What Andrew Sullivan Says He "Got Wrong About Iraq"

I've just read Andrew Sullivan's column What I Got Wrong About Iraq. In it, he invites us to understand how a self-described "proud Reaganite and Thatcherite" also "marinated in neoconservative thought for much of the 1990's" could have allowed himself to commit the "four cardinal sins" of "historical narcissism," "narrow moralism," "unconservatism," and "misreading Bush."

Says Sullivan, in conclusion:

I know our enemy is much worse. I have never doubted that. But I never believed that America would do what America has done. Never. My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of - a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise - was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq - the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed - was bad enough. But what was done to America - and the meaning of America - was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself either.

Pouring Gasoline on Iraq Fire

"Invading Iraq to defeat jihadist terrorism was like pouring a can of gasoline on a fire. Now that the fire is raging out of control, continuing to fight it is simply pouring more gasoline on it."
--Gary Kamiya

Camille Paglia on the Iraq War

I want American troops out now -- not next year but tomorrow. Support of the troops means not subjecting them to an unsustainable and ultimately unwinnable mission, cooked up by armchair cowboys who see the world in simplistic cartoon terms ("good guys" vs. "bad guys"). The provincial philistines of the Bush administration blundered into the Mideast with little more than superficial knowledge of its tangled history and ancient culture. And they have colossally wasted American blood and treasure on a project that had only a tangential relation to the atrocity of 9/11.

--Camille Paglia