Lawrence Kaplan was one of the influential proponents of the Iraq invasion. In a telling interview with der Spiegel, he concedes his support of the war was "an abstraction", not based on an appreciation of the ground elements of reality involved.

The article header is "NEOCONSERVATIVE LAWRENCE KAPLAN ON IRAQ
'I Don't See Anything Good That Has Come from this War' "

The interview can be found on this page.

An excerpt:

"SPIEGEL ONLINE: So for the record: Was the Iraq war a mistake?

Kaplan: Yes. Knowing what we know today, definitely. I know this is political poison in some quarters, but respect to reality demands this answer. However, this is a completely different question from whether or not having invaded Iraq we should stay or leave. On this I am equally clear: We turned this country upside down and we have an obligation to put it back together again. No matter how long it takes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Iraq war was percieved as the one chance the neocons had in our time to prove that their theories were right. Is neoconservatism already a historical footnote?


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Kaplan: The near term argument here is that if John McCain wins the presidential election, neoconservatism will have been vindicated. Because by voting him into office, people will have tacitly given their endorsement to that sort of foreign policy. His advisers are the very people we are arguing about. The second argument is that, even if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton win, they can't completely escape certain ideas that could be described as neoconservative. Because in the course of American history, what we refer to as Neoconservatism today, is really just a shorthand for the practice of combining power and idealism in foreign policy. It's very difficult to escape these boundaries. The question is only how much you stress the one and how much the other. Looking at it from this angle, the difference even between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is not huge. There's something essentially American about what we today call neoconservatism. Or to put it differently: Iraq set things back. But to extrapolate too much from Iraq would be as if after Vietnam one had said that anti-communism was discredited and we should stop fighting the Cold War. "