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However, I’m amused by the DLC’s insistence on claiming they are relevant–Really!

Atrios is having fun toying with them here, here, here, here, and here I find the reaction rather funny.

The oddity of the DLC argument is that it consists of if you took at face value the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq there were perfectly good reasons to go to war.

It is certainly true that if you accept a bunch of false premises and outright lies, there was a perfectly good reason to go to war.  The appropriate response if you were on the wrong end as I was, is to say, yep, I screwed the pooch on this and a lot of kids are dying.  But not the DLC.  Instead they want to make the argument that going to war was perfectly reasonable given what we knew at the time.  Sure, if we accepted the Bush Administration’s lies and made up intelligence about knowing where the WMDs were, it sure would make sense. But we now know that it was a crock and that we should have seen it as a crock then.  Joe Wilson and three others (remember the three others for the Wilson debunker team out there) debunked the Niger uranium claims.  Yet, the administration still sold the story.  We had Colin Powell deliver claims of mobile labs that appear to be mobile trucks.

There were people who saw the intelligence and thought it was bunk and weren’t wide eyed anti-war whatever the label is today.  People like Bob Graham.  Why didn’t I listen to Graham.  I have no excuse. Why didn’t I listen to Durbin?  I have no excuse.

Why didn’t I fall back on the assumption of Bush incompetence and realize he was going to not only get us into a unnecessary war, but screw it and the necessary one up to boot? I have no excuse.

I was wrong and it was stupid to support the invasion of Iraq on so many different levels there is no excuse.  Yes, looking back is 20-20 and no one is perfect in hindsight.  However, trying to pretend one could come to a perfectly rational position to support invading Iraq forces one to fall back on really stupid arguments to go to war over as Cohen finds himself relying upon:

Like it or not, there was a defensible case for war in Iraq – Saddam had for 12 years thumbed his nose at the United Nations and international community; he had refused to account for his WMD programs and had consistently tried to hide from international inspectors the extent of these programs; and continued UN sanctions against Iraq were causing a real and unrequited humanitarian emergency among the Iraqi people. Saddam was a very bad guy and many well-meaning Democrats believed that getting rid of him was worth the cost of war even if they didn’t buy into the Administration’s fear-mongering and hyping of the WMD threat.

Because a dicator is a very bad guy isn’t reason to remove them from power. There are plenty of bad guys the United States is in alliance with and very bad guys who still walk the Earth despite being worse than Saddam. And a critical review of the analysis at the time would have determined a not surprising finding that it was in Saddam’s domestic interest to say he had WMDs even though there was no evidence of them.
Furthermore, inspectors were in Iraq and finding that there likely weren’t any WMDs so that was a silly justification as well.
Maybe it’s hard for the very serious people to admit, but they were wrong. I was horribly wrong.  Bad judgment has consequences.  Some people accept that and admit they were wrong and move on. Others insist they didn’t have bad judgment because they are very serious people who had very serious reasons.  Who do you trust?