From vastleft.com:

National Review Online columnist John Derbyshire tries to apologize for his Iraq War cheerleading, but finds that sorry seems to be the hardest word.

Some parts he gets just right:

Let's start from the fact that the whole thing, taken in one piece—attack plus follow-up nation-building effort—has been a huge negative for the USA. Is there anyone, really, who is glad we did it? Most of my NR colleagues are still talking up the administration's Iraq policy. It's hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: "Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?" any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.

We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We've spent untold billions of dollars. For what?

Hats off to Mr. Derbyshire for closing that passage with the two-word question that weighs so brutally on the Cindy Sheehans and so many others.

But put that fedora back on, as Derbyshire re-fouls the slate he purports to clean:

One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we'd just rubbled the place then left.

So, the problem is that we should have just blown up all those fuckers and left. There's your compassionate conservativism at work.

We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that.

Translation: we're being held hostage by a cartoon cavalcade of Arab stereotypes.

But, wait, gotta tip the ol' hat again:

The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don't know how to get out of.

Can't gripe much about that one, though if Dick Cheney reminds you of your uncle, I'd definitely skip the family reunions.

Next up, Derbyshire digs into his personal archives:

[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don't want to "bring democracy to Iraq." I don't, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples."

Who among us can read this and not fill with apple-pie pride for the speakable folkways of right-wing America? You Middle Easterners may have started civilization, but goddamit, we've perfected it!

If the FFA gives blue ribbons for horseshit clusters, this could be a prizewinner:

I've never been able to work up any guilt, either on my own behalf or the administration's, about the WMD issue.... As for the administration: Well, either they knew the intelligence was worthless, or they didn't. If they knew, then their duty was to assume the worst, and present it to us as the worst. If they didn't know, then they honestly believed the lousy intelligence. None of this excuses the CIA's incompetence, of course; but even that incompetence serves the good conservative purpose of driving home to the populace the fact that the federal government sucks at pretty much everything.

Basically, it's all good, no matter what, as long as it's what you and your government wanted. And if your government screwed up, they were doing the essential work of showing that government is bad, which is good.

There's more, including Derbyshire's puzzlement that anyone thinks those A-rabs might actually want peace and freedom. He also makes some valid points about how the Iraq misadventure weakens our hand in the nuclear game with Iran.

Perhaps, though, he'd rather we use our remaining resources to rubble-ize a target that seems to disturb him more than Saddam: sodomites.

(via)