Mistakes, excuses, and painful lessons from the Iraq War

Ezra Klein has admitted he made a mistake in supporting the Iraq War. And he’s sorry.

OK. He was, by his own admission, “a college student, young and dumb.”

That’s not a particularly good excuse, since there were plenty of college students who opposed the war. But it does mean, since then, he’s learned some painful lessons:

First, listen to the arguments of the people who will actually carry out a project, not the arguments of the people who just want to see the project carried out. . .

Second, don’t trust what “everybody knows.”. . .

Third, the people who are most persuasive aren’t necessarily the people who are actually right. . .

Fourth, the U.S. military is a blunt and limited instrument.

Those are certainly valuable lessons. But the biggest mistake is not Klein’s individual decision to support the war. It’s the fact that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld & Co. are allowed today to operate today with impunity, still treated as having ideas and opinions that matter, and not put on trial for war crimes.