So, to return to Jeb Bush:
BUSH: I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.
That’s a justification. It’s just one that turned out to be wrong.
Alrighty, we’ve established that Jeb Bush thinks Iraq was justified.
Clearly the whole thing was a massive case of motivated cognition:
Step 1: We want to invade Iraq.
Step 2: Cook up an excuse to do this.
Step 3: Convince enough people it’s not bullshit.
Step 4: Quagmire.
And of course the real question for elected officials is not just Iraq: yes or no, but why Iraq at all? Why not Saudi Arabia? and so on.
But I’m just feeling slightly ancient in that this Iraq question was the defining issue of the early blogosphere, circa 2003-2005.
It split the tech community into two camps, the pro-War bloggers (also known as the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, or chickenhawks) and the anti-War bloggers (also known as the Decadent Left Fifth Column, or pro-Saddam stalinists).
It was a deeply stupid time.
Understanding the depths of the stupidity may help those who were not there avoid such stupidity themselves, when they face the next great challenge.
I’m younger than you, and I was too young to understand how strange it should have seemed to me at the time.
But I have not forgotten.
Fortunately, I already understood what a mistake it was by the time I was able to vote.