SEVEN WEEKS AGO, I published my case against the Iraq war. I wrote that although I had originally advocated military intervention in Iraq, and had even signed a letter to that effect shortly after the 9/11 attacks, I had since changed my mind.
But apparently this kind of honest acknowledgment is \o7verboten\f7. In the weeks since my book came out, I've been challenged, attacked and vilified from both ends of the ideological spectrum. From the right, columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused me of being an opportunistic traitor to the neoconservative cause -- and a coward to boot. From the left, I've been told that I have "blood on my hands" for having initially favored toppling Saddam Hussein and that my "apology" won't be accepted.
In our ever-more-polarized political debate, it appears that it is now wrong to ever change your mind, even if empirical evidence from the real world suggests you ought to. I find this a strange and disturbing conclusion.
For the record, I did change my mind, but in the year preceding the war -- not after the invasion. In 2002, I told the London Times that "the use of military power to push [Iraqi democracy] forward is a big roll of the dice. We may not win on this one." On the first anniversary of 9/11, I argued in the Washington Post that we should invade Iraq only with approval from the U.N. Security Council, and in December of that year, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal warning that the project of democratizing Iraq and the Mideast might come to look like empire and that it violated the conservative principle of prudence.
But \o7when\f7 my political shift occurred is not important: Even if it had come a year or two later, it would still not have represented a cowardly retreat or an apologia, but a realistic, intellectually honest willingness to face the new facts of the situation.
In my view, no one should be required to apologize for having supported intervention in Iraq before the war. There were important competing moral goods on both sides of the argument, something that many on the left still refuse to recognize. The U.N. in 1999 declared that all nations have a positive "duty to protect, promote and implement" human rights, arguing in effect that the world's powerful countries are complicit in human rights abuses if they don't use their power to correct injustices. The debate over the war shouldn't have been whether it was morally right to topple Hussein (which it clearly was), but whether it was prudent to do so given the possible costs and potential consequences of intervention and whether it was legitimate for the U.S. to invade in the unilateral way that it did.
