Like Shooting Ducks in a Barrel

Glenn Greenwald takes on the distasteful task of reading the prognostications of Richard Cohen and Mark Steyn and then performing the relatively easy task of demonstrating that they were and are full of it.

That really is why we are in the situation we confront in Iraq. Because Richard "Only-a-fool--or-possibly-a-Frenchman--could-conclude-otherwise" Cohen and his ilk demonized and caricatured the Howard Deans of the world as pacifist, amateur, naive, stupid, frivolous, dangerous French hippies even though everything Dean was saying was true and prescient and everything Cohen was saying was false and idiotic. And they're still doing that.

Cohen wrote a column in June of this year (yes, he is still held out by the Post as someone to whom we should listen), entitled "Culpability Deficit Disorder," in which he oh-so-knowingly blamed everyone for the disaster in Iraq other than himself (including by blaming decisions that happened immediately after the invasion that he never criticized at the time, when he was still cheering loudly and worshipfully for the administration). He also now says that everything would have been great in Iraq if we had just left once Saddam was removed (something he never advocated at the time), and still rails against "the people who are so certain of their moral righteousness when it comes to the Iraq war."

Same story for that other shill, Mark Steyn. Glenn quotes some Steyn and then asks:

Is it even possible to be more wrong than that? And that's why we stayed, doing what we were doing. Because the self-serving propagandists like Mark Steyn paraded around as experts -- and were hailed as such -- and kept telling Americans that the Iraqi Army was almost self-sufficient . . . just a little bit longer because we're making really great progress . . . . those who keep telling you that violence is escalating and we're not making progress are cut-and-run cowards who hate America and want us to lose. . . . ignore the reports from the Bush-hating media because they are inventing stories about violence . . . Churchill would stay and so should we.

[...]

That is the most tragic part about what is happening in Iraq. None of it was unforeseeable. To the contrary, it was all not only foreseeable, but foreseen and warned about -- by the unserious, frivolous, America-hating crazies who were demonized and laughed at (and unbelievably, still are) by the warmongers (in both parties) and their mindless allies in the press.

I know I've written about this several times before, but it is truly unfathomable that the people who are responsible for this disaster -- not just the ones who advocated it in the beginning, but much worse, the ones who continued to insist that things were going well and that everything was progressing nicely and that reports to the contrary should be dismissed and ignored -- continue to be accorded respect and treated as though they have great credibility. Why is that?

And conversely, why are those who were so right and prescient and wise in their counsel treated as though they are lightweight, laughable morons who can't be "trusted with national security"? Why is it that when one watches news programs, one still encounters all of those smug, all-knowing little sneers whenever there is a reference to Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi and national security, whereas John McCain and Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan and Lawrence Kaplan -- Iraq War lovers all -- are addressed with whispered reverence as we wait for their wise and weighty pronouncements about What We Should Do Next?

Glenn points us to a "a great post highlighting some of the underlying assumptions of the pundit class, prompted, appropriately enough, by a personal encounter with Richard Cohen."