Monday, January 15, 2007

I was wrong...but so were the unserious leftists.

One of the more annoying memes that you keep seeing from Bush followers/warbloggers lately is the "I was wrong about Iraq but so were the anti-war Bush haters." It probably started with Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous, "Iraq was a worthy mistake" op-ed, but however it started, it's gaining more and more traction as it becomes clear to people who breathe through their nostrils that invading Iraq was a really dumb thing to do.

Enter Megan McCardle, who, after a series of lame mea culpas, writes:
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass.
I don't know who Megan was arguing with, but I do remember many conversations going like this:
War Supporter: "Invading Iraq is the best idea ever! You either agree with that or you hate America."
"Dove": "Acutally, I think it's a really, really bad idea."
War Supporter: "Chamberlain! What an unserious terror-lover."
"Dove": "But I didn't..."
War Supporter: "Vote Republican or die."
Megan, here's a thought: when you decide to own up to being wrong about supporting the worst foreign policy disaster in US history that's to date killed 3,000 Americans and maimed over 20,000 and continues to wreak havoc in the most volatile part of the world, the owning up is diminished when you simultaneously point fingers at strawmen and say, "they were wrong too."

You'd think conservatives would know this stuff.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Let us grant that Megan is being honest and all the antiwar types she spoke with did have all the wrong reasons for being right. This is a quite serious self-indictment for her narrow intellectual curiosity; she must have limited those conversations to conservative circles, to the Buchanans and Buckleys and minor AEI functionaries. But then hasn't this been the central shortcoming of the war party all along? Their willingness to believe alcoholic scam artists like CurveBall but not Muhammad al-Baradei...

Blue Texan said...

Well, I don't think she's being honest. As Atrios pointed out, most people opposed to the war didn't think Saddam was a imminent threat, and didn't think we should invade a country that hadn't attacked us. Period.

To argue some arbitrary laundry list of hypotheticals didn't come to pass balances out the wrongness of the We Must Invade Iraq Now crowd is laughable.

Chris said...

Lots of us were wrong. I never imagined for a second that Colin Powelll would sit there and lie to the world. I actually thought men like Wolfowitz, Perle and Fukayama had some idea what they were doing. But it takes a particularly venal mind to dress one's own admission of being completely, flat-out wrong in a final, half-hearted attack against the "doves" whose warnings now leave you with the sour taste of guilt in your mouth. We were wrong. Period. None of this "But they were wrong too" shit - because they WEREN'T WRONG, Megan.

Unknown said...

BT -- You shoudl get HaloScan, or another comments system. Just a suggestion.