By Any Means Necessary?

I enjoy Christopher Hitchens as much as the next guy, even when I'm on the opposite side of the argument, but he's totally lost me here:

The literal-minded insistence that all government rhetoric be entirely scrupulous strikes me ? as weird. It can only come from those who were not willing to form, or to defend, positions of their own: in other words, those for whom Saddam would not have been a problem unless Bush tried to make him into one.

Asking that your government doesn't lie, and that it makes the best honest case for using deadly force, strikes me as something less than a "literal-minded insistence," and something more like a fundamental precondition for avoiding abuse and bad policy.