Nobody's got perfect judgment on foreign and domestic policy. Looking back, I was probably wrong to support the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s, which was an attempt to halt Western escalation of the nuclear arms race. Turned out just a few years later, the Soviets gave up, gave in, realized they could not compete with the West. Indeed, the Soviets spent so much on arms that their society collapsed from within, from internal rot.
I was also too negative in my assessment of Ronald Reagan when he was president. In retrospect, he did some good things.
On Good Friday, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative supporter of the war in Iraq, wrote an essay atoning for his support for the war in Iraq. He committed four cardinal sins, he said: historic narcissism, narrow moralism, unconservatism, and misreading Bush. "I had no idea he was so complacent - even glib - about the evil that men with good intentions can enable." It's a thoughtful essay and well worth a read.
For me, I was plenty pessimistic about the Iraq misadventure from the start, as evidenced by my blog folder on Iraq. Even so, I probably wasn't pessimistic enough.
Jon Stewart of Comedy Central captures the scene on the fifth anniversary of the war. As some sage said, I try to be as cynical as I can, but I just can't keep up. (Hat tip to Buck Naked Politics)
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