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.
His point, and he does have one,…
what?
By now I’m fed up with the pundits who cite whether one person or another “voted” for the war and therefore somehow has less credibility or electability.
It’s as silly as insisting that because John Kerry — according to Bushites — insulted the troops, that he is not a viable candidate. Other reasons, maybe, but not a comment made in 2006 by a very smart man.
What’s worse is blaming “doves” because he didn’t take heed their warnings. What an idiot.
Well I have to say I agree with Gore. The first gulf war was right and the second was wrong for the mere fact the first was in defence of an attacked country and thus could be defended according to international law.
The reasons for the second war on the other, hand were artificially made. Saddam represented no existential threat neither to the US nor to the region, he was confined and boxed.
I hate the whole “hawks” vs. “doves” thing. I supported sending troops into Afghanistan but not Iraq. So what am I? A hawk or a dove? Perhaps a dawk or a hove?
It’s stupid, stupid, stupid, because it suggests that the “doves” are simply anti-war, when, in large part, that’s not the case. So the basis for the whole op-ed is incorrect.
In addition, I’m tired of these editorialists who supported the Iraq invasion and their confessions that “I was wrong, but…” Fuck you. You weren’t wrong. You are a liar and you supported a war based on lies that you knew were lies. Because nobody who actually listened to what the administration was saying in the run up to the invasion of Iraq really could have come away from it thinking, “Yeah, we really need to invade Iraq. That will deal a serious blow to international terrorism.”
I say that knowing full well that many Democrats in Congress voted for this war and that I’m leaning heavily toward supporting Edwards in ’08, who was one of them. He, like many others, was a big fucking coward, fearful of being called a traitor by those scary republicans.
At least now Edwards appears to be making an honest and sincere effort to make amends for that shitty vote, so at the moment I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. You, on the other hand, spin glibly about your batting record, as if you’re referring to bets on the NFL playoffs and not a war in which tens of thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been injured, that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and has made the United States far more hated in the world and far more susceptible to terrorist attacks than pre-September 11, 2001.
So screw you, Chait. You’re musings about Iraq aren’t worth a pint of piss.