This is the season of the Iraq apology.

Hillary won’t quite make one, though she says had she known today how the war would turn out, she would not have cast a vote that she insists was not meant to authorize the war she supported until recently.

One of her rivals for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, John Edwards, has the advantage of already having apologized. Back on November 13, 2005, the former senator wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that began with, “I was wrong.” The former trial lawyer went on to say he was a victim of poor intelligence, some of it hyped.

Barack Obama, just recently a senator, has less to apologize for, but only because he came to office in 2005.

Apology fever has infected former intelligence analysts like Paul Pillar, who now regrets that he did not “stand up” to pressure from his political bosses when drafting the intelligence estimate on which so many lawmakers now blame for their miscast war votes.

Even my fellow journalists are not immune to war contrition. The man who, until 2006, edited the New Republic, Peter Beinart, has devoted much of his time in the last year to voicing his Iraq regrets. Because his polemics presented the Democrats’ best case at the time for the intervention, his recent evolution is a good barometer of where the party is heading today.

What it demonstrates is that the liberals who are apologizing don’t acknowledge that a consensus between democratic nations can also lead to illiberal consequences.

As for Mr. Beinart’s apology, which appeared in the New Republic, he wrote about Kanan Makiya, an important and classically liberal dissident who chronicled the evils of the Baath regime in his book “Republic of Fear.”

Mr. Beinart writes that he himself supported the war in 2002 and 2003 because Mr. Makiya did. Surveying the carnage in Baghdad, Mr. Beinart claims he was gulled by a noble man. “I’ll always consider Makiya a hero,” he concludes. “But I haven’t seen him, or read anything he’s said or written, in several years. He’s living, and suffering, with the consequences of this war, I suppose. And so are we.”

Like many other left leaners and liberals, Mr. Beinart’s apology is nuanced. He doesn’t want to give up on democratic interventions just yet, he just wants his cherished “liberal international order” to approve them. So, as Mr. Beinart says, “when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war — as they did in Vietnam and Iraq — because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right.”

Or not. After all, the Iraq record itself shows that our fellow democracies don’t always have the purest of motives. Documented evidence suggests that high officials in the liberal democracies that opposed the Iraq regime change were profiting from the dictator’s deliberate malnutrition and impoverishment of his people. France, whose BNP Paribas Bank was the custodian of Saddam’s oil profits, may not have had Iraq’s or America’s best interests at heart in their opposition to the war.

What the apologists are asking for, if only by default, is a return to the amorality of détente and Realpolitik. Again, Iraq demonstrates this. In the decade before the Gulf War, when Saddam’s torture state was a balance against Iran’s ruling clerics, America sold grain credits to the regime after it cleansed more than 100,000 Kurds from the country’s farmland in the north.

With a brief exception of a few arms sales to Iran to release hostages in Lebanon, America prevented Saddam’s opponent in the Iran-Iraq war from receiving the spare parts it needed to defend its cities from the ordinance our allies happily sold him.

After driving Saddam’s army from Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush called on the long oppressed Kurds and Shiites to rise against the dictator, only to allow Saddam to use his remaining helicopters to put down the uprising he encouraged. Determined we could neither topple the Iraq tyrant nor coexist with him, Mr. Bush and then President Clinton saddled Iraqis with the twin terrors of an embargo and Saddam. And so it went from 1991 to 2003.

Throughout this period, Saddam tightened his grip, using the people he was starving as a prop for world sympathy, a ploy that worked well on the left to which the Democrats keep apologizing. The uneasy pre-war consensus between liberal democracies and great powers was a chief cause of Iraqi misery, not to mention an obstacle to resolving the stand off over germs, chemicals, and nukes.

Mr. Makiya would have none of the civilized world’s half measures. In 2002, Mr. Makiya spent time fighting ambassador-to-be in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, demanding a mission statement committing Iraq to successive elections, the rule of law, and a constitution.

He clashed with our diplomats over the composition of a committee to draft a new Iraqi constitution. Mr. Makiya supported keeping the constitution he helped write in the early 1990s with the Iraqi National Congress. The State Department sought to repeat such a process with more exiles, whose opinions aligned with the wishes of Iraq’s undemocratic neighbors.

Perhaps one of the myriad reasons Baghdad today is at the mercies of competitive ethnic cleansers is the failure of American diplomats at the time to listen to Iraq’s liberals — and not the other way around.