Matthew Yglesias is certainly right about at least some things in the post which I criticize below..

"Still, we're seeing a bit of the rosy glow of hindsight here. The anti-war discourse was filled with arguments that have proven totally false about massive casualties in house-to-house fighting through Baghdad and Arab regimes toppling left and right. Was this what the "majority" of people were saying? " I don't know about the majority of anti war discoursers but I made those arguments. It is certainly true that the consequences (so far) for Arab regimes have been much less severe than I feared and so, less severe than my subjective mean. Similarly, I feared that there could have been massive casualties in house to house fighting. Again things were better than my subjective mean. I might add that I also feared that a lot of Iraqi soldiers would have been killed without need in Highway of Death II the sequel. I have the sense that, partly due to Rumsfeld (yes Rumsfeld) the coalition approach minimized Iraqi military casualties -- a very good thing which I did not expect at all.

Finally I think the case against invading Iraq is much weaker than it seemed, because Iraq did not have WMD. Before the invasion, in my very first post on Iraq, I argued in no uncertain terms that WMD in Iraq were a reason to refrain from invading not a reason to invade. In retrospect this seems to me to be completely obvious. Given the total failure of coalition forces to secure such sites as the bombed out nuclear reactor, what chance is there that they would have secured all the WMD in Iraq. I’d say roughly zero. What chance would there be that WMD would have since been used by insurgents or terrorists. Not 100% but I would say clearly much higher than the chance that they would have been used if we had not invaded. I still think that the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake but I am much less sure than I was just before the invasion when I was 99% sure that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq or in 2002 when I was 99.9% sure that there were.

So all in all, I am somewhat less sure than I was that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. The Bush administrations incompetence and limited devotion to nation building was not a major factor in my decision, and I would have opposed an invasion of Iraq in the impossible contingency that Clinton proposed it.

I don’t expect Yglesias to agree with the last point, but I think he should agree that Clinton would never have invaded and occupied Iraq, nor would Kerry nor, of course, would Bush Sr. Can he really imagine a President who would be both qualified to direct the invasion and occupation of Iraq and willing to do it without recent extreme provocation ?