I agree with basically everything here, which reminds me of the old days of Kos. Anyway, Georgia10 is right fucking on:

It's not groveling that we critics want; we don't want conservatives to face years and years of personal humiliation over this. The admitted emotional satisfaction we can get from that is minor, more appropriate for the schoolyard than the national political stage.

What the right doesn't understand - and why they're screaming that we're meanies over this insistence on an unconditional mea culpa - is that we anticipate a repeat, with a more competent executive in charge, of a scenario that most people with a grounding in Middle Eastern history knew had no chance of success from the get-go. You could put the most efficient, brilliant leader in charge, but if the idea is simply bone-headed and undoable, all you've got is a longer time period before the unraveling becomes apparent, which in some ways presents a bigger danger. A competent executive that marshals a bad idea through its initial stages has a greater ability to hide the signs of an impending disaster. Just ask Enron employees who had their life savings tied up in company pension plans.

I also find it disingenuous that the right claims sole ownership of the "Saddam is a bad, bad man" banner. Please. Compared to the liberal left, they are decades late to that particular party. Progressives were screaming into the void about Hussein's human rights violations, his gassing of the Kurds, his terrorizing of political opponents long, long, long before it conveniently bubbled up into the consciousness of the neocon right. While Donald Rumsfeld was famously shaking hands with and arming Hussein, we were saying: Bad idea. Bad man. This is gonna come back and bite us in the ass.

For this, we were labeled too "sensitive," not reality-based enough to operate in the real world, where sometimes you have to arm a strongman to keep a worse scenario at bay.

Well, shove it. We were right. You were wrong. Period.

It's always been a supreme frustration of mine that for three years Republicans have been able to portrey criticism of Bush and the war as somehow a vestigial political reflex from the 60s. It's a frame that anti-war protest groups admittedly walked right into, but I think a clear majority of people opposed to the invasion were acting out of rationality and true patriotism. This in contrast to the chest-beating Nationalistic melodrama that the GOP spin machine -- with the aquiesence and sometime full-on participation of the Press -- whipped up in the wake of 9/11.

Facts matter. History matters. This war is the result of a bad idea, poorly planned, dishonestly presented, and then mismanaged in execution. It should prompt a complete and open review of our national security priorities, much as the acceptance of the lessons of Vietnam did. Really, 9/11 should have done this but it never happened; maybe we'll get a second chance here. The only way to do this in a democracy is to have a wide-open and fact-based debate.

I'm not holding my breath, but maybe if Dems take back some of congress and there are some real investigations, a critical mass of the Power Elite will come to their senses and turn away from the GOP's brand of irrational Nationalism. Maybe.

If not, there's always the State of Jefferson!