You Fucked Up, You Trusted Us
By 
Julian Sanchez’s response to Max Boot’s “eh, everyone thought the Iraq War was a great idea, what are you gonna do?” attempt at self-exoneration is priceless:
This is dumb. Approximately nobody was in favor of invading Iraq until a relatively small group of policy makers and intellectuals started pressing a specious case for it. That many ordinary people unwisely deferred to their judgment is not exculpatory. https://t.co/2ZPBdncIIm
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) March 13, 2019
Anyway. If “most people believed X” because you’re a supposed expert, and you wrongly told them that X, you can’t use “well, that’s what everyone thought” as a dodge. They thought that because you misled them.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) March 13, 2019
I do think the “hey, it’s not our fault, we were fed a lot of lies” excuse doesn’t fly for public officials who didn’t initiate and weren’t particularly enthusiastic about the war but went along, particularly after the ridiculous Powell presentation to the UN made it clear how weak the case that Saddam posed any kind of threat to the United States was. But the idea that “this war, like pretty much all wars, was initially popular” lets its architects and biggest backers off the hook is deeply silly.