Tom Friedman is back:
What I resent so much is that some of us actually put our personal politics aside in thinking about this war and about why it is so important to produce a different Iraq.
Translation: I was right to support the war, which should have gone well, but the Bushies screwed everything up. Blah blah blah. You hear this a lot from Sensible Liberals who furrowed their brows and thought things through and decided that they had no choice but to support the war in Iraq, what with the WMD’s and all — and nothing annoys me more. Well, that’s not true — having someone stand on my feet and shout “neener neener” in my ear in a screechy voice would annoy me more, and I’m sure there are other examples. But we’ll let it stand as a rhetorical device. The point is, the Sensible Liberals steadfastly refused to take into account what the rest of us understood to be obvious: of course the Bushies are going to screw this up. Look at who you’re dealing with. Halliburton Dick and the PNAC Posse — you think these people are going to get it done right? All that crap about being welcomed as liberators, rose petals thrown at our feet — it was obvious from the start that the people in charge of this thing were living in a policy wonk fantasy world. Add to this the fact that anyone with the slightest historical perspective should have been able to extrapolate from past experience and understand that the Law of Unintended Consequences often governs U.S. interventions — and, well, let’s just say I’m not terribly impressed with the Sensible Liberals who sensibly supported the war and now reluctantly must acknowledge that things have not gone as well as one might have hoped.