Iraq, for Better and Worse

WAS THE Iraq war worth it?

Ever since its beginnings, long ago, as a gleam in the eye of Bush administration officials and neoconservative thinkers, the war has forced on all of us F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous test of a first-rate intelligence: 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.'

Before the invasion, there was the possibility of a world without Saddam Hussein and of an Iraq that no longer threatened endless violence in its volatile region � which was attractive. There was also the certainty of death and destruction in a new war, and the many reasons to doubt that this administration was up to the job � which was frightening.

One had to balance fear against hope, the Middle Eastern status quo against unknown consequences, Donald Rumsfeld against the legacy of the Halabja poison gas attack, the United Nations against democratic idealism. In the winter of 2003, what you thought about the war mattered less to me than how you thought about it. The ability to function meant honest engagement with the full range of opposing ideas; it meant facing rather than avoiding the other position's best arguments. In those tense months, the mark of second-rate minds was absolute certainty one way or the other.

I came down on the pro-war side, by a whisker. I understood the risks and costs; I didn't understand how large they would be � how much larger than necessary because of the arrogance and incompetence of U.S. leaders.

I thought then, and think now, that the war's merits could not be known in advance. The argument that the war was 'illegal,' and therefore damned at birth, wasn't persuasive; the intervention in Kosovo was justified without"