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How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be.

By Jeffrey GoldbergPosted Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET

Editor's Note: To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?" We have invited contributions from the best-known "liberal hawks," many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week. Read the rest of the contributions.

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What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—was almost entirely preventable. It's not only my encounters, inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration, most of which were avoidable.

Which makes the last five years a tragic waste. I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism. The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis.

Mainly, I believed in the human-rights case for armed intervention. I had spent a good deal of time with Saddam's victims before the war—the Kurds especially—and I had been radicalized by what I learned about the crimes committed against them. I have always sympathized with John Burns' position: He argued, at the outset of the war, that Saddam's regime of torture, rape, and genocide gave cause enough for intervention, without confusing the case with arguments about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.

My Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan and I have argued over the notion that travel can actually narrow the mind. I believe in reporting, but I also believe that I was somewhat blinded by my rage at the genocide Saddam perpetrated against Kurdistan. It is difficult to stay neutral on the question of intervention after visiting the survivors of Halabja, Goktapa, and other towns and villages that had been attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam's air force.

This is why I find it impossible to denounce a war that led to the removal of a genocidal dictator. To borrow from Samantha Power, the phrase "never again" has in recent years come to mean "Never again will we allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s." The Holocaust proved that the world is a brutal place for small peoples, and it defines for me the nonnegotiable requirements of a moral civilization: to be absolutely intolerant of dictators who have committed documented genocides. The tragedy of this war—one of its tragedies—is that its immorally incompetent execution has, for the foreseeable future, undermined this idea. I believe, for instance, that Darfur demands our armed intervention, but we are now paralyzed because of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation.

A long time ago, I was certain that the Iraq invasion would be seen as a moral victory. Most Americans quite obviously do not see it this way. But on my last trip to Iraq, four months ago, I learned that many of Saddam's victims continue to see the invasion as a triumph of justice. The Kurds, who make up nearly 20 percent of Iraq, remain, by and large, quite pleased with the Anglo-American invasion, which removed from their collective neck a regime that did an excellent job over the years of murdering them. This must count for something, and I'm hopeful that one day, when President Bush is gone and the Kurds are free, it will.