Digby: Bad Idea

The ongoing back and forth about why liberal hawks shouldn't have supported the invasion of Iraq because they should have known that the Bush administration was incompetent or known it was impossible to succeed continues. And all those things are correct. But I never hear anyone discuss why invading Iraq was a bad decision on the merits.

For reasons I've never been able to fathom, a whole bunch of liberal hawks accepted the premise of the Bush Doctrine without considering the ramifications of such a doctrine and whether it was wise to adopt it. Right after 9/11 the Doctrine was a simple formulation that if a government harbored terrorist enemies of the United States, they too were considered an enemy of the United States. That made some sense, particularly as it was applied to Afghanistan. After all, the Taliban didn't just have terrorists in its midst, it was actively working with them and supporting them. Deposing them was an obvious reaction to the terrorist attacks and very few but the purely pacifist (a thoroughly respectable but extremely rare principle in our culture) objected to it. Indeed, most Americans, hawk and dove alike, agreed after 9/11 that any government that would actively help such criminals as bin Laden had to be stopped.