POLITICS - Looking Back, Iraq & Neoconservative Predictions

Joe Conason, The New York Observer, article "Three Years Later, No End in Sight" is another reminder, especially to "neoconservatives," on just how wrong they got it.

Back then, popping open champagne corks while the carnage unfolded, the neoconservatives gleefully announced that anyone who had questioned this great expedition would be held accountable. Page after page of their punditry from the spring of 2003 was devoted to gloating, along with lengthy blacklists of the bad people who had expressed doubt about the wisdom of going to war. Honors would flow to the wise and courageous proponents of war, while the foolish and pusillanimous opponents would suffer eternal disgrace. And so on.

...and....

Meanwhile, confident predictions abounded in the conservative media. Democracy would flower, our enemies would wither, and those elusive weapons of mass destruction would be discovered either tomorrow or the next day. In The Weekly Standard, David Brooks, who soon moved on to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, offered an observation that now may be turned on him. No degree of humiliation, he sighed, would dissuade the war’s critics from their folly:

“Even if Saddam’s remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, ‘We were wrong. Bush was right.’”

.........

Today, Mr. Brooks and his fellow neocons quarrel over the quagmire their movement made, seeking to shift the blame to scapegoats in the Pentagon and the press, and to refurbish themselves as critics of the President they once idolized. What they once considered a political watershed that promised them limitless power and influence has become a political disaster they are scurrying to escape.

.....finally......

As the intellectual cheerleaders for war, the neoconservatives knew perfectly well that there were many reasons to doubt the existence of Saddam’s fearsome arsenal and to doubt the rosy scenarios for a postwar Iraq. They angrily dismissed those doubts and beat the war drums louder.

Proven wrong on every count, they insist those arguments no longer matter, but they’re wrong about that too. The American people know they have been repeatedly misled, which is why they are turning their backs on this President and his war.

Amen