If no personal price at all is to be paid in terms of careers for errors on this scale, which contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans, then the long-term consequences for U.S. government and U.S. democracy could be dire. If being proved obviously, dreadfully wrong brings no long-term consequences, and being proved right brings no long-term rewards, then why in the future should any U.S. analyst, adviser, commentator or public figure ever take a public stand in favor of what he or she believes to be right and correct, if this is going to lead to short-term unpopularity and career damage?

The result will be a further accentuation of an already dangerous trend: the silence of large areas of U.S. public life on critical but controversial issues; and the dominance of the think-tank, media and bureaucratic worlds by gutless time-serving hacks. At this point, the quality of much of the advice reaching both the U.S. government and the U.S. sovereign people will in the end be no better, and certainly no more independent, than that in many dictatorships.

Closely related, and even more important, is the health of the U.S. democratic system. The American people's ability to throw out a U.S. administration by elections every four years is of course vitally important, but it is not sufficient if the only result is to replace them with a different sub-set of a basically unaccountable, irresponsible policy elite; and if in any case the defeated elements, however disastrous their record, simply retire to well-paid jobs in academia, business or lobbying, and then return to government again after a few years. We have seen this kind of system in many democracies in Latin America and elsewhere. The eventual result is to corrode the faith of the people in democracy itself.

In his poem "Mesopotamia", Rudyard Kipling reflected savagely on the way in which members of the British elites whose monstrous incompetence and arrogance had led to the British military disaster in what is now Iraq in 1915-16 escaped paying any price for their failures. Part of it reads as follows:

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
     In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
     Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide-
     Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
     Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
     When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
     By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Ruth Wedgwood ends her response to Ximena Ortiz's critique with a sentence that has nothing to do with an intellectual defense of Dr. Cohen, or a discussion of moral and political responsibility, but which reads very like a threat: "More than one member of the National Interest family favored the intervention in Iraq. Ms. Ortiz may wish to shoot her flaming arrows with greater care, lest they land in some unexpected places." I'm afraid that the only appropriate democratic response to that is: Let them fall.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author, with John Hulsman, of Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World (Pantheon, 2006). He is also a contributing editor at The National Interest.