Anti-war writer, Gary Kamiya, does some admirable soul-searching in Salon:
I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.
Some of this is merely the result of pettiness — ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It’s a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one’s head and one’s heart are at odds.
Let me say I’m disturbed by some of what Kamiya confesses, but extremely heartened by his honesty. It seems to me that a real anti-war liberal, with a heart and a head, is bound to feel deeply conflicted by all this. Contrast Kamiya with the apparatchik Krugman this morning and you see the difference between someone trying to figure this all out and someone who thinks he figured everything out years ago. (And notice Krugman’s use of the term ‘conquest’ rather than liberation. Telling, don’t you think?)
The Dish 