Four years into the war in Iraq, a Washington Post editorial says "looking back also is essential, particularly for those of us who supported the war."

So, what does the Post see? First one thing, then another. The first thing tends to make the Post  and the Bush administration look pretty bad, the next thing kind of lets the Post and the Bush administration off the hook.

Read the breakdown after the jump.

Four years into the war in Iraq, a Washington Post editorial says "looking back also is essential, particularly for those of us who supported the war."

So, what does the Post see? First one thing, then another. The first thing tends to make the Post  and the Bush administration look pretty bad, the next thing kind of lets the Post and the Bush administration off the hook.

First, a whiff of reality: "[T]he picture today is dire, and very different from what we would have hoped or predicted four years ago. The cost in lives, injuries and dislocations, to Americans and Iraqis, has been tragic; the opportunity costs for U.S. leadership globally have been immense."

Somebody must be to blame for this, right? "There's no question that the execution was disastrous. Having rolled the dice on what everyone understood to be an enormous gamble, Mr. Bush and his team followed up with breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance...But the war might have spun out of control even under wiser leadership." [emphasis added]

Even successful wars have messy aftermaths, the Post says. "U.S. forces remain bogged down in Afghanistan after dislodging the Taliban regime in that brilliant, brief campaign of 2001." Hmm. Might that have something to do with, y'know, us invading another country right after that brief campaign? The Post is silent on this question.

What about the case for war itself? "An overarching lesson is that the failure of diplomacy is not a sufficient argument for war." Some might substitute "abandonment" for "failure," but anyway...

"Clearly we were insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports. It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had 'lied the nation into war,' as is frequently charged. The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed -- as did the CIA -- the catastrophically wrong case that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the United Nations." [emphasis added] Doesn't this suggest that the pre-war journalism was rather lacking?

On and on. "[T]he experience has shown the risks of preemptive war. Yet it remains true in an era of ruthless, suicidal terrorists and easily smuggled weapons of unimaginable destructive power that not acting also can be dangerous." [emphasis added]

"Iraq has shown the disadvantages of acting without full allied support...But ask the victims of genocide in Darfur whether international law and multinational organizations can always be counted upon. And, yes, the past four years have demonstrated the difficulty of seeding democracy in unaccustomed soil. But no American foreign policy will be supported at home or abroad if it does not include as one ambition the spread of freedom." [emphasis added]

It's like two editorials for the price of one.