By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Sam and Matt say that it’s wrong to cast the Iraq war as a good idea ruined by Bush administration incompetence. They’re right about this – clear thinking about the deep ethnic divisions in Iraq, our insufficient troop deployment, and the difficulty of instituting democracy at gunpoint should have convinced intelligent observers that invading Iraq would be a very bad idea. I’d add that the opportunity costs of invasion – in terms of the good that could have been done with those hundreds of billions of dollars and the American military (stopping the genocide in Sudan, perhaps?) ought to be reckoned into the calculus as well. I hope their piece forces unrepentant liberal-hawk commentators to drop their bad arguments and face responsibility. However, a whole different set of issues come into play when we talk about the positions that Democratic politicians should adopt.
