Sunday marked the third anniversary of Gulf War II: The Vengeance.

While the military sees fit to mark the anniversary with a potemkin assault, I choose to mark it with an apology.

Every so often, righty bloggers will note that I am not so much a moderate. Well, I probably am not anymore. But when I started this blog I most certainly was. I was a big believer in working across the aisle, a big supporter of working with the Republicans to get things done, and an apostate Democrat.

One of the things I was willing to weigh carefully was the war in Iraq.

In the months leading up to the invasion, I was far from skeptical of this administration. Indeed, I was all but a pro-war cheerleader. Oh, sure, I occasionally expressed misgivings, and even decided at the eleventh hour that we should delay invading. But I was never strongly anti-war, even though I had predicted the way that the Bushies were going to conduct the post-war period.

I was wrong.

Had I been paying more attention at the time, I would've recognized that we didn't really have a plan for post-war Iraq, that our plan was to remove Saddam in the hopes that something would materialize in his place to stabilize Iraq. Hope, of course, is not a plan. And we have found that out repeatedly over the past three years.

I should have been more strongly against this war. I should have listened to voices on the left who were raising really, really good points. I should have recognized the incredible level of incompetence in this administration, and questioned what we were doing more. Mostly, I should have remembered that war is a terrible thing, the last resort of all last resorts--and something that should never be engaged in without complete certainty and moral conviction.

I had my Road to Damascus moment in April, when I noticed that there weren't so much any WMDs in Iraq. From that point to now, you can watch my posts veer left as I became increasingly angry at this administration's mendacity, incompetence, and insouciance.

But my posts have not veered left because I veered left. They've veered left because the lefties were correct about this war. They were always correct about this war. Would that our nation had listened better to them in 2002 and 2003. Would that I had.

For what little it's worth, I'm sorry.

(Cross-posted from Blog of the Moderate Left.)