deriding accounts of a last-minute peace offer from the Iraqis. I don’t think there’s much to the story, but I was struck by this paragraph, which gives an indication of the kind of parallel universe still inhabited by many hawks.

The Iraqi side openly conceded that U.N. inspections as then being conducted were a farce and a sham. Hassan al-Obeidi, chief of foreign operations of the Iraqi intelligence service, is at one point reported to have offered to allow “2,000 FBI agents” to enter Iraq and look at anything they wanted. He had clearly got bored with the easy and transparent routine of thwarting Hans Blix.

Given that there were no weapons, stopping Blix from finding any was indeed easy and transparent’.

Read as a whole, the piece seems to show Hitchens morphing from his original position (war for human rights) to one of generic hawkishness.