Yglesias dug up this Crazy Andy gem from April 22, 2003 (not long after Pulling Down the Statue Day):
I was walking through my neighborhood the other day – in D.C.’s hyper-p.c. Adams Morgan – and I swear I’ve been seeing a few more anti-war posters since the war ended. The signs are perhaps expressions of some kind of rage at reality, especially a reality that has surely undermined some of the anti-Bush left’s cherished nostrums – that American military intervention is always evil, that nothing good can come from any Bush policy, that Iraqis will loathe being liberated, and so on.
Since the war ended. Yes, we all remember the end of the war, three fucking years and tens of thousands of deaths ago.
Here’s another good one, from April 02, 2003:
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: (for egregiously bad predictions in wartime) “The administration premised virtually all of its strategy and most of its tactics on the assumption that the civilian population would treat us as liberators. Unfortunately, that basic assumption has been shown itself to be fundamentally flawed.” – Josh Marshall, April 1.
Yeah, Josh was sure off his rocker, wasn’t he? What a left-wing loonie.
And while we’re on the topic, we’d be derelict in our duty to forget this Instapundit classic from April 11, 2003:
Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen’s cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn’t rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a “quagmire” were wrong — again! — how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong — again! — how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error — again — and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about “civilian casualties” now seem almost disappointed that there weren’t more — again — and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American “liberators” were proven wrong — again — as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn’t stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It’s probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
posted at 04:36 PM by Glenn Reynolds
As the third anniversary of the war approaches, I’m in agreement with FAIR — it’s time to go back and take a second look at what its cheerleaders believed at the time. Feel free to send in your own favorite blasts from the warblogging past.
… looks like my own thoughts at the time were just a wee bit more nuanced…