Ileft the National Review editorship on January 1, 1998, and at the time of the Iraq War, I was editor in chief at United Press International. That gave me two different interests in the war and the run-up to it: The first, at NR, was an advocate’s role because I broadly supported the war, and the other, at UPI, was an editor’s because UPI had both to report on the war and the various powers involved in it impartially and to invite a fair range of commentaries on it. Impartiality wasn’t a problem, because UPI had any number of different opinions in its newsroom, everyone keeping everyone else honest. And despite our relative poverty, very few newsrooms could match in their coverage our experts in Middle Eastern politics, diplomacy, and conflict, who included Arnaud de Borchgrave and Martin Walker. Arnaud had snagged an interview with Mullah Omar only a week or two before 9/11 (we couldn’t sell it! no interest!), and Martin, then in his late fifties, embedded with British troops, sent his reports from the thick of the battle of Basra, and returned home to fold his and other UPI dispatches into his history of the war, which is still well worth reading.

Perhaps my dual position gave my view of the war an unusual slant. I supported the invasion of Iraq but was critical of the justifications of it advanced by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair — and by some of its more vigorous neoconservative advocates. It seemed to me that the best case for invading Iraq was the least ambitious one. Saddam Hussein had broken the main provisions of the cease-fire agreements that ended the Gulf War. He had done his best to convince the world, including every Western intelligence agency, that he had an ongoing nuclear program — and succeeded all too well for his own good. He had restored his political power by brutally repressing domestic opponents, allowing the post-war humanitarian crisis of the Iraqi people to fester, and blaming the U.S. for that crisis to divide America from its allies. Altogether Saddam had not only placed himself in the wrong; he was also a constant irritating obstacle to U.S. interests. Why not simply remove him on the tough but limited grounds that he had broken the cease-fire, he was an international outlaw, and he was a nuisance? That was how conservative realists, of whom I was one, justified the war.

At the time, however, the atmosphere of international relations was one of unusual utopianism. Bush One had called for a new world order after his personal Gulf War triumph; Francis Fukuyama had announced that history had ended, to be replaced by a permanent regime of liberal democracy; and even post–Cold War Russia seemed enthusiastic about joining the party. But into the late 1990s and the new century, Saddam’s obstructive diplomacy and brutal politics continued, as a moral rebuke to this liberal ascendancy. The West’s new leaders — Clinton, Blair, and Bush Two — saw removing him in much more utopian terms than did the Hamiltonian strategists and Jacksonian populists in the large national coalition for Getting Rid of Hussein. In their different ways they were Wilsonians who wanted to remove Saddam as a necessary step to constructing liberal global governance (Clinton, Blair) or spreading democracy, American-style, to a gratefully waiting world (Bush).

Don’t be persuaded that the Iraq War was a neoconservative hijacking of foreign policy. Most of the conservative coalition supported it, even if each faction in it had a distinctive reason for doing so. Pat Buchanan led the principled group of Old Right dissidents out of the big camp. But they were few in number. That said, the neoconservatives — for instance, Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz — did play a distinctive part in the debate. They had energy, expertise, standing in the foreign-policy establishment, and a fully thought-out theory of what they could and would achieve. In Kagan’s books, that theory held that the U.S. was in effect a revolutionary power and in principle hostile to all nondemocratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian governments while being on the side of their peoples. That’s not a conservative position; logically speaking, it risks bringing the U.S. into conflict with half of the world’s governments, and it could be applied anywhere only in a way that takes account of local circumstances. It is, however, a battle plan that gives its adherents a good notion of what to aim at or which way to move in any actual war or revolution.

The well-known problem with a battle plan, however, is that it shatters on contact with the enemy. In the case of Iraq, the effect was not quite so immediate: The U.S. and its allies won the fighting war rapidly and established control of the country. Internationally, too, the war’s first effects were favorable; Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear program to international regulators in return for better relations with the West. But an invading power has to have several advantages — good local allies, good local knowledge of its politics, the respect of its new subjects, and a willingness to use such force as is necessary to obtain all of the others.

We were unwilling — perhaps to our credit — to employ our superior force ruthlessly to impose our will on recalcitrant subjects. We failed to maintain order in Baghdad, and ordinary citizens lost any reason to welcome us and began to feel nostalgic for Saddam. We disbanded the Iraqi army and released its soldiers to become armed dissidents. We destroyed the Baath Party’s structure of power before we had something solid to put in its place. Any hardheaded prospect of installing a friendly Sunni leader in the presidential palace on condition that he form a broad Sunni–Shiite coalition vanished mirage-like. And in the end we drove both sides to form alliances — with al-Qaeda, with Iran — in order to resist and eject us. Sure, we did bring ballot-box democracy to Iraq, and that was celebrated there. It was a start. But we wanted to do more than that, to transform Iraqis into model liberal democrats — more liberal than the average American, in fact — rather than create the stable circumstances in which they would gradually change as we did over the centuries.

Whatever the reason, we won the war but lost the occupation, and that weakened us internationally too. Would we have done better if we had given ourselves simpler and less ambitious political objectives? Probably; no one knows. But the divisions in Iraq, the civil and religious wars in the Gulf region, the rising threat of Iran, and the shrinkage of American power in the Middle East today make me doubt that we made the right decision. Diplomacy may have done no better, but at a lower cost.