New York Times columnist David Brooks was once an enthusiastic backer of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. He’d write columns for the Weekly Standard – the official journal of bankrupt neoconservative thought – glorifying Bush for his steely-eyed determination and tartly mocking the pansy liberals and other anti-war types who opposed Bush’s righteous exercise in nation-building and freedom-spreading. “History will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam,” Brooks prophesied in the March 2003 column, “and which were not.”

That prediction didn’t quite pan out. Yes, the Iraq war ended up being a disaster, but contrary to Brooks’ assurance, the “clear judgments” about who was right and who was wrong about Iraq are still pending, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who got it so terribly wrong haven’t faced any real consequences. Let’s use Brooks himself as an example. He landed his plum gig on the Times op-ed page a few months after the war started and used his perch to continue singing the praises of Bush and the Iraq experiment, like in this September 2004 column predicting that Iraq’s elections would help undermine the insurgency. What judgment did Brooks face for being constantly and consistently wrong about Iraq? Well, he’s still writing for the Times op-ed page.

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But, according to his latest Times column, Brooks claims to have learned from the mistakes he made about Iraq. You can’t undo the past, Brooks writes, but you can draw lessons from it:

The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war. That doesn’t gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”

There’s so much that’s wrong in these two paragraphs. Brooks’ argument that the invasion was just one big good-faith “whoopsie” on the part of the Bush White House was demolished just yesterday by his colleague Paul Krugman. The problem with the Iraq intelligence wasn’t just a lack of “skepticism” on the part of the people consuming it – there was a concerted effort to twist and manipulate that intelligence to achieve the desired end of invading Iraq.

But, Brooks counters, the notion that “the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure” is a “fable.” This is a dishonest and easily debunked straw man. No one is arguing that all the intelligence was cooked. There were definite failures within the intelligence community. The problem, again, is that those failures were compounded by the Bush administration spin and deception about aluminum tubes and secret Al Qaida connections.

But, Brooks counters again, it’s just not true that the Bush people cooked some of the Iraq intelligence because the “exhaustive” Robb-Silberman report found that it was all just a series of errors. This, again, is false. The Robb-Silberman report was not “exhaustive” – the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn’t reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

Having exonerated the architects of the war – and, by extension, himself – of conscious wrongdoing, Brooks explains what he’s really learned from this ordeal: military interventionism is only slightly overrated as a policy.

If the victory in the Cold War taught us to lean forward and be interventionist, the legacy of the Iraq decision should cause us to pull back from the excesses of that mentality, to have less faith in America’s ability to understand other places and effect change. These are all data points in a larger education – along with the surge and recent withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I wind up in a place with less interventionist instincts than where George W. Bush was in 2003, but significantly more interventionist instincts than where President Obama is inclined to be today.

Obama, of course, has also intervened in Iraq, sending fighter planes and drones to attack the Islamic State. Brooks wants more than that, but less than a full-scale invasion. He wants… I don’t know. Something. He’s landed at a mushy and undefined middle ground, which indicates to me his belief in interventionism hasn’t substantially changed, but the failure of Iraq is forcing him to express it differently.

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But let’s go back to Brooks’ 2003 assurance that history will render its verdicts on those who endorsed the Iraq debacle and those who did not. History hasn't yet allowed "clear judgments" on the backers of the Iraq misadventure because the people who should be feeling the sting of those judgments – like David Brooks – are doing their level best to water down and explain away the appalling conduct that led to the actual war. What makes Brooks’ column so galling is that he’s trying to present his self-serving exculpation of the Iraq war architects as a lesson learned. Brooks pretty clearly hasn’t learned a thing, and that’s to be expected when you suffer no consequences for being completely and catastrophically wrong.