"We should never have to apologize for believing our President."

Belle Waring's done a little soul-searching on why she supported the Iraq War and what she's learned since then:

Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq

Kudos to her...mea culpas are never easy and it takes a certain courage to make one. Her explanation is thoughtful and enlightening; I have a better understanding now of why some of the people I spent those frustrated hours arguing with in early 2003 about Iraq -- people who are smart, reasoned, not easily fooled, people whose political opinions I respected even when I didn't agree with them -- had been persuaded to support Bush's Follly.

Too bad Belle didn't have D-Squared's handy little instruction, "Avoiding Projectes Pursued by Morons 101". Too bad, in fact, that the rest of the war supporters didn't have it, either. 'Course, they did have literally millions of us shouting the same things that D-Squared lists, but who can be expected to listen to millions of people who might actually be right, even when they do it in mass protests around the world in marches of hundreds of thousands, because they are, after all, liberals and progressives. Nope, those liberals and progressives just don't know what the hell they're talking about.

The saddest part of of this whole thing? Mea culpas are all well and good, such as they are, but they can't change where we're at now. As commenter SusanG writes in Belle Waring's comments:

As someone who opposed the war from the very beginning, I suppose I should be taking pleasure in the mea culpas and explanations of illogical thinking that led to positions of support for the invasion.

But I'm not. I'm just very sad about it all.

The best response to the honest re-examinations I've seen comes -- believe it or not -- from Michael Moore, after Howard Stern publicly apologized for berating Moore in the run-up to the war.

Moore simply said: That's the problem, isn't it? We should NEVER have to apologize for believing our president.