Of course, many say that it's still likely that regime change will benefit Iraq's people in the long term, but Prince shares some of the doubts voiced by the Iraqis themselves. "The only argument you can make now [to Iraqis] is, 'You're not better off today, you're not better off next week, but in the long run you and your family will be better off.' It's hard for Iraqis to understand that. It's really hard to make that argument with a straight face when you're talking to someone who may have supported the war aim but who cannot feed their family or who just had to pay ransom to get their kid back or was mistakenly taken away by the Americans because they had a relative in the Ba'ath party."

"A lot of people in the human rights community, they are so jaded now, so disappointed," he says, adding that they feel "betrayed" by an administration that co-opted their rhetoric but ignored their concerns.

Besides disenchantment, there's a degree of denial. David Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who before the war acted as an advisor to members of the Iraqi opposition, now says he was never pro-war. "I think that, if you look at everything that I've written and said, you'll never find an instance in which I said I supported the war," he says. "I supported better freedom for the Iraqi people and the opportunity for them to express their democratic desires."

Before the war, though, his arguments sounded distinctly hawkish. In February, he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed about a French and German proposal to deploy U.N. peacekeepers to back up weapons inspectors: "The lessons from Bosnia are clear. Adopting resolutions at the U.N. Security Council without the resolve to implement them is a formula for failure. Unless diplomacy is backed by force, tyrants will always prevail. Moreover, appeasement by European leaders did not work in Bosnia, and it will not work in Iraq ... Europe still has not learned its lesson. Neville Chamberlain's appeasement did not work against Hitler, and appeasement failed in Bosnia with Slobodan Milosevic. Appeasement will also fail in Iraq, with deadly consequences."

Now, Phillips seems bitterly disappointed by the consequences of invasion. "Bottom line here, there were a lot of elaborate plans made for the liberation of Iraq. When those plans were implemented, they fell far short of expectations," he says. "The reason those plans fell short is that the participation of Iraqis wasn't valued by the civilians in the Pentagon, who only wanted to work with Iraqis in the Iraqi National Congress and felt that they knew what was best. They threw out a year's worth of planning and proceeded with their own plans, their own people, their own timetable, the results of which have left a lot to be desired."

Thus, while Phillips speaks to many Iraqis who talk about the "intangible benefits" of the war, he says: "Until their lives are materially improved, there's going to be a lot of skepticism among Iraqis about whether or not this was a good idea."

This raises the question of whether liberal humanitarians were remiss in not foreseeing administration incompetence. Even if the war was worth fighting, was it wrong to trust the Bush White House and Rumsfeld Pentagon to get it right? Todd Gitlin, a Columbia professor, longtime activist and ambivalent opponent of the war, says yes. "If you propose a course of action which is plausibly at serious risk of being manhandled by the actually existing authorities who are going to implement your plan, even if you have differentiated your idea of proceeding from their idea of proceeding, I do think you bear some responsibility" for how things turn out, he says.

Phillips, though, says there was no way to foresee the way Bush would mishandle the occupation.

"Plans for Iraq were proceeding in a positive way up until the point where the president assigned postwar civilian administrative responsibility to the office of the secretary of defense," he says. "From that point forward, the participation of Iraqis and the contribution of other agencies in the U.S. were ignored or disparaged. Was it naive not to have expected that? I can't say. Up until the point where the presidential instruction was given, there was reasonable basis to expect something different than what we've seen. I certainly did."

As did others nationwide. "I know academics across the country who were for the war," Prince says. "A lot of them are embarrassed now."

That matters because the furious Iraq debate and its murky denouement could have consequences that are far more than academic. After all, one reason America failed to even try to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide is because the country was chastened by the Somalia debacle the year before, just as the ghost of Vietnam kept the U.S. from intervening early enough in Bosnia.

The horror of Bosnia drove many liberals away from post-Vietnam isolationism. If the situation in Iraq doesn't improve soon, it could drive them back. "There's a danger that the transparent deceptions of the case that was made for the war will discredit other arguments on behalf of intervention, including arguments for multilateral interventions," says Gitlin. In other words, it might get a lot harder to be a liberal hawk, no matter how worthwhile the fight.

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