# Posted 1:42 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HALF-RIGHT: Matt Yglesias writes:

I think it's fair to say that Howard Dean, and many other liberals-but-not-pacifists, who opposed the war allowed their detestation for the Bush administration to blind them to the merits of the arguments in favor of the war. At the same time, those of us who were more open to military action appear to have allowed our appreciation for the merits of the pro-war arguments to blind us to the utterly despicable nature of the Bush administration.

Call me stubborn, but I'm not about to spend my time going through Matt archives looking for posts in which he gave the benefit of the doubt to the Bush Administrations.

Interestingly, Kevin Drum has also engaged in a subtle bit of personal revisionism. Today, Kevin writes that he briefly supported the war but then became convinced that Bush & Co. weren't serious about rebuilding Iraq.

Note, however, a subtle difference in the meaning of the word "serious". Today's post equates revision with competence. Yet Kevin's original post from March argues that Bush isn't even committed to rebuilding Iraq, competence aside.

Why does this sort of trifling semantic difference matter? After all, you can't expect bloggers to consult the Oxford English Dictionary before publishing every post. However, these small differences matter because they say something about the mindset of their authors.

Kevin misses how his cynicism regarding Bush's motives has been transformed into a resentment of Bush's incompetence. In a President, both flaws are dangerous. But on a moral plane, sinister motives are far worse.

Matt wants to believe that he only could've supported the war (however briefly) by blinding himself to the Bush administration's "utterly despicable nature". Yet Matt goes on to say that what's wrong with the Bush Administration is not that it's evil, but that it's incompetent. (UPDATE: In this post, Matt says the administration is still evil because it's lying about it's commitment to democracy in Iraq.)

In the end, both Matt and Kevin are left pondering the same question: How could the Bush administration ever have believed that the reconstruction of Iraq would go smoothly despite a total absence of planning?

In isolation, that question makes a lot of sense. But it is important to put that question in context. Planning for the occupation was going on at the same time that the Bush Administration had to face down critics who thought that it was evil because of its decision to invade Iraq. The White House was consumed with responding to criticism of its motives, not its abilities.

Does this excuse its negligent planning for the occupation? Hell no. I've blasted the administration's negligence on the planning front since long before the invasion. But OxBlog did recognize after Bush's February speech on democracy promotion that the President had invested his reputation in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Before the February speech, however, OxBlog joined both liberal and conservative advocates of democracy promotion in questioning the President's commitment to that objective.

The bottom line here is that liberals like Matt and Kevin did not (briefly) support the war because of momentary ignorance. They supported it because it was the right thing to do. And they stopped supporting it because they underestimated the President's idealism. That matters, because the President's idealism is the only thing that may compensate for his incompetence.

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