Part 4 of a retrospective series on why 1)the Iraq war was a bad idea, and 2) Jonah Goldberg is a putz.

It was a mistake...but it wasn't really.

Next Goldberg foists what he wants everyone to believe is a mea culpa:

But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known — or what was believed to have been known — in 2003.

(emphasis added). Goldberg is saying that the only reason the war was a bad idea is that we did not know it was a bad idea at the time. That is one of the dumbest arguments I have ever heard. I will agee with him that truth is truth, and the truth is that we knew plenty in 2003 that established that going to war was a stupendously bad idea. I will present a partial list of things we knew before the war, but before that there is one other matter to address.

Goldberg actually gets one thing right.

Goldberg says that "the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing." I almost entirely agree with him on this point. Congress and the public were lied to, but the Democrats who voted for the war 1) knew that; 2) should have known that; or 3) knew or should have known there were many other reasons to vote against the Iraq War Resolution. Instead, they were too cowardly to make a stand, or they were too cowardly to want to risk their electoral chances (Kerry and Edwards come to mind).

Up next: Matters that were known before the war, beginning with WMD.