HONEST STUPIDITY. Now that he no longer stalks the Prospect's halls with a whip and a red pen, I feel free to say that ol' Bossman's Tomasky's latest column strikes me as rather strange. Call it post-pre-war revisionism, but I think Mike's rundown of how disingenuous most war supporters were forgets too much about the intellectual atmosphere in the moment, particularly in Washington, and how addled the conversation really was. Mike argues that, "I don't believe for a second that any of them [liberal-leaning Senators] thought that handing George W. Bush the authority to launch a preemptive war was in any conceivable way a good idea." But that, sadly, wasn't the question. Had Democrats been thinking more clearly, they would have considered Bush's record, his competence, his instincts, and just said no. The moment, however, was not one conducive to clear thought. And the question was never framed or explained quite like that. Rather, an array of foreign policy wisemen and self-styled Iraq experts fanned out to speak to those politicians they were closest with and convinced them to vote for the resolution as a way of voting for their personal wars. So the number earnestly voting for Tom Friedman's war, or Kenneth Pollack's war, or Christopher Hitchen's's war, was really quite large. These were the folks Democratic politicians invited into the dining rooms and offices to advise them, and these folks, publicly as well as privately, sold their personal Iraq Wars, rather than George W. Bush's war. That's not to say the Democrats who voted wrongly -- nor the pundits or individuals, like me, who thought wrongly -- were anything but stupid for it. But the support wasn't disingenuous. Indeed, in some ways, that makes it all the worse. --Ezra Klein
