It's a good thing when people recognize how irrational they were when they were scared, and it's great to see people recognize their self-righteous stupidity. ...but I won't quickly forget being hated for not being sufficiently frightened, and I won't forget the fear mongers.

So he's got his head together now? That's great.

Meanwhile, the values we in the West once held dear have been trampled upon--some of that damage may be irreparable. We still haven't found bin Laden, and it looks like anti-Western militants are resurgent in Afghanistan. Is there any evidence that Muslims are more integrated into the West than they were five years ago? If there is, I'm not aware of it.

...Oh, and let's not forget--there are an awful lot of dead people.

But at least the fear mongers feel bad about what they said! Am I supposed to find that comforting? Oh! So when he broadcast all that stupidity and insanity on a loop, he was scared...

So what?!

I continue to be amazed -- just flat out incredulous -- at how many people got fooled by the administration's smoke and mirrors that got us into Iraq. And he still doesn't get it:
Some neo-conservative intellectuals believe that the plan was good, but that George W. Bush screwed it up. There might be something to this.
Let's see if I understand this: attacking a highly complex country with the purpose of occupying it without first understanding it, while planning for insufficient troops troops to really manage that occupation? And then on top of this, making the king mistake of all, leaving the business of actually, y'know, finding actual terrorists as an afterthought in Afghanistan, another effort that was also bungled because of American willingness to subcontract its military operations to agents of dubious loyalty?

But this -- this infuriates me:
There are no certain outcomes, and if you have a good chance of success, that chance is worth taking, even if it doesn't end well. ... A little chaos would only do the region good.
Oh, gee, we're advocating that the U.S. go into Iraq and kill, oh, we don't know how many, but it'll be from summers around tens of thousands to mebbe hundreds, turn millions into refugees, all the while stirring up ancient ethic and/or religious animosities? I'm supposed to take this seriously? If he needs to ask "what went wrong", he can start there.

Pro-war bloggers have constantly sold this war as some kind of existential battle-to-the-death, dragging out every hackneyed Churchillian cliche. Meantime, not one of their prominent members has enlisted in the military. I'm with Glenn Reynolds on this in that while the "chickenhawk" label amounts to baiting, it is a completely legitimate charge against those who seem to view war as some kind of Nintendo cartridge.

That adolescent worldview is fully exposed early in his essay when he drops this Wilsonian bomb on us:
Who were these people? They were us. "Us"? This seemed a lot clearer at the time. Us were the people who acknowledged the threat of Islamist terrorism, who had the common sense to see through the multicultural fog of words, and the moral courage to want to change the world by force. It included politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it included the new European right, it included brave and honest pundits, straight-talking intellectuals in the enlightenment tradition.
There was no courage at all required to vote for this miserable war, one that Bush and Cheney had been thumping for for months; if some of the apocryphal stories about 9/11 were true, Cheney was hoping to pin that disaster to Iraq regardless of the facts within hours of the event. What required actual courage was to tell the administration to buzz off. What required a backbone was for Congress to do its constitutionally-mandated goddamn job and demand that Bush make an actual casus belli instead of rubberstamping a war based on the weak soup of innuendo and hypotheticals he presented; and, once the war was declared, they needed to follow up and make sure the war was being prosecuted with some oversight.

Instead, none of these things happened. The pro-war party operated to silence criticism of the President (which Staerk at least acknowledges) by brainless name-calling and the worst sort of jingoism not seen since Vietnam. I mean, bully for him that he's figured something out, but he's obviously got a whole lot of lessons remaining.

But we don't live in a world of perfect information. George Vreeland Hill is right about people being unclear on the facts at the time--I certainly didn't have 'em all lined up.

In which case, given the facts we did know, there was no justification for attacking Iraq. None.

Maybe you knew, Rob. I was skeptical of the Iraq War because I was skeptical that what we were likely to gain via invasion and occupation would be worth the costs, especially in terms of lives. Also, I thought that the occupation was likely to create a zone of influence for Iran--a state sponsor of terror par excellence.

...My question wasn't whether Hussein had WMD; it was about what the best course of action was.

I can't speak to what you knew or what the Bush Administration knew or what our intelligence agencies knew or what the Bush Administration should have known. ...but I didn't know that Iraq didn't have WMD, and according to the poll I linked above, a full two years after 9/11, almost 70% of the American people still believed that Saddam Hussein was personally complicit in 9/11. ...that's months after we'd invaded Iraq!

So I'm not so sure war bloggers should have known that Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD. Regardless, my beef with the war bloggers goes way beyond what they did in the lead up to the war. My beef is especially with those who, once the 9/11 report came out showing that Saddam Hussein had little if anything at all to do with Al Qaeda, and those who, once it became clear that there was no WMD in Iraq, turned their guns on those of us in the West that opposed the War in Iraq and those who of us who criticized the way we were fighting the War on Terror.

I was called an Al Qaeda sympathizer for coming out against torture. I was called a racist for questioning Reverse Domino Theory. I was called a traitor for questioning the wisdom of the President's policies in war time. I've been the subject of what I believe to have been an "instalanche".

I don't blame people for believing in misinformation. Appeals to authority are a way of life for many people. ...but if you're in a position where people see you as an authority like that, and you did the things this guy seems to be 'fessin' up to--I don't know how you just wash your hands of that and go your way. There were consequences!

Anyway, I think these guys are partially responsible for some of the bad that's happened over the last few years. ...regardless of whether Iraq had WMD.