I sometimes forget how crazy the pre-Iraq period was. In searching for something else, I ran across this Jeffrey Goldberg comment from a Slate discussion on invading Iraq:
There is not sufficient space, as well, for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected).
Forget, for a moment, how astonishingly wrong Goldberg's point is. The dismissal of the anti-war arguments -- he doesn't even have space to refute them! -- says as much as anyone needs to know about what happened in the run-up to war.
Update: Meanwhile, Robert Wright was stunningly prescient about the whole thing:
I suspect Goldberg is proud of the absence of cost-benefit calculations from his analysis. His is a moral argument—he uses the words "moral" or "morality" five times in his post, with a dollop of "evil" thrown in for good measure. Of all the annoying undercurrents and overtones of the pro-war rhetoric, this is the one that annoys me the most: the suggestion that those of us who are clinically weighing all the possible downsides and upsides of war, rather than spending all our time marveling at how evil Saddam is, are being something other than moral. When I think about war in Iraq, I think about the long-term results in terms of human suffering and human fulfillment. I consider that a morally grounded framework.
