The Poor Man: Why we lost Iraq

Jacob Weisberg attempts to navigate between the in/competence dodges:

Virtually everyone now agrees that the war in Iraq has been a vast mistake. But what, exactly, was the nature of that mistake? The isolationist left and the realist right—George McGovern and Brent Scowcroft—emphasize that our error was intervening in the absence of overwhelming national interest. At the opposite end of the foreign policy continuum, the neoconservatives contend that invading Iraq was a perfectly good idea undermined by incompetent implementation. In the space between are liberal hawks who originally supported the war and a variety of skeptics who didn’t. They now tend to agree that the war was both a mistake in theory and a disaster in execution. […]