What was the mood like in D.C. in the lead-up to the invasion?
In my conscious lifetime, it was the most exultantly pro-war that I can recall. The prevailing mood was a William Randolph Hearst–type production. It was not just disagreement on the merits of doing this, it was dismissive ridicule of the weakness of the people who weren’t with the program. [If you were against the war] it was a sign that you shrank reflexively from the use of force, that you were a symptom of America’s long slouch into fearfulness around the world, that you were dismissive of the moral claims of the Kurds or others in Iraq. If you were tough as a thinker and decision-maker, if you were brave about America’s role in the world, and if you were properly sensitive to the moral claims of the people Saddam Hussein had abused, then the logic of history and the times led you not to just support the war, but to embrace it.

In August 2002, The Atlantic published your piece “The Fifty-First State?,” which laid out many potential dangers that became deadly realities in Iraq. How did you come to sound that warning? 
By February ’02, we were sure that the war was going to come. So we thought, “What are going to be all the questions people are going to be asking after the war starts? Let’s ask all of those now and, as a bonus, see if asking those questions now might affect the decision of whether to do it at all.” Now, there was some tension within The Atlantic itself, because our then-editor, Michael Kelly, was very, very emphatically pro-war. He’d been a reporter in Iraq during the original Gulf War, and he had firsthand experience with all the cruelties of Saddam Hussein. He said, “We have to go to war, it’ll be great for Iraq, great for America, and I personally want to witness it.” He, of course, was an embedded reporter and was killed. And although Kelly and I disagreed entirely, he, to his credit, recognized that I and other people on the staff didn’t agree with him. He told me to go full speed ahead with the piece. It came out while he was still alive, and while he disagreed with it, he was supportive of our running it as a cover story and pushing it hard.

How did other war supporters respond? 
A lot of my friends were in the liberal-hawk camp, and it was more just rolling their eyes: There he goes again. He didn’t like Vietnam. He doesn’t like this either....