George has blood on his hands, and that's Glenn's point.
I know. But Josh Marshall supported the war too, you know. Does he also have blood on his hands?
I know. But Josh Marshall supported the war too, you know. Does he also have blood on his hands?
ts
Yes. And his repeated contrition will never take away from the facts. It's just that I still have respect for him. But he shouldn't be representing the anti-war view.
I think the point is that there are numerous foreign policy experts on the left who were right about this from the get go and have been all along. They are never on any such panels.
Helena Cobban
Steven Zunes
Gen. Odom, perhaps, to name but a few.
Chomsky, obviously.
Jim Henley? Is he really "on the left"?
Thanks LWM. You put it much more eloquently than I could.
This war was based on transparent lies right from the start. Thinking people with even a modicum of insight could see through them, long before the war started.
We also could see the outcome of this enterprise unfolding exactly as it is.
So, no, I would never forgive anybody who supported this war; no act of contrition would be enough for me.
They, along with the criminals who actually put the war into motion, are guilty of the deaths of thousands and thousands (and many times that maimed and injured), the destruction of a country, and the disruption of a whole region.
So don't come now, wringing your hands and saying "Oh, I'm sorry. I was wrong" and expect forgiveness from me.
You didn't spill milk.
Well put, TS. The Assassin's Gate is still one of the best books on Iraq and the neocons out there. I do think it's good to note Packer's previous views, but he came to his senses pretty quickly and has done some superlative work. Meanwhile, Richard Cohen, Bill Kristol, Anne-Marie Slaughter and many others should be shown the door. They're still trying to say they were wrong for the right reasons while war opponents were right for the wrong reasons, which is of course, complete bullshit. The only two things necessary to oppose invading Iraq were a high threshold for war and a decent bullshit detector. But when idiocy and chickenhawk fervor are the social norms, the voices of sane adults who have studied some basic history or have some common sense tend to get dismissed. All these hawks, all these whiners like Michael O'Hanlon, Slaughter and Cohen are not bright, certainly not wise, they have no intellectual integrity and their continued refusal to come to grips with their disastrous mistakes is to my mind mainly due to vanity. Their egos depend not only on being right, but on having been right. Kristol being hired by the NYT is similarly, however unconsciously, an attempt to validate all of the NYT's crappy coverage leading up to the war. The biggest problem is these knaves are still in positions of power and influence, and they'll do the same thing all over again.
I think a strong argument could be made for saying that the people whose judgment was cloudy enough not to be able to see the invasion of Iraq for the disaster it would turn out to be might not be the best people to turn to for advice on how and when to end the war, because presumably they're using the same set of judgmental skills to make those recommendations.
Has Packer actually come out against the war? Or is he still just critical of how it's been executed? There's a difference between opposition and criticism.
Has Packer actually come out against the war? Or is he still just critical of how it's been executed? There's a difference between opposition and criticism.
darrelplant
Word.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Packer, since knowing there were no WMD, has been critical of everything, including himself. He's chronicled the Bush administration screw-ups and how the neocons got their idiotic notions very well, in any case.
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