Christopher Hitchens has an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal ($) today regarding the recent barbarism in Fallujah. Mr. Hitchens points out the following:

But this “Heart of Darkness” element is part of the case for regime-change to begin with. A few more years of Saddam Hussein, or perhaps the succession of his charming sons Uday and Qusay, and whole swathes of Iraq would have looked like Fallujah. The Baathists, by playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite, were preparing the conditions for a Hobbesian state of affairs. Their looting and beggaring of the state and the society — something about which we now possess even more painfully exact information — was having the same effect. A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what.

And Mr. Hitchens concludes with this particularly insightful thought:

Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand.