Among a number of writers - 'liberal hawks' - who supported the Iraq war, Kanan Makiya answers the question put by Slate, 'How did I get Iraq wrong?'
I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq.The rest is here.
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[M]y biggest political sin is that in spite of nearly a quarter of a century of writing about the abuses of the Baath Party, I, and more generally the whole community of Iraqi exiles, grossly underestimated the consequences on a society of 30 years of extreme dictatorship. Iraqis were, it is true, liberated by the U.S. action in 2003; they were not defeated as the German and Japanese peoples had been in 1945. A regime was removed and a people liberated overnight, but it was a people that did not understand what had happened to it or why. Iraqis emerged into the light of day in a daze, having been in a prison or a giant concentration camp, cut off from the rest of the world to a degree that is difficult to imagine if you have not lived among them.