Imagine that WMD had been found

Paul Pillar:

Imagine that the famously flawed intelligence judgments about Iraq's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been correct. What difference would that have made to the American effort in Iraq?

The Bush administration would have had fewer rhetorical difficulties in defending its decision to go to war, even though any discoveries of weapons programs would have confirmed nothing about the use to which Saddam Hussein might someday have put such weapons or whether Iraq would eventually have acquired nuclear weapons.

But the war itself would be the same agonizing ordeal. An insurgency driven by motives having nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and little to do with Hussein would still be going on.

Iraq's sectarian divisions and intolerant political culture would still have pushed it into civil war. Iraq would still have become the latest and biggest jihad, winning recruits and donors for al-Qaeda and boosting the militant Islamic movement worldwide. And the United States would still be suffering the same drain of blood and treasure in Iraq and most of the same damage to its global standing and relationships.

...

Pillar goes on to argue that we should consider these problems before the next war. That is what liberals always think wars are going to be about, but he ignores some central facts.

Wars are won when enemy forces realize their cause is hopeless. What liberals have done with their incessant Bush lied nonsense is give the enemy hope. It is something that they will never acknowledge because to acknowledge it would be to undercut their ability to undercut the war. Instead we should imagine a world with no liberal neo quagmirest to give an enemy hope. In such a world the war could have been concluded much more quickly with fewer casualties to all sides and an democratic Iraq would be building prosperity. Imagine a world where the the media was independent of the enemy script on war reporting and pointed out each and every violation by the enemy of the Geneva Conventions. Imagine how much better that world would be and how much more difficulty the enemies of this country would have.

Power Line discusses the Pillar of unwisdom. Pillar does not offer much on the consequences of his analysis being wrong.