From his website and the Sunday Times. An excerpt:

...as Hitchens looked around him, even in the days after the atrocity, he found something rather different. He found that a deep and lingering hatred of America over-powered some leftists' objection to mass murder. He found excuses for totalitarian hatred. He saw exactly what Orwell had seen in the leftist intelligentsia of his own time: not simply a passivity in the face of evil, but almost an admiration for it. And he was disgusted. Since those first days of shock, the hard Left has merely redoubled its assault on a free society's right to self-defense. The endless series of rationalizations, the opposition to any war to fight terror, now the sad and pathetic moral abdication of those who see president Bush as more of a threat to world order and peace than Saddam Hussein - all these responses, under-written by a simpering, barely concealed anti-Semitism, would be enough to turn anyone's stomach, let alone a good liberal's. At some point, when you look around and see that this is the quality of one's ideological allies, you have to break ranks, if only for the sake of personal moral hygiene.



But Hitch's shift is symptomatic of something far deeper than one individual's career. 9/11 presented the American left with an awful quandary. Its intellectual and literary leadership, long marinated in anti-Americanism, was simply unprepared for the stark moral choice in front of them. They couldn't afford the cheap and easy carping of the European and British Left: this was their country under attack, after all. Yet most, with a few honorable exceptions, couldn't make the leap toward support of the war either. So they engaged in a campaign of anti-anti-terrorism, the position of the coward and the sophist, encapsulated by Al Gore's bitter rant of last week. While not opposing war itself, they opposed every single decision that could make war possible, demanding conditions and timetables that would effectively gut any assault on, say, Iraq. A few even came perilously close to siding with terror, minimizing its threat, and all but regarding it as the lesser evil compared with Republican dominance on the domestic political scene.