Neo Culpa

Vanity Fair has a new article about several people who were huge fans of the Iraq War, but now claim that if they knew then what they know now, they wouldn't have supported it.

But not because it was a monumentally stupid idea based on lies and deceit. No, they're fine with all that; they still think it was a great idea, but the execution--which always was the responsibility of other people, of course--was horribly flawed.

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

...

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN'T DO. And that's very different from LET'S GO."

Right. So these people still believe that Saddam had WMDs, which he was going to supply to his good buddies in al Qaeda, and that Bush's policy was "absolutely right, and noble, beneficial", his arguments "absolutely right". How much more deluded can they get?