Pro-War Liberals Backtracking

Normblog critiques pro-war liberals backtracking on their support of the war based upon "the incompetence of the administration argument."

Nate has been writing here and here basically taking that position.

Normblogs best comment regarding the pro-war liberal backtrack is "I don't believe that an undertaking like the liberation and democratization of Iraq, undertaken by anybody (whether internal movement or external intervention force), could have been free of mistakes and misjudgements; because, on some of the issues in play in Iraq, I haven't felt especially competent to judge what the best course of action would have been; and because I have not seen in the discourse about US administrative incompetence from the anti-war side much in the way of an effort to discriminate between culpable error or negligence and the sort of unavoidable mistakes that are part and parcel of any enterprise of this magnitude."

And he summarizes the anti-war camp well "I'm referring, rather, to a wider anti-war left, those who would bridle (and reasonably so) at any suggestion that they might actually support the combination of jihadists and Baathists opposing the US and its allies in Iraq, but whose time, whose criticism and, above all, whose passion so far as that country is concerned are all but consumed by their hostility to Bush, Blair and the supporters of the war, and who evidently find it rather more difficult to get excited about the reactionary aims and the murderous methods of those the US-led coalition are fighting against."