TNR on the Iraq Mistake

This editorial is good, though not exactly ground-breaking. They're pretty much right, though that'll be ignored for many reasons, including the fact that TNR-bashing has become a favorite activigy in the leftosphere. Drum's response is uncharacteristically uninformative...he seems to be just phoning it in on this one.

I actually agree that TNR should put out a big piece on exactly why they were wrong in supporting the war...but it's obvious enough, really, to anyone who isn't already a committed anti-TNRist. In fact, I've defended the position that they (and many other liberal, non-Bushie war supporters) articulated. It doesn't go down well with the rabidly anti-war left, which wants to believe that no intelligent, well-meaning person could possibly have defended this war. But, then, there are some people you just can't reason with. (Imagine how insufferable and immune to reason the right would be if we really had been greeted with flowers and candy, and if the mission really had been accomplished in one month. It was always obvious, they'd say. Only a moron or a Saddam-lover could ever have denied it, they'd say.)

In a way I understand lefty irrationality on this one. The war was undertaken for such bad reasons, and defended on the right with such terrible arguments, and opponents of the war were treated so badly by the right, and the war was botched so badly, that the level of anger in some parts of the left is so high that they just can't think clearly about this issue. Try to talk about this with some lefties, and it's like flipping a switch--the vituperation pours forth in a torrent, their reasoning faculties shut down, and anything even vaguely resembling civil discussion becomes impossible. Not all lefties, of course--but if you don't know any lefties like this, then you've got a very different sample than I do.

Pro-war liberal hawks made a mistake--a mistake with terrible consequences. But they were weren't stupid and they weren't evil. They knew that Bush was lying and cheating, and they knew that he was leading us to war for the wrong reasons. But they recognized that Saddam was evil, and that this would be our only chance to free Iraq from his tyrannical rule. If Democrats ever suggested such an invasion for genuinely moral reasons, they'd lose every election for the next 20 years. So it was hold their nose and support the invasion, or continue to watch the people of Iraq crushed under Saddam's boot.

I'm a liberal hawk. I went back and forth on the war issue in the lead-up. I agonized over it. As I've said before, I ultimately opposed it, but for reasons which, to this day, I believe to be questionable. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I'm not an idiot. I'm not evil. I wasn't fooled by any of the administration's WMD BS. Had the invasion happened a month before it did, I'd have probably been a supporter at the time of invasion.

What pro-war liberal hawks didn't reckon with, of course, was the massive incompetence of the Bush administration, and their disastrous mismanagement of the peace. Of course many people now want to assert that only an idiot could not have forseen that.

Well, you know how the discussion will go from here on out, so I won't bother.

Funny how everybody's so smart about things, though, after all is said and done.