This is a most unusual and extraordinary post. A former self-proclaimed “lizard” and “anti-idiotarian” in Europe confesses that what LGF and Michelle and the like hath wrought goes exactly counter to what America needed to achieve in the wake of 911. Considering that the writer was not that long ago a serious and strident advocate of the war in Iraq who aligned himself with the “warbloggers,” it’s nothing short of astonishing. It’s tone is somehow calm yet urgent, poignant and blisteringly logical. It reminds us of just how noble a thing it can be to be “for the war before we were against it.” In other words, changing your mind and reshaping your opinion can be a sign of maturity and wisdom, not cowardice and treason.

Anyone who argues for war plays with dangerous forces, so they must do it responsibly or not at all. Foolish wars have led countries to disaster. They have caused the deaths of millions. History and psychology tells us that war parties tend to be over-confident, paranoid and emotional. So the minimum you should expect from a responsible war supporter is that they are aware of this bias, and do their best to counterbalance it.

It’s not enough to believe that you are right. You have to be actively open-minded, you have to listen to your critics, and encourage devil’s advocates. You have to set up a robust information structure that makes it as difficult as possible for you to ignore reality. This is the only good way to prevent self-deception. It works. And we did not do it.

What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side. We defined the entire mainstream media establishment as irrelevant, leaving more biased, less experienced “new” media as our primary source of facts. We ignored reasonable critics, and focused on the crazy ones, so that we could tell ourselves how incredibly smart we were.

Among the bloggers there was a sense that there were all these brilliant people, who knew so much about history, war and society, who had previously been without the tools to express themselves. Thanks to the wonders of amateur media, we could now finally exploit this huge reservoir of expert knowledge. And when you contrasted the lazy neutrality of the old media with the energy of the new, it certainly could seem that way. Here were people who regularly would write thousands of words about the historical context of Islamist terrorism, who could write brilliantly about freedom and democracy, who commented boldly on the long trends of history. How could such people be wrong?

But what we saw was not expert knowledge, but the well-written, arrogantly presented ideas of half-educated amateurs. This, too, went all the way from the bottom to the top. It often struck us how well the writing of the best of the bloggers measured up to that of pro-war pundits and intellectuals. We thought this showed how professional the amateurs were, when what it really told us was how amateurish the professionals were.

Retraction is never an easy thing to do and I give this writer very high marks for doing so with such fortitude and eloquence. Instead of an emotional mea culpa, it is a step by step walk-through of all the dreadful, tragic errors we made in the September 11th’s wake, and how the vitriolic call for vengeance clouded our better judgment and led us into the mouth of hell, where we find ourselves today.

Please check out the entire long essay. It’s a rare blog post that keeps me thinking about it throughout the day, This one definitely did, and then some.