The wrongest war

Twenty years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the American consensus is clear: It was wrong. Neocons admit it. Reaganite conservatives admit it. Liberals who helped sell the war admit it. Bret Stephens — well, Bret Stephens regrets nothing, ever, but that he felt compelled to write a column petulantly rejecting his wrongness is an exception that proves the rule. Even George W. Bush himself won’t come out and publicly defend the war he started, leaving Peter Baker to write an entire article premised on the question, but what if he did?

Yet as a society we have not come to a consensus on why it was wrong. Just look at the high-level apologies — or “mea culpa[s], with limits,” as Iraq War–mongerer Jonathan Chait put it — that are circulating (or in Chait’s case, recirculating) this month. Almost all are built on the same theme: The war was a good idea, poorly executed. “The United States went to war to build a democracy in Iraq. That did not work well,” former Bush speech writer David Frum wrote in The Atlantic. “In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force,” says Max Boot.

Chait thinks the invasion went fine, but regrets that he “gave absurdly little thought to the post-invasion phase.” He blames the Bush administration for this, saying, “I assumed that its real plan was to decapitate the Iraqi leadership, install a more pliant and less brutal military figure in Saddam’s place, and call it democracy.” (Incredible to admit, years after the fact, that you were actively rooting for the U.S. to install a client dictator on another country by force, but I guess that’s how you make the big bucks.)

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