A reader writes:
Thank you for your excellent 9/11 article in Newsweek. But please allow me to raise one important question for further explanation on your blog: why exactly did you support the war in Iraq?
I know you have reconsidered your position, and in your article you "tip your hat" to those who got it right. Since then you have led the fight publicly against neocon thinking and paid a professional price (I guess) by being ostracized by the Republican party for challenging Bush-era terrorism policies. And, I suspect, you may be tired of "apologizing" for this episode. But as a devoted reader, who didn't read your blog back then (it was 10 years ago!), I never really understood why you supported the Iraq war and, over the last few years of my readership, I haven't heard a satisfying explanation on your blog as to why you did originally.
I also suspect that many of your current readers also would be curious as to why you were in favor of the Iraq war. But, your explanation in the Newsweek article was both very short and (frankly) unsatisfying. By your words, the explanation is straightforward: you were "fooled" because of understandable post-9/11 anxiety. You write of your "psychic terror," "swamping of reason in [my] frontal cortex," "panic," "fear . . . spiraling upward," "minds . . . flooded with dread," "panic," "overwhelmed . . . judgment," and "fear dominated my being," and thus you trusted in "what our government told us, in tones that certainly sounded sincere."
Look, you are an admirable straight shooter, and it is plausible that you became overcome by 9/11 fear. But, candidly, that doesn't feel right. I mean, we got hit on September 11, 2001 and we didn't invade Iraq until March 20, 2003 – 18 months later. By the time we went to war in Iraq, it was widely reported that 70% of the American population mistakenly thought that Saddam Hussein had a connection to 9/11 (a percentage which I assume did not include you), there were high-level dissenters as to the supposed WMD intelligence, there was no evidence that Saddam posed a threat to the U.S. homeland, we knew that senior Bush people previously had issued public pre-9/11 statements in favor of invading Iraq, etc.
Honestly, this was not an environment where you could be fooled. It was an environment where you could make an informed choice. And it is hard to believe that 18 months after 9/11 that you were in a state of debilitating panic.
I have gone over this many times. But here's as succinct answer as I can muster today: no, the debilitating panic did not disappear. But it hardened into a political and rhetorical position, which I resisted changing in a highly emotional and volatile environment. I did believe that Saddam had WMDs; I also believed they could be handed to Jihadists; I did believe that democracy in Iraq could transform the Middle East, and that only such a transformation could get at the roots of Jihadism and adequately respond to the 9/11 crisis. I think I was broadly right about the latter but blind as to the competence and morality of the Bush administration, and woefully clueless about the distinction between democracy imposed from outside and a democracy that bubbles up from within. That last misjudgment is about as grave as a Burkean can admit.
In the daily mudfight of the blogosphere, I also dug in. And if I doubted, far left elements of the anti-war movement (think ANSWER) kept me too sure of myself (a classic epistemic failing). When I spoke with them, some instinctively blamed the US itself for an indefensible mass murder, and some seemed more consumed with hatred of George W Bush than Osama bin Laden. I got into a camp and doubled down. And if you want to know where the impulse for a blogazine that routinely presents dissent, that is open to self-doubt, that has become less a one-man pedestal than a collective thought process, then that experience may help explain the Dish's evolution.
None of this is an excuse. But I hope it is more of an explanation.
The Dish 