springheel_jack has the best take.

A moral sensibility that causes something like the ongoing nightmare in Iraq in the name of its own moral certitude is one that is feckless and infantile, convinced that any desire that is clear enough and enunciated loudly enough cannot help but bring about the right result simply of itself. This is magical thinking expressed not by ritual but by tantrum.

I suspect that this was not the actual motivation of Blair's Iraq policy - more of a traditional British effort of undermining Europe in order to maintain a global role in excess of actual significance comes to mind. But it's certainly the best comment I've heard on Blair's rhetoric.

I heard the same radio program, but just before it was Hitch promoting his new book about how religion poisons everything. He is still launching it, but proudly announced that it's already no. 3 on Amazon. I think the book will probably be worth reading for those who think that secularism did more damage in the 20th century than religion - they discussed the religious origins of Fascism, the magical nonsense that was embedded in Nazi ideology (plus the papal dispensations for both), the fact that the Japanese emperor was a god (not a mere earthly representative of god), and the fact that Stalin had been a priest before he became a communist. I suspect the argument becomes a bit thin around there, but there's no doubt that communism had many religious qualities in its 20th century manifestations - in particular its appeal to those who needed a place to which they could escape from the tortured reality of human existence. Hitchens only achieves his aim by pointing to the 'primitive' and 'backward' notions of the Russian and Chinese masses as evidence of their religious need. Why not then the 'primitive' and 'backward' nature of mid-20th century Germans?

There was a bit too much mutual backslapping by atheist ex-lefties (although Philip Adams has not undergone quite the same epiphany as Hitch). But I enjoyed three things about their discussion. (1) Hitchens is as good at talking over the top of his interlocuter as Adams; (2) Hitchens has written quite a lot of fairly misogynous stuff recently, but in the context of
their discussion about genital mutilation, he emphasized that the religious attitude to vaginas is far worse than it is towards penises and this horror of female sexual function is not confined to Christianity and Islam; (3) I love the fact that there is clearly a backlash against religion going on in America.

Oh! and I really enjoyed the bit where Hitchens quotes Marthin Luther King about the Promised Land. What would people think, he asked, if King had continued the biblical passage from which he quoted - about how you have to slaughter and rape and plunder everybody along the way? In short, it isn't religion that provides morality, but we select only those quotations that support our moral sense. Contra Dawkins and his genetic reductionist view, Hitchens' argument is that we get that moral sense from our social relations (solidarity he called it) because we are a species that lives in communities and we need to get on with each other. The real achievement of secularism, then, is that it extends the idea of the community to the widest possible spectrum, i.e., Planet Earth.

The results of a BBC Radio 4 poll:
1. Jose Manuel Barroso - 22%
2. Rupert Murdoch - 15%
3. Parliament - 14%
4. The British People - 12%
5. Gus O'Donnell - 10% (Cabinet Secretary)
6. Terry Leahy - 7% (CEO of Tesco)
7. Tony Blair - 7%
8. Google - 6%
9. Gordon Brown - 4%
10. Shami Chakrabarti - 4% (director of civil rights group Liberty)