Michael,

I think both you and TNR have gotten this one completely wrong. Ms. Hirsi Ali is a kind of feminist that Muslims and many Christians and Jews seem to revile because she speaks out against the kind of terror of place and mind that many keep to themselves. She is former member of the VVD, a Dutch political party that combines conservative views on the economy, foreign policy, crime and immigration with a liberal stance on drugs, abortion and homosexuals. Why would she not support an invasion of Saudi Arabia? She may not be against the Bush family's ties with the house of Saud (I cannot answer for her), but she is clearly against the insulting laws and canons of Wahabi Islam. What's right about the article is that people will clap at anything, what's missed is that she is not doing enough to substantiate her position.

I wasn't taking issue with Hirsi Ali, whom I respect enormously. I also think TNR got it right to say that she didn't meant to advocate invading SA over Afghanistan but rather over Iraq. Fair enough. This seems to me a more reasonable reshuffling of Wilsonian-democratic priorities coming from her.

But it is not Hirsi Ali's geopolitical and moral calculus I question, but rather Bill Maher's and his pathetic audience's.

All I meant to show was that those who glibly rattle off other autocratic regimes in the Middle East as better might-have-been targets aren't really serious when they do so. They use priority and urgency as a prequisites of intervention, yet they believe in neither priority or urgency. The only time they take the full measure of a dictator's human rights abuses or his supposed "imminent threat" to the United States is when the United States plans to do something about him. Witness the Iraqi Liberation Act, passed without a dissenting vote in the Senate in 1998. Where were the impassioned "No Blood for Oil" marchers then, or the Richard Clarks, for that matter, stating that Saddam was solidly "in his box"? (Clark himself evidently didn't believe so, since part of his legal brief for encouraging the Clinton administration to bomb the Al-Shifa factory in Khartoum was that the Sudanese government was facilitating an alignment between the Baath and Osama bin Laden!)

What we know now about Saddam's WMD capabilities has only been known for certain since he was removed from power. Before then, every major intelligence agency on the planet believed the tyrant was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program, already had an advanced bio-chemical one, and was violating U.N. trade sanctions, which had been in place since 1991.

Now consider: Had George Bush instead pinpointed Saudi Arabia as ripe for regime change, arguing (correctly) that most of the 9/11 terrorists came from there and that the Riyadh government suborns radical madrassas and Al Qaeda, what are the odds that the shrill "Real Time" lot would have have paid any more credence to this argument than it did to the one about going into Iraq? And if nation-building in Saudi Arabia didn't go so smoothly either, would we now be hearing from them that the initial case for war was overstated, "sexed up" or completely disingenuous?  Of course we would.