Blogger Andrew Sullivan is a Kiko's House favorite because, among other things, he (gasp!) is not afraid to admit when he's wrong. And so in a Time magazine essay, Andrew becomes the latest to add his name to a growing list of neocons in politics, academia and the media who acknowledge that they misunderestimated some rather fundamental things about Iraq and the potential for peril because of how the Bush administration has prosecuted the war. He also acknowledges that the job still has to be finished.
In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors. The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence. . . . The second error was narcissism. America's power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. . . . The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism's skepticism of government's ability to change culture at home and its naivete when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad.
We have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response to that is not more spin but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me. All this is true, and it needs to be faced. But it is also true that we are where we are. And true that there was no easy alternative three years ago. You'd like Saddam still in power, with our sanctions starving millions while U.N. funds lined the pockets of crooks and criminals? At some point the wreckage that is and was Iraq would have had to be dealt with. If we hadn't invaded, at some point in the death spiral of Saddam's disintegrating Iraq, others would. It is also true that it is far too soon to know the ultimate outcome of our gamble.
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