BUT LAST NIGHT THE PLAN FOR A FUTURE WAR WAS ALL I SAW ON CHANNEL 4: More or less via Gene Healy, a post in which I re-read my March 2003 archive and look at what I got wrong. It doesn’t quite work, because I didn’t spell out my changing views on Iraq very clearly (on the blog or, in some respects, to myself–see below). But you can look here and here, plus blogwatches here, here, here, here, to see what I posted then. The post where I came closest to spelling out my thoughts is actually from February, here.
The main thing that leaps out at me is that I thought I was being pessimistic about both war and not-war/status-quo/continuing-crisis. That isn’t true. I was much too hopeful about the possible effects of war, and much too unwilling to accept that continuing-crisis might be the best of the bad options.
The blog posts don’t get at the other bad features of my reasoning at the time: arrogance, and willful self-delusion about whether/to what extent the Iraq war was “pre-emptive.” (That February post is a great example of the latter, in which I just totally refuse to engage the question.) But I wouldn’t call those “mistakes” so much as sins.
I’m saying all this solely with regard to my own reasoning, not as a comment on other people’s positions. But it should give you some idea of why I post on foreign policy hardly at all these days: I have a stronger sense of how much I don’t know; and if I were somebody else, I’d see no reason to listen to me given my track record.
This is probably the best post I’ve made about war.