What Did I Think About the Iraq War

Many of the center-left pundits who supported the Iraq war have come clean with apologies and explanations for why they made the mistakes they made (e.g. today's TNR by Beinart). Sure, some of the pundits will never admit an error, and I will take back some nasty things I've said about Hillary when she actually says the line "I was wrong to vote for the Iraq War," but most decent people have had to reckon with their mis-punditry.

So what about The Styx. Lord knows my reputation depends on either never being wrong, spinning data to make it sound like I'm always right, or dancing around errors by distracting ya'll with Onion & Simpson's quotes.

My clearest statement about the Iraq War comes from July 17, 2003 (found on the archaic archive):

The President Lied??!

I can't believe that this is a doubt in anyone's mind. The President needs to actually know what he's saying to be called a liar. Give the guy a break, plunging the country into war on false premises against nearly universal international opposition isn't nearly as bad as what Clinton did. If you recall, Clinton was almost impeached for lying about a heinous act of taste. It's not the same thing, people! You need to be blind and stupid to consider Bush Inc. as bad as Clinton.

Now, had we happened to find a scrap of WMD, or weren't getting our pasty white rumps kicked every single day in Iraq, then maybe we'd cut Bush some slack. As it is, we have descended into [text missing from original]

I was all for the war in Iraq. But not for any of the Bush reasons. And good thing too. I supported taking out a tyrant and for showing the world that the U.S. was as crazy as Israel (meaning that just as Israel will go into any place on the world, kick A and take names, so now America will too). Bush was for the war so he could look like a chief executive and not as a plundering, retrogressive misanthrope.

Maybe the tanking economy, the grotesque deficit, the abandoning of the State governments, and now the idiocy of our Iraq policy will show Americans that we need to kick these bums out.

To clarify the key line: "I was all for the war in Iraq. But not for any of the Bush reasons. And good thing too. I supported taking out a tyrant and for showing the world that the U.S. was as crazy as Israel" I was for the Iraq war even though I knew the president was lying and I strongly suspected there were no WMDs. I am on record (I have to search old emails, which may have been deleted) but I also claimed that when I saw that the Army 3rd Division was not allowed to leave Texas because Turkey refused to allow us entry to set up a camp, I knew the war was lost. If we were unable to bring enough troops in, we would lose.

Not that I'm a military genius; but I read the book and saw the movie "Black Hawk Down." Major military failures occur when the military isn't given enough material to factor in Murphy's Law. Small tactical forces are fine as long as everything goes as planned. But, as I learned from Bill Maudlin (among others), nothing goes to plan in war. When we couldn't move our troops in, yet we continued the attack nonetheless, I knew we were going to fail.