Excerpt:

Having no more solid information or context beyond the two claims qua claims and the groups making them, where would our rational, coma-survivor place his bet? Before answering, keep in mind a key assumption: The potential political blowback of making the wrong choice is very, very asymmetrical. That is, if conservatives and their parrots in the national conservative media–the latter term itself, increasingly, redundant–had been proved right about purported WMD and mythical al Qaeda connections, they would have pilloried their opponents as not merely wrong, but dangerously wrong. Being wrong-in-support may today earn scorn and disappointment, but that condemnation is not nearly on the scale of condemnation that would have reined down on those wrong-in-opposition, had they been wrong.

In short, supporting Bush and the war was clearly the lower-risk option. And that’s why the knee-jerk refrain, heard in 2002 and 2003, about Democrats who supported Bush being the courageous ones, is so galling because, in fact, the reverse is true. It took guts to look at the two claims and, forecasting the future blowback of each, say, “wait” or “no.” War was the easy answer, and the one people like Beinart chose.