I missed Noah Millman’s comment on Vaclav Havel and Iraq from earlier this month. Millman wrote:

He [Havel] had every reason to trust the United States in its estimation of the Iraqi threat. And he had every reason to believe that the NATO Alliance and the United Nations between them held out the best hope for an international relations structured around simultaneously preserving peace and promoting freedom.

What would be more accurate is that Havel trusted that the U.S. government would not start a war without good cause (he was wrong about that), and at the time he joined his name to the article in question the U.S. and its allies had not yet started the war without U.N. authorization, so we might let him off on the technicality that he was being incredibly naive in believing that the build-up to the Iraq war actually had something to do with upholding international law. As far as I know, however, he did not change his position on attacking Iraq when it was done illegally. An “international relations structured around simultaneously preserving peace and promoting freedom” is completely incompatible with an attack on a member state of the U.N. without authorization. Because he had once been a dissident in a satellite of a superpower, he should have been far more skeptical of the claims of a superpower against a much smaller, weaker state concerning the supposed threat that the latter posed to the former.

Havel made an error that was obviously an error at the time. We can understand why he did it, and we can even acknowledge that he allowed his appropriate trust in allied governments to cloud his judgment, but that doesn’t get around the reality that he lent his name and the credibility that went with it to a bad cause. I suppose there’s no way to disentangle how we view the Iraq war’s good-faith supporters from an assessment of the wisdom and justice of the war, but the only way to conclude that Havel made the “right call” on Iraq is to continue to believe that the case for war as it stood in January 2003 wasn’t full of holes, and I don’t know how anyone does that.