Alex WellersteinVerified account

I can't believe either of you could be so wrong about something that was so fundamentally obvious to me and everyone I knew. Nor can I come to grips with the way you discuss events led to over a million deaths as though you'd lost a bet on a football game.

I was 20, just out of college. I think I'm allowed to be wrong and admit it later. Better than not admitting it, eh? As for being dispassionate: we're not talking about the war itself, we're talking about our memory of their beginning, and how our wrongness shaped our views.

You can be pissy and high and mighty (I'm sure you've always had a perfect track record on politics), or you can say, here's how a couple of young, fairly liberal, educated folks who later became academics had their views challenged by the Iraq War. Totally up to you!

In any case: my take on both wars at the time was that they were bad ideas. Iraq seemed avoidable, even if they had WMDs (which would have surprised me less than them not). On Afghanistan, I was wary of war as the solution, but couldn't see great alternatives to Taliban/al-Qaeda.

I did feel that the War on Terror was a terrible way to frame the conflicts, and could see (as did many) that doing it that way meant there would never be any kind of obvious end-point. But I figured they would have some plan to prop up Afgh/Iraq after the main battles were won.

I didn't really do any marching, though. And in retrospect I had too much faith in the idea that however bad the Bush admin was on these things (and I suspected they were pretty bad), they wouldn't be as bad as they turned out to be (e.g., no WMDs, no long-term plan, etc.).