Some excerpts from moron Jonathon Chait’s atrocious editorial in the Los Angeles Times:
I DON’T WANT to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated…
…Indeed, most Democrats in the Senate voted against the Persian Gulf War, and that vote disqualified many of them from running for president in 1992. The presidential nomination went to a governor, Bill Clinton, who didn’t have to vote on the war, and he selected as his running mate then-Sen. Al Gore, one of a handful of Democrats who supported it.
Gore certainly deserves credit for his foresight as one of the very few public figures to support the first Iraq war and oppose the second. (Having supported both, I’m batting .500.) But this method of judging one’s worth solely by his or her record of supporting or opposing the right wars has pretty limited value. Sen. John Kerry, who opposed the first Iraq war and favored the second, has a more dismal record than Vice President Dick Cheney, who at least got one of his wars right. Does that mean Cheney is necessarily a wiser foreign policy sage than Kerry?
What’s even sillier is judging someone’s foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy…
Because the doves made so many bad predictions leading up to the Gulf War — remember the mass uprisings in the Arab world and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties? — many of us ignored warnings this time that proved more prescient.
There are many lessons to be absorbed from Iraq. We’d be foolish not to absorb them; only the most dense war supporter has come away from the experience unhumbled. But the failure of a criminally negligent administration to carry out a highly challenging rebuilding task in the most hostile part of the world does not teach us everything we need to know about the efficacy of military power.
Of course we’ll learn lessons from Iraq. I’m worried that we’ll learn too much.
Hey, Chait!! Maybe you were wrong about BOTH WARS. Maybe they are the same war. Maybe we lost it. Maybe we shouldn’t have started it.
