Big day for being wrong. Ara Rubyan says he was wrong, too — wrong in predicting that
the President would not go through with his veto threat. He then more than makes up for it with this very reasonable, moderate and yet politically astute post: What The Dems Should Do Next.
But you know, Ara, being wrong is no crime. Sometimes you stick your neck out and you get to be historically right. Sometimes, true, the price of doing that is a broken neck; and understandably not everyone is up for that. Hitchens (via Hydralisk):
So one day we’ll all see just how right you all were about Iraq?
No, I don’t think the argument will stop, perhaps forever. But when it does become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists, it’ll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just. Most of what went wrong with it was that it was put off too long. What a lot of people wish is that the thing could have been skipped.
And we can understand how the nihilist left would rather that the Saddam problem all just went away — and can convince itself, as it always has with its powerful appetite for myth (no matter how inconsistent with other myths in the treasury), that it just would have gone away, anyway, if only we would have sent more unicorns. And too the fascist-friendly right; it’s not that Pat Buchanan is anything but a realist about the containability of Saddam Hussein; he just didn’t consider the bad outcome from letting Saddam fester all that bad.
But how do we understand people of evident good faith who say they believe the Saddam problem, and the WMD’s that everyone knew he had, was despite that not really “our problem” — “our” meaning America the hegemon — at all? Could they actually be stupid? Possibly, but I don’t think so. Is there a fine point of strategic vision, some twist of James Baker / Cyrus Vance type “realism” that explains it? It claims to constantly; yet I have never heard an actual rational explanation, but merely self-delusion and self-congratulation from that camp. They merely go home with their Nobels and leave the problems for the next guy.
So are politics, and political ambition, and the lust for power, and cynicism, really that corrosive — so much so that, as Hitchens says, people with power and responsibility would rather just stick those necks and what’s on them deep into holes along the beach despite the solemn seriousness of their obligations, and vote as the Senate and the House did for a policy as utterly bad for long run foreign policy as the vote to capitulate in Iraq?
They are, they are.
I argued vociferously last year that the spin on how dumb, stupid, idiotic the Israeli prosecution of its foray into Lebanon was wrong. One could second-guess the policy, and inevitably many would; but could the Israelis really be actual idiots? As 
known that he was totally unqualified for the job when he took it, and having made little effort to make himself better informed in the months leading up to the war. “His lack of experience and knowledge,” the report states, “prevented him from challenging in a competent way both the IDF, over which he was in charge,” and from demanding from the IDF the “presentation of serious strategic options for discussion.
concept of “Jewish American”-ism, and I picked a bunch of pictures of “famous American Jews” of the sort that a certain kind of restaurant has up on the wall to show which Jewish American mouths may or may not have been filled there.
