First I read Molly Ivins' remarkably candid apology:
CROW EATEN HERE: This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
It takes up half the column. I've never heard an opinion-writer give such a detailed account of the origins and circumstances of a screwup without trying to exclulpate herself at all. I respect that.
I don't often see that on the red side of the fence, and I was going to say something about that disparity until I read Eliot Cohen's more restrained, but still refreshingly honest, admittance of misplaced faith.
You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it? As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending. So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.
I wish that column had comments enabled--it would be interesting to compare the responses.