I was hunting for something else and I came across this a paragraph from Jon Chait's "Iraq war mea culpa." Those were fashionable, briefly, as all the big brained boys wrote pieces about themselves and their big brains and why they were WRONG but still not as wrong as the stupid hippies, who are always wrong even when they are right.
Libya was like Iraq on cocaine and meth - one more chance to prove the hippies wrong with glorious humanitarian intervention, which was predictably a disaster, in part, but not just, because of course there was no plan other than "bomb" and then we just never talked about it again. Bygones.
Not a perfect success!!! My god.
I do agree it's bad when tens of thousands of people are massacred.
Chait's mea culpa wasn't quite as bad as Saletan's, whose big takeaway was that supporting Iraq was stupid because it made it harder to go to war with Iran, which was vitally important at that moment oh look squirrel.
