“It seems to me as complete a case as any case could be,” he said.

“Picture, if you will, what Mr. Hussein could do with a weapon of thermonuclear capacity,” he told the audience, suggesting that a fully armed Iraq might resemble North Korea today.

Hitchens also said that the United States must work against reputations of complicity with the Iraqi government in the past.

“We have acquired a responsibility to the peoples of Iraq,” he said. “We have to show that was not what we wanted.”

Hitchens’ work as a journalist for such publications as Vanity Fair and The Nation brought him into contact with several Iraqi residents. He has not met anyone, he said, who does not wish that the United States would “put an end to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.”

Hehir acknowledged that with increasing precision and conscientiousness in U.S. military operations, attacks probably would not endanger civilians’ safety.

Yet an attack on Iraq, he said, would assault the lifestyles of an already-strained population.

Hehir also said that the United States must realize that a war could produce considerable American casualties.

Hitchens argued that civilians would be in greater danger than soldiers under the threat of mass-destruction weapons.

“Everyone sitting in this room is already wearing a uniform, whether or not you realize it,” he told the audience. “Living as I do on the top of a tall building in Washington, I consider myself to be in the front line.”

The anti-war sentiment among audience members was evident throughout the evening. Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley H. Hoffman joked with Hitchens when he stepped to the microphone to pose a series of questions.

“How does it feel to be in the same camp as Heinrich Kissinger?” he said.