Don't you sometimes wonder what I was thinking way back when when I thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq? I sure do. My apologia from September 2004: Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq. I ain't feeling a whole lot righter, I'll tell you that. It still seems to me, even now, that war supporters on the left, even those who now basically agree that the whole thing was a bad idea, still cling to some weird sense of moral superiority [cough, Euston manifesto, cough]. Like, "at least I wasn't some big hippie who didn't seriously grapple with the issues." The thing is, those people, hippies or not, were completely right, and many of them were right because they had seriously considered the issue and decided (correctly, mind you) that it was a bad idea.
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Still, there seems to be some sense floating around the pundit class that those on the left who were wrong about invading Iraq were wrong in an interesting, morally meaningful way; wrong in the manner of a wrong Winston Churchill, or something. But one who turned out to be totally wrong, as I may have mentioned. That's just total bullshit and any of these people who is now going on to advocate war with Iran should be roundly ignored. No, they should be laughed at, and then ignored.
Indeed. At the time they believed they were "serious," that they shouldered heavy intellectual burdens about the world that mere mortals could not understand, that the world was a scary dangerous place in ways dirty fucking hippies like me couldn't understand, that anyone who wasn't on board their little dream was totally unserious and idiotic. They mocked and disparaged critics, marginalized them from the debate, and helped ensure that their noble vision was doomed to be a colossal clusterfuck as they did the same even after the war started (had they not clung to the McCarthy-Tinkerbell Strategy, some more useful contemporaneous criticism about the handling of Iraq after statue day might have improved things a bit.) They didn't just side with the Bush administration with the war, they sided with the Bush administration against all of its critics.
(via uo)