Better Dead Than Red

DAVID CORN: You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. You joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1994 at 24. You were the op-ed editor four years later. You became a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a blogger for Commentary. You were in neocon heaven—a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. You were one of the major voices in favor of the Iraq War. And you say with great introspection and humility, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” I mean, Max, this is almost, maybe it is, an apology. What brought you to that point?

Well, it’s basically that I could not deny reality indefinitely. Anybody looking around Iraq today can see it is not the democratic paradise that George Bush and Dick Cheney and others promised in 2003. I’m certainly not the only one who has confessed their errors here. John McCain did before his death. But many right-wingers have stuck to their guns rather stubbornly. And I think the only way you’re going to improve US foreign policy and set a sound course for the future is if you’re willing to look back at what went wrong before. One of the lessons I draw from the Iraq War is be pretty darn careful about launching preventative conflicts. And that’s not a lesson that everybody has learned. For example, John Bolton, before he became national security adviser, was arguing in favor of preventative military action against both Iran and North Korea, which I