Mea Culpas

So the New York Times takes a bit of responsibility for the sheer malarky level of hoo-ha they spouted encouraging the US to get into the Iraq invasion.

Keller apologizes. But that's not without caveats:

We forget how broad the consensus was that Hussein was hiding the kind of weapons that could rain holocaust on a neighbor or be delivered to America by proxy.

Uh. No we don't. Even freakin' Newsweek could smell the bullshit on Colin Powell's breath when he tried to convince the UN that Hussein had chemical-weapons trailers that were roaming around the desert.

And you know what? This is total crap:

If there was only a 50-50 chance that Hussein was close to possessing a nuclear weapon, could we live with that? One in five? One in 10? 

 We were aware with 100% assuredness that Iraq had no nuclear program at all before we invaded. You didn't need some sort of high-security clearance to know Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, you only had to ask the scientists who had defected.
Lots of people did. As as much as they hated Saddam Hussein and wanted the US to invade Iraq, they would tell you there was no nuclear program in the years leading up to the invasion.

Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call. I could not foresee that we would mishandle the war so badly, but I could see that there was no clear plan for — and at the highest levels, a shameful smugness about — what came after the invasion.  

What? Everybody who had any sense at all at the time realized that. In fact, the whole argument about news agencies vs those political bloggers (ahem) came about because so many blogs called the whole thing right -- right down the line. It was completely eminently clear that there was no plan for after the invasion. The whole military point the Administration was trying to make was that we get in, topple the government, and get out. How could you not remember that?
And then to whine that people don't trust you anymore?

“Whatever we wrote — no matter what it was, and no matter how well documented — was dismissed as Bush propaganda,” added Dexter Filkins, who covered the battlefields and politics of Afghanistan and Iraq for The Times...

Do you remember that the New York Times had an actual mole for the Bush Administration as a member of its reporting staff?