[Iraq]

Poor Judgment.

In the lead-up, to the Iraq invasion, support and opposition for the war was bipartisan. Liberals tended to be more cautious in their agreement about the evidence, but many hawks thought Saddam was sufficiently evil to warrant toppling (shades of Woodrow Wilson). Some conservatives were opposed to the war for the opposite reason--traditional conservative reluctance to mess in foreign wars. Among liberals who opposed the war, there too were multiple views.

The pacifist left tended to speak with the biggest voice, but there was another group--a minority of the minority--who felt that the strategic and legal justifications were absent, never mind the WMD. (I was a member.) This group also looked at the history of the "country," its bloody sectarian rivalries, and the interest of dubious neighbors, and said that even if Saddam were evil enough to warrent extra-legal invasion, the clean-up would be impossible. (Bush senior reasoned exactly this, stopping at the Kuwaiti border in Gulf 1).

In our post-game squabbling, that latter camp's position has largely been forgotten. Writing in TAPPED, Greg Sargent at least alludes to this position when he describes the failures in Iraq being of judgment, not intel:

The decision to support or oppose the Iraq war wasn't about doctrine. It was about judgment. Many of those who backed the war fell prey not to ideology, but to a massive judgment failure. They were unswayed by mounting evidence that at least some of the case for war was based on lies -- and yes, there was plenty of evidence of this before the war. They were similarly unmoved by those who argued -- perhaps with better judgment than they -- that such an enterprise was undoable. And as for those who have adopted the fallback position that no one could know just how incompetent the Bush team would prove, that too constituted a judgment failure, not a mere accident. There were plenty of people who before the war argued -- and here we can be certain their judgment was better -- that the ideological blinders Bush and his neocon advisers had donned meant Bush and company weren't to be trusted with this enterprise.

I guess it isn't shocking that no one's owning up to poor judgment. It's a lot easier to blame it on the intelligence.