From The Corrosion of Conservatism (Max Boot, 2018) pp53-5
My advocacy of the Iraq War and my refusal to support a pullout led the far left and far right to call me a “neocon warmonger” and “chickenhawk” who was part of a “cabal” that had “lied” America into the war. The aspersion that this was a “neocon war” seemed designed to play into ancient prejudices, on both the far left and far right, about conniving and disloyal Jews, since the “neocons” blamed for the conflict – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle were Jewish officials of limited influence. This is exactly the kind of calumny that Trump now spreads in inveighing against “globalist” elites who are supposedly betraying America. In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a “neocon.” Those of us who supported the invasion were, as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider.
For years I felt defensive about my support for the war and refused to repent. Stubborn and self-righteous, I did not want to cede any ground to my critics. Now, looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost. It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power. It is not nearly as easy to remake a foreign land by force as I had naïvely imagined in 2003, and even the conservative “best and brightest” — Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and all the rest-can make mistakes that are every bit as dumb as those that their more liberal counterparts made in Vietnam.
One of the perverse consequences of this catastrophe was that-along with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Great Recession in 2008-2009 — it disillusioned many Republicans with the traditional leadership of their party and made them receptive to an outsider like Donald Trump who was unabashed in his hatred of the war and its architects. So, much to my chagrin, I now realize that the failed policies I advocated in 2003 helped, thirteen years later, to elect a president who stands in opposition to nearly everything that I believe in.
It was a lesson in the unintended effects of a militaristic foreign policy that I should have learned earlier. But some conservatives still have not learned it, as witness the agitation in some quarters in 2017 for a preventative war against North Korea before President Trump launched talks with Kim Jong Un. For my part, Iraq cured me of any enthusiasm for what my boss Richard Haass has labeled “wars of choice.” Listening in early 2018 to hard-liners like future National Security Adviser John Bolton advocate a first strike against North Korea—an act that could easily trigger a nuclear war — I recognized an echo of my callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be.
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