DemFromCT reads Jonah Goldberg so we don't have to. Goldberg tells us:
We know now that invading Iraq was the wrong decision, but that doesn't vindicate the antiwar crowd.
Indeed, he says "the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003."
The thing is, we did know then what Jonah knows now. And that does vindicate those who opposed the war.
I called my congressmen to oppose authorizing an invasion, and said that there were probably no WMD, certainly none that were any sort of urgent threat. I pointed out the total lack of adequate planning for the occupation, and the likelihood we'd be stuck in a quagmire. I observed that bulked up inspection teams and expanded no-fly zones would be effective at reducing Hussein's power without sending American troops into urban warfare between the factions which would surely rise up against each other.
And I was ignored. Millions of people protested to ask the President not to invade, and he dismissed them all, saying he didn't govern according to opinion polls.
Nancy Boyda knew then what others are just now figuring out. She helped organize local protests before the invasion, even getting together a group to attend a major demonstration in Washington. For this prescience, she was attacked; Jim Ryun ran ads comparing her to bin Laden.
The thing is, she was right about Iraq. Jim Ryun was wrong. She was a private citizen and a businesswoman. He sits on the Armed Services committee. He's responsible for overseeing our armed forces and making sure we don't send them into harm's way without a plan or a clear objective.
He failed his constituents and the troops. Shouldn't being wrong like that count pretty strongly against him? Should anyone listen to what Ryun or Goldberg have to say any more? Shouldn't we prefer the people who would have made the right choices?
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Just like Sen. Rpberts who said if he knew then what he knows now, he probably would not have voted for the war in Iraq. The problem with this statement is that he is the head of the senate intelligence committee. He did know, or at least should have known if he had bothered to do his damn job.
Maybe Roberts forgot to take his memory pills when he said that?
The military and the intelligence community DID "know then what we know now" to a considerable extent.
On WMDs:
The Germans thought that their source, codenamed 'Curveball', was unreliable, told US intelligence this, but his claims about Biological Weapons were still cited as "facts" in the Powell UN speech. Likewise the aluminium tubes that "are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets" (Powell UN speech) -- when in fact the most comparable U.S. system, the Mark-66 air launched 70mm rocket, uses the same grade of aluminum and has similar tolerances. Similarly, the Niger Yellowcake documents were already known to be forgeries when they were publicised.
On the effects of the occupation, the government was warned:
By Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute (warning against outstaying your welcome: "If we try to transform Iraq into a democracy, we will need more and more troops over time because we will have to quell nationalistic revolts"), by a meeting of experts that the Pentagon convened in December 2002 ("The possibility of the United States winning the war but losing the peace is real and serious"), by Norman Schwarzkopf ("What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question to my mind. It really should be part of the overall plan.") by a major planning meeting convened by Jay Garner in February 2003 ("we risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest, chaos whose magnitude may defeat our national strategy of a stable new Iraq"), as well as a large number of other consultants, Middle East experts, and serving and retired military officers.
Goldberg is quite simply clueless.