There’s a very silly debate going on in the blogosphere right now about whether those of us who opposed the war from the start deserve credit for our prescience if, in many cases, we did not predict every single thing that would go wrong in exactly the precise order it would do so. (You can catch up on this, if you care, by reading this from Tbogg and this from Atrios.)
Well, two things. First: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong often enough in my life and in my work, but at the risk of straining a muscle as I pat myself on the back, let me direct you for the umpteenth time to this cartoon from April of 2003, which predicted the next four years with the sort of eerie accuracy that Nostradamus could only have envied.
I will pause as the shivers run up and down your spine.
Okay then. Clearing throat, moving along: it’s also worth directing your attention to Roy Edroso, who responds to the silliness rather definitively, here.
Speaking only for myself — as someone who is decidedly not a dove, but who thought this war was a bad idea from the beginning — I make no claim to analytical or any other kind of brilliance. If anything, I just have a lick of common sense, drummed into me by my late mother, who did not trust fancy salesmen who refrained from showing their merchandise; this trained me to look askance upon a war against someone who hadn’t attacked us, justified only by the assertions of untrustworthy Republican poltroons.
Devising paradoxes and logic puzzles to get around bald reality is some sort of a skill, but not the kind that pays the rent or keeps a nation out of unneeded difficulties.
I don’t know why this was too complicated for the various Sensible Liberals to understand, then or now. Maybe their own upbringing was too sheltered, too privileged; maybe they never had to learn that there are hucksters in the world who will shower you with flattery, compliment you on your discriminating taste and obvious intelligence and overall non-dirty-hippieness, and yet do not have your best interests at heart. I really don’t know.