Why is it people bleating most loudly about 'partisan attacks from bloggers,' like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Joe Klein, always seem to be the same people who supported the President's idiotic misadventure in Iraq and dismissed the concerns of the millions of people (including most of those shrill liberal bloggers) who were, I think we can all agree, a hell of a lot less gullible?

Just askin'.

UPDATE: Several commenters are questioning whether it's fair to say Slaughter supported the war.  Considering her pre-war justification for illegally invading, I thought it was more than fair.  But, to be sure, I decided to go back and review all her writings from around the time of the invasion that I could find.

The common thread in all of them, including the March 18th New York Times piece called "Good Reasons to Go Around the UN," (.pdf) is that Slaughter feels the UN should be playing a larger role.  In the pre-invasion writings, she says that the war, if successful, is likely to receive ex post facto UN authorization and that invading without getting a second resolution may therefore be legitimate. 

Two months later (once it became clearer that the UN wanted as little to do with the war as possible), in Foreign Policy, Slaughter argues in an article titled "Mercy Killings" that what the UN should have done is issued a death warrant against Saddam, and that issuing death warrants against specific leaders ought to become something the Security Council does more often.  She says they should do this in order to avoid the sort of illegal invasions she had rationalized two months prior (using the UN's potential future acquiescence as her rationale).  I'm not sure how exactly she thinks a war launched by the UN for the express purpose of capturing Saddam would be any different from the point of view of the Iraqis as a war launched by the US for the express purpose of deposing Saddam, but she seems pretty convinced that it would have been better for Iraqi civilians somehow.  You can read "Mercy Killings: Why the United Nations should issue death warrants against dangerous dictators" at this link (warning, pdf): http://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/Articles/MercyKillings.pdf

But I think the piece that best expresses Slaughter's pre-war gullibility is her response in Foreign Affairs to an argument by Michael J. Glennon (almost comically entitled "Misreading the Record"), wherein she argued that, in order for Glennon's interpretation of the administration's position on the UN to be valid, it would also have to be true that Richard Perle was more influentiual within the administration than Colin Powell, and that the administration fundamentally preferred an invasion to diplomacy.  Now, knowing what we now know, does anybody want to seriously argue that Powell was more influential than Perle, or that the administration ever saw international diplomacy as an equivalent strategy to invasion?

So, I will grant that Slaughter was not exactly a cheerleader for the war (though she certainly has been an opponent of withdrawal, that is a different issue).  She certainly offered a rationalization for invading in spite of international law and, so far as I can tell, never presented an argument against invading.  If, as an expert in international law, you argue that it's legitimate to unilaterally invade Iraq, then base your arguments on the idea that nobody could possibly think Colin Powell is less influential than Richard Perle on matters of war,  and then wait until well after the invasion is a fait accompli to say you opposed the way it was handled--though not the rationale behind it--then you should expect that reasonable observers will consider you to have been a supporter of the war. 

When an international law scholar offers excuses as to why an obviously and admittedly illegal war might still be legitimate, and declines to subsequently offer reasons why invading might be a bad idea, I consider that supportive.  When someone says before the war starts that UN authorization isn't critical before invading, then complains after the invasion that the UN should have authorized it (by issuing an unprecedented death warrant, no less), I consider that supportive.   When anyone argues that Powell played a bigger role in the run-up to war than Richard Perle, I consider that to be just plain gullibility.