At the New Republic, a leading voice of the liberal hawks, senior editor Jonathan Chait seems slightly more uncertain about Saddam's weapons, but also stands by his support for the war and his assessment that Iraq, if not a threat already, would have metastasized into one. "I still think it was a good idea, although I'm less certain about that than I was before," he says. "The reason I'm less certain is that the threat is far less immediate than we thought it was at the time. It was very hard to predict it would have turned out this way. There's a fairly long history of outside intelligence services underestimating weapons systems in Iraq. To me, the threat was always that he would obtain nuclear weapons. You couldn't be sure, but you had these external intelligence agencies saying one to three years, maybe a little more. Now it seems pretty clear there was no active nuclear program in Iraq."

Yet Chait says that doesn't wholly undermine the rationale for war. "There were still nuclear scientists in Iraq, and I still think eventually, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein would have obtained some kind of nuclear weapon. I don't want to give the impression I'm clinging to this possibility to justify my argument. I'm just not sure we can close the book on the status of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq right now."

Coupled with Saddam's potential destructiveness, Chait says, was Iraq's history of spurning more than a decade's worth of U.N. resolutions regarding weapons inspections. "It all ties together in a way that's hard to explain in a simple or clear sentence. I don't think the United States or the United States acting through the United Nations can say, 'Here are our conditions for ending the [Gulf] war' and then have the country flout those requirements and then do nothing. It's deadly for your credibility. It invites hostile behavior from rogue states in the future."

Chait, like Cohen, says he never had high hopes for democracy in Iraq, so the current chaos doesn't shock him much. The humanitarian case for war, he says, never convinced him. "I was never confident that there would be democracy in Iraq," he says. "I hoped there would be. I always argued that there would be a decent chance that the government that ended up in Iraq would be only marginally better than Saddam. I don't think you can launch an entire war just to get a marginal improvement of the living conditions of a country."

Indeed, it's those who were most concerned about humanitarian issues -- who supported the war precisely because it would bring the Iraqis some marginal improvement in living conditions -- who seem most disillusioned by the current situation.

At least, those who are speaking out do. Others have grown strangely silent as a messy occupation and restive population challenge their optimistic pre-war theories.

Kanan Makiya is a Brandeis professor and Iraqi exile who was the foremost documenter of Saddam's human rights abuses. Before the war, he issued passionate exhortations to his Western comrades to show solidarity with oppressed Iraqis, even if it meant swallowing their own partisanship to back Bush's policy. Yet Makiya always opposed a protracted American military occupation. In February, he began to realize that the administration didn't share his agenda for rebuilding Iraq, and he published a blistering Op-Ed in the Observer.

Describing a plan much like the one that was later implemented, he wrote: "The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities. The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the U.S. of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government."

This plan, he wrote, "is guaranteed to turn [the Iraqi] opposition from the close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation ... We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab and Middle Eastern brethren, over and over again, that American mistakes of the past did not have to be repeated in the future. Were we wrong?"

Makiya hasn't yet to come forward to answer his own question. He hasn't published anything in months, and didn't respond to requests for an interview.

"I'm embarrassed for people like Kanan," says Jim Prince, president of the Democracy Council, an NGO that promotes democracy in developing countries. "Kanan is one of the world's biggest hearts. He, as a liberal Shia, really advocated for the United States and supported the United States. I haven't spoken to him recently, but he has to be so disillusioned with America."

If so, he's not the only one. Prince, a human rights activist who once worked in Iraqi Kurdistan and attended the founding meeting of the Iraqi National Congress, is unique among liberal hawks in that he's now recanting, or at least rethinking, much of his previous position. He returned from Northern Iraq three weeks ago, and says: "I never imagined that it would be such a screwed-up situation.

"Most of us supported the war because we felt from a moral, human rights angle that it would improve the lives of the Iraqis," he says. "We find out later that the planning for such [humanitarian] activities were pushed aside. The lack of planning shows the lack of importance [the administration] placed on these issues."

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