Based on the situation at the time

Well, strike me with a feather! The Economist edges towards mea culpa ville?
On reading the valedictory message of departing editor Bill Emmott and Lexington’s dangerous dance with balance and fairness (as opposed to fair and balanced?), I had to prick myself. Good thing I did: it really was just a dream.
Let’s first consider Mr. Emmott’s urge for self-examination. As I mentioned earlier, in a teaser previously published in the Financial Times, Mr. Emmott admitted his self-doubt about The Economist’s unflagging support of Dubya’s war to disarm Saddam, eliminate a terrorist safe haven and liberate the Iraqi people. Now, in his valeditory column this week, he appears to go further.
First Mr. Emmott admits The Economist essentially got it wrong in opposing NATO’s intervention in the Balkans:

. . . our cover headline was ‘Stumbling into war’. Things turned out much better than we expected.

My, isn't that refreshing! Lessons learned and all that, right? Not quite: Mr. Emmott isn't willing -- yet -- to concede making a similar misjudgment on Iraq. The Economist’s decision to support the invastion of Iraq, he writes, “was correct – based on the situation at that time, which is all it could have been based on.” Mr. Emmott goes on to explain:

The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high, practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts. Iraq qualified on the former. George Bush let us - and America - down on the latter.

This rather lame bit of sophistry reminds me of something Josh Marshall recently wrote about an inescapable consideration as we ponder the latest chasm (Iran) yawning before us:

When I look back on my own thinking about Iraq (in 2002) and the thinking of a lot of other sensible people, the biggest mistake was considering the issue in the abstract without taking into account who was really driving the car, i.e., who was president and who would make the key decisions.
Not that I didn't think about it on some level, of course. Most of what I wrote at the time suggested that the Bush White House would screw things up. But I considered that a secondary issue whereas in fact it was the primary issue. The fact that President Bush and his advisors wanted war and shaped their actions to achieve that goal was the issue. Everything else was secondary.
Folks like me, who thought that threatening war (and being willing to follow through on the threat) made sense, assuming a good-faith commander-in-chief at the helm, were just wasting their time and making a major miscalculation.
And that is one thing I fear in the current debate [over what to do about Iran].

Read the rest of Josh’s article – it’s a strong tonic and tastes awful. But, oh so necessary.
One shouldn't dwell over-long on the bitter irony of The Economist's conversion in favour of moral wars in the post-Clinton era, this sudden over-compensation in favour of wars which happen to coincide with Republican administrations. Guess they skipped that bit about the Council of Nicea in their moral philosophy classes at Oxford.
As for Lexington, well, although I suppose I should be grateful for this week’s column (“The rebirth of outrage”) in which Lexington finally, amazingly, acknowledges the existence of the Falafel King, Hannity, Scarface and Lou (“celebrate our sameness”) Dobbs. Unfortunately, the wheels come off yet again as Lexington assaults us with patently ridiculous comparisons suggesting the attainment of some sort of delicate equilibrium in the cosmic outrage balance between “leftists” and “rightists”:

Ironically, both sides of the divide feel marginalized. Leftists feel excluded because the Republicans control every branch of government. Rightists feel left out because the left dominates so much of the cultural world – especially the movie business and the universities . . .

Note how the business world, the military and especially all our thoroughly compromised friends in the news media are left out of this particular equation.
Ah, yes: after briefly acknowledging Bob Dole’s plea for the inexplicably missing “outrage” during those halcyon days when principle triumphed over politics in the feverish pursuit of Bill Clinton in 1996, Lexington pronounces, “[t]oday the mood is sourer”. Only since 2000, evidently, has outrage been truly “reborn”.
Outrageous.