Wank Wank Wank

The "liberal hawks" over at Slate are having a wankfest about how wrong they were on the Iraq War.  Each has written a little missive entitled "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?" - and as you'd expect, they suck.  A smattering:

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I believed the groupthink and contributed to it," by Jacob Weisberg.

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality," by Andrew Sullivan.

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be," by Jeffrey Goldberg.

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Rather than bore you with the answer, here are lessons from the experience," by Lord William Saletan.

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I wanted to strike back," by Richard Cohen.

"How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn't," by Christopher Hitchens.

Commentary after the jump.

Let's take on a few of these, shall we? First, Mr. Sullivan "misjudged" the Dear Leader's sense of morality. Let that sink in. Mr. Sullivan assumes Bush even has a sense of morality when the following was known prior to the 2000 election:

On May 21, 2000, the New York Times reported that, as a child, Bush and his friends used to torture animals for pleasure, "`We were terrible to animals,' recalled [Bush's boyhood friend Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. `Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,' Throckmorton said. `Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'" Note that the torture took place on Bush property; had Bush wanted to, he could easily have stopped this sadistic behavior. Instead, since it was his domain, it is more likely that Bush was a ringleader. Later, while an undergrad at Yale University, Bush was a president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, which engaged in initiation procedures described as "sadistic and obscene," including burning pledges with a hot branding iron. When the fraternity's sadistic rituals were uncovered by Yale authorities, Bush, then a Yale senior, defended the practice to the New York Times in an article that appeared on November 7, 1967, saying that the wound was "only a cigarette burn." Later, after becoming governor of Texas, Bush oversaw the executions of 131 people. In 1998, Bush signed the death warrant for a woman named Karla Tucker, who was executed on February 3, 1998. In an interview with Tucker Carlson that appeared in the September 1999 issue of Talk Magazine, Bush mocked Tucker's last-minute pleas for clemency. In the interview, Bush imitated Tucker with an exaggerated whimper, saying, "Please don't kill me."

Mr. Golberg claims he had no clue that the Bush administration could be that incompetent.  Of course, that administration was created by a man about whom the following was known prior to the 2000 election:

As explained by Kevin Phillips in his book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, George W. Bush's businesses fail but he makes millions.  Among Mr. Bush's business ventures:

• • Arbusto, an oil exploration company, lost money, but it got considerable investments (nearly $5 million) because even losing oil investments were useful as tax shelters.
  • Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. bought out Arbusto in 1984 and hired Mr. Bush to run the company's oil interests in Midland, Texas. The oil business collapsed as oil prices plummeted by 1986, and Spectrum 7 Energy was near failure.
  • Harken Energy acquired Mr. Bush's Spectrum 7 Energy shares, and he got Harken shares, a directorship, and a consulting arrangement in return. Harken, under Bush, brought in Saudi real estate tycoon Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh as a board member and a major investor. Over the next few years, Harken would turn out to have links to: Saudi money, CIA-connected Filipinos, the Harvard Endowment, the emir of Bahrain, and the shadowy Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
    • A 1991 internal SEC document suggested George W. Bush violated federal securities law at least 4 times in the late 1980s and early 1990s in selling Harken stock while serving as a director of Harken. This is essentially the same kind of activity that Martha Stewart is going to prison over. Except at the time of the investigation, Mr. Bush's father was president and the case was quietly dropped.

Mr. Cohen wanted to "strike back". But why did he want to strike back at a country that didn't attack us?

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including [Richard] Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq. "Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it. "Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

I'm sure these pundits that were so wrong about the Iraq War are sending all the money they've made from writing about it to the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they've helped kill.

Why Did We Get it Wrong? [Slate]

Comments

[No Blood for Hubris]

Merely proving that stupid people, are, in fact, way too f*cking stupid to know they're f*cking stupid.

Duh.

[Kvatch]

A little f*cking late! I'd say.

[Lew Scannon]

In the future, we will all know, that the opinions of these writers are based on wishful thinking, bad judgment, and political bias. Which makes their jobs as "opinion writers" as useful as seat belts on a toilet.

[Lew Scannon]

Christopher Hitchens: "I didn't get Iraq wrong, I merely redefined terms and words to make it appear as all is well with Iraq and I was right all along."

[Ale]

Very interesting, Thanks

[konagod]

Wow, what a boost for my own ego. I was right about Bush in the 1990s.

[actor212]

How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?

Me, I underestimated the stupidity of the chattering classes.

[Richard Smithon]

Do you know, if the internet sinks without a trace it will be because some almighty hand has finally HAD ENOUGH of bad-tempered illiterate ignoramuses getting their knickers in a rancid, fascist, foulmouthed ranting twist about people who express different opinions from their own. When did "liberal" become a term of abuse? And why? Oh my good Lord - someone disagrees with the president of the US of sodding A, and everyone with enough digits to tap a keyboard feels the world needs to know his (it usually HIS his) views. And if invective, pathetic playground abuse, and badly-thought-out political posturing isn't good enough, well sometimes language breaks down altogether and we simply can't work out what on EARTH you are trying to sday.
Who CARES what you think? Be grateful you're allowed to vote every four years (five inthe UK, never in less happy climes) and SHUT UP! Please? (Excuse typos, if there are any. Anna and I have just shared a bottle of champagne. Didn't give the dog any, naturally.)