But I'm chastened now. I'm sorry to say but this administration has done it to me.

I simply cannot pretend that what we've learned about them these past few years - and what I've learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism - hasn't deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army - because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?

The torture regime is the biggest reason I have had to reassess my view of the actions of the United States these past few years. But the case for war is the second. Pete hauls out my own passionate defenses of the case for war as if it's proof I'm off my rocker. But of course the passion of my advocacy in 2002 - fueled by my continuing hatred of Jihadism in all its forms - is precisely why my anger is now so great. I was deceived and feel terrible responsibility for my naivete. I think there was plenty of good faith in the run-up to the war, among many in the administration and out of it, but I now find it highly probable that there was also a clear and resilient element of bad faith in the office of the vice-president (and he, we now know, has been effectively running the country since 2001). I have come to see, by force of the evidence, that some, if not all, in the Bush administration knew that the WMD case was paper-thin, but pursued the removal of Saddam as a power-play in the Middle East because they wanted the US to become an even greater global power, wanted to secure oil fields, and wanted to do to the Arabs what Putin is now doing to his neighbors: teach them a lesson about raw power. Jonah Goldberg expressed the impulse before the war, in what he called "The Ledeen Doctrine":

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

Viewd in retrospect, if you try and make sense of all the strange decisions the Cheney-Bush administration made, this seems by far the most plausible rationale. When you add to this the deployment of torture and abuse of countless innocent Iraqis as a weapon, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions more, the ethnic cleansing the US presided over for years, it does become harder and harder to see the unquestionable moral superiority of the US. Certainly, it seems much more questionable than ever before in my lifetime.

