I’d say the vast bulk of my friendliest and most loyal readers think I’m wrong. See here for example. I appreciate many of the arguments. And, I’m deeply grateful for the politeness with which they are being expressed. It’s nice to know that I’ve earned some good will from folks who passionately disagree with me. My basic problem with most of the disagreement is that the vast bulk of it is arguing with things I didn’t write, based on assumptions about positions I don’t hold. It seems like the debate over the war is so entrenched that people are fighting with the imagined implications of my argument, while liberals are seizing on the word “mistake” while ignoring the rest of it.

Two points need to be clarified, since there seems to be so much confusion. First, I think I was very clear when I wrote “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. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing.” Of course, this goes for President Bush as well. I think the war was the right the decision given what we knew. People are getting very hung up on the word “mistake.” If, after consulting your conscience, the experts, the available data and the rest, one choose door number 1 instead of door number 2 and it turns out that you’ve gotten the tiger rather than the lady, I think it’s fair to say you’ve made a mistake. I also think you’ve got no choice but to fight the tiger. Unless, of course, you’d prefer to just lie down and get eaten. But surely, if you had to do it all over again, you wouldn’t open door number 1 again. Or at least you wouldn’t do it without being prepared to face a tiger.

Second, it seems to me that one can say choosing a battle you were unprepared to fight was a mistake without contradicting one’s larger position on the war itself. I’ve seen A Bridge Too Far a million times. It never dawned on me that the lesson of movie was that WWII was wrong or that the allies were foolish for wanting to break German lines in Europe.

The times call for realism. My intent was to acknowledge the reality of the predicament were in. I don’t think doing that is a call for retreat. I’m still in favor of the only “exit strategy” truly in America’s interests: winning. But, it’s very difficult to come to grips with what winning means if we don’t first get a grip of the situation we’re in. As I said at the end of the column, if we win, nobody — including me — will think this was a mistake. If we don’t, by definition, it will have been a mistake.