A 'Sorry' State of Affairs

The New York Times editor's note apologizing for a lack of skepticism in some of its prewar reporting (a "mini culpa," as Slate's Jack Shafer called it) was just the latest in a veritable typhoon of apologies raining down from Iraq war cheerleaders. They seem to have finally realized that the case for war wasn't quite as clear-cut as they once thought, and that regime change is not quite so simple.

Kenneth Pollack launched the trend. A former Clinton administration National Security Council member and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, Pollack argued for invasion in his vastly influential prewar book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq."

Pollack's prewar case went like this: Saddam Hussein was intent on building a nuclear arsenal, which he was then likely to use on the U.S. "For more than a decade," he wrote in the New York Times in February 2003, "we have consistently overestimated the ability of inspectors to impede the Iraqi efforts, and we have consistently underestimated how far along Iraq has been toward acquiring a nuclear weapon."

As late as June of last year, writing again for the Times, he was still certain we'd find weapons, arguing that "the fact that the sites we suspected of containing hidden weapons before the war turned out to have nothing in them is not very significant. American intelligence agencies never claimed to know exactly where or how the Iraqis were hiding what they had." He acknowledged that "it is also possible that Iraq did not have the capacity to make the weapons," but he quickly put those doubts aside. "Given the prewar evidence, this is still the least likely explanation."

Then, in an Atlantic Monthly piece in January, after Hussein's capture and the incredible vanishing WMD, Pollack acknowledged that he'd probably been wrong all along. "What we have learned about Iraq's WMD programs since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed beforehand."

Pollack was followed by a much more reluctant Christopher Hitchens, a pro-war writer who famously cut his ties to many liberals -- and the Nation magazine -- over his disgust with the peaceniks. Hitchens largely based his arguments for war on moral grounds: We created Hussein; it was up to us to free the Iraqis from his clutches. But he clearly expected the Iraqis to be more grateful.