Salon Series

Another great article on "What I Got Wrong About Iraq" by Jonah Goldberg.

Good parts:

1. If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.

2. My Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan and I have argued over the notion that travel can actually narrow the mind. I believe in reporting, but I also believe that I was somewhat blinded by my rage at the genocide Saddam perpetrated against Kurdistan. It is difficult to stay neutral on the question of intervention after visiting the survivors of Halabja, Goktapa, and other towns and villages that had been attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam's air force.

Full series is here. These are all liberal hawks...many of whom I've been reading since before the war and who provided the most influential arguments - in my opinion - in favor of the Iraq intervention.