Over the last decade or so, Christopher Hitchens has become one of the most controversial and intellectually rigorous political journalists in the English-speaking world. He has an acute instinct for demolishing political cant and ill-conceived views, a talent he has been recently parading in Australia. He is a so-called defector from the Left, taking his views from either end of the ideological spectrum and infamously mounting a morally compelling case for the invasion of Iraq. For over a decade before the 2003 invasion he had been lobbying for the removal of Saddam’s regime from a socialist and human rights perspective,…