The neocon mea culpas

James Joyner observes that multiple neo-conservatives have published op-eds today critical of the Bush Administration’s handling of Iraq. The kicker is David Brooks’ New York Times column. Brooks still thinks the invasion was the right thing to do, but allows:

The first thing to say is that I never thought it would be this bad. I knew it would be bad. On the third day of the U.S. invasion, I wrote an essay for The Atlantic called “Building Democracy Out of What?” I pointed out that we should expect that the Iraqis would have been traumatized by a generation of totalitarianism. That society would have been brutally atomized. And that many would have developed a taste for sadism and an addiction to violence. On April 11, 2003, I predicted on “The NewsHour” on PBS that we and the Iraqis would be forced to climb a “wall of quagmires.” Nonetheless, I didn’t expect that a year after liberation, hostile militias would be taking over cities or that it would be unsafe to walk around Baghdad. Most of all, I misunderstood how normal Iraqis would react to our occupation…. Despite all that’s happened, I was still stirred by yesterday’s Bush/Blair statements about democracy in the Middle East. Nonetheless, over the past two years many conservatives have grown increasingly exasperated with the administration’s inability to execute its policies semicompetently. When I worked at The Weekly Standard, we argued ad nauseam that the U.S. should pour men and matériel into Iraq — that such an occupation could not be accomplished by a light, lean, “transformed” military. The administration was impervious to the growing evidence about that. The failure to establish order was the prime mistake, from which all other problems flow.

Matthew Yglesias doesn’t accept Brooks’ argument that invading Iraq was still the right thing to do:

The trouble, however, is this. When George W. Bush is president and is advocating a war and you, too, are advocating for war, then the fact of the matter is that you are advocating that the war be conducted by George W. Bush. That Bush would botch things was a perfectly predictable consequence of said support, based on — among other things — the fact that he’d botched everything else he’d ever done…. In the interests of full candor, let it be said that I did something very similar. The difference here being that, as I will now admit, I was wrong. Neither the policies being advocated by Bush nor the policies being advocated by the anti-war movement (even at its most mainstream) were the correct ones. What I wanted to see happen wasn’t going to happen. I had to throw in with one side or another. I threw in with the wrong side. The bad consequences of the bad policy I got behind are significantly worse than the consequences of the bad policy advocated by the other side would have been. I blame, frankly, vanity. “Bush is right to say we should invade Iraq, but he’s going about it the wrong way, here is my nuanced wonderfullness” sounds much more intelligent than some kind of chant at an anti-war rally. In fact, however, it was less intelligent. I got off the bandwagon right before the shooting started, but by then it was far too late — this was more a case of CYA than a case of efficacious political dissent. Now I am not an important person, and at the time I was even less important. Nevertheless, the block of opinion of which I was a part included some very influential people. In the aggregate, we were never a very large block of public opinion. We were, however, the all-important swing group. Some of us (represented in the blogosphere by me, Kevin, Josh, etc.) swung too late. Some of us never swung at all. If we had swung earlier (not just the bloggers and the journalists and hawkish Clinton administration veterans, but also the regular folks who had similar opinions) there probably would have been no war. We should have swung earlier.

Now, since back in the day I wrote a memo to liberal hawks urging them to support the war, I suppose Matt could blame me, except that I doubt my arguments tipped the scales either way. Like Yglesias, I care about process issues. I’ve been saying for some time that the Bush administration has f@#&ed with the foreign policy process in serious ways. That said, I still side with Brooks over Yglesias — provided the United States sees Iraq out to the end. If Bush — or Bush’s successor — were to turn tail and withdraw from Baghdad without leaving a stable popular government in its wake, then I’m afraid Yglesias would be correct. From a humanitarian perspective, invading Iraq was the right thing to do. From a national security perspective, invading Iraq and then withdrawing in the face of insurgent attacks would be far worse than not invading in the first place. And this point, I suspect, is what drives so many of Bush’s mainstream opponents around the bend. It’s one thing to have opposed the Iraq invasion — that’s a reasonable position to hold, and I said so at the time. However, responsible politicos recognize that it’s irresponsible to advocate withdrawal after the invasion. The damage to the United States of pulling out in the midst of insugent violence would be severe. This is why Howard Dean, even when he was riding high in the polls, advocated sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. During this campaign season, Bush’s mainstream opponents are forced to support staying in a country that most of them did not want to invade in the first place. They didn’t want to break the country — but they’re nonetheless stuck with the proof of purchase. UPDATE: Niall Ferguson compares the Iraq of 2004 with the Iraq of 1920.