The Lamo in Winter

Richard Cohen still gets his McCain man love in before spitting out yet more banality:

I have some questions. When politicians and commentators detail all that the Bush administration did wrong, I wonder whether any of it really matters. Would things have turned out differently if we had done everything right? Was Iraq so "broken" we never could have fixed it? Was Hussein's despotism an avoidable tragedy, or was it, instead, a tragic necessity? I wonder about all these things. I tend to think now we never could have made it work.

Now, of course, everyone looks like an idiot. Bremer was an idiot and Garner was an idiot and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and all the generals, with the exception of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who called for lots and lots of troops and was sidelined. But these men are not really idiots. They were merely wrong, sometimes on account of arrogance, but they were doing what they thought was the right thing. They simply didn't know what they didn't know. They didn't know a damned thing about Iraq.

Didn't know a damned thing about Iraq?

Well, good thing we FUCKING WENT TO WAR then, huh?!

November 21, 2006:

I thought [on Iraq]. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing -- the fighting -- were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

But Golly, on May 22, 2006:

For many who supported going to war in Iraq, the nature of the regime was important, even paramount. It is disappointing that this no longer gets mentioned. I suppose the handwriting was on the wall when Michael Moore failed to mention Hussein's crimes at all in his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Years from now, someone coming across the film could conclude that the United States picked on the Middle Eastern version of Switzerland. Now, all the weight is on one side of the moral scale.

And then there's this on November 29, 2005:

Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. All the evidence for one -- the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa -- had been challenged. What's more, U.N. inspectors on the ground had found nothing. ``We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq,'' said the U.N.'s Mohamed ElBaradei. That was on Feb. 14. The next month, the U.S. went to war anyway.

In their respective confessions, neither Edwards nor Biden explains why they were not persuaded by the evidence that Bush & Co. were exaggerating -- concocting is possibly a better word -- Saddam's nuclear threat. Of course, that still leaves chemical and biological. But chemical has been around since April 22, 1915, when the Germans used chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres. Biological is a different story, but it's hard to deliver and not all that effective. Whatever the case, before Sept. 11, Americans hardly feared Saddam's chemical or biological weapons.

Sept. 11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks, coupled with the still-unexplained deaths of five people from anthrax poison sent through the mail, unhinged America. Cooler heads in the Bush administration seized the moment to plump for a war they always wanted while many of the rest of us -- myself included -- got caught up in an emotional frenzy. Even after the passions of the moment cooled -- even after it was clear Iraq was no real imminent threat -- few of us demanded that Bush back down. The best I could do was whisper some doubt. On July 25, 2002, I wrote that the Bush administration would pay dearly if it was, as was then becoming clear, going to wage war for specious reasons. ``War plans are being drawn up at the Pentagon," I wrote. ``But explanations are lacking at the White House."

The above, is certainly a far cry from this on February 6, 2003:

The evidence he [Colin Powell at the UN] presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise...

OH and LOOK AT COHEN GO on all the issues he said he had doubts about:

But the case Powell laid out regarding chemical and biological weapons was so strong -- so convincing -- it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that. In effect, he was telling the French and the Russians what could happen -- what would happen -- if the United Nations did not do what it said it would and hold Saddam Hussein accountable for, in effect, being Saddam Hussein.

The French, though, are so far deaf to such logic. Their foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said that the consequences of war are dire and unpredictable. He is right about that. But the consequences of doing nothing -- and mere containment of Iraq amounts to nothing -- are also dire and somewhat predictable. The United Nations will be revealed as a toothless debating society -- a duty-free store on the East River -- and every rogue will have learned a lesson from Saddam Hussein: Stall until everyone loses interest.

Gee, Dickey, if I may call you Dickie as it beats the the alternative choice of I-D-I-O-T, who turned out to be more credible five years down the road...Colin Powell or the then vilified and mocked Frenchman de Villepin?

I suppose your problem in admitting that fact would be a Joe Klein like, "well yes, the French were right, but they were so snooty about it, being french." This admission (with bonus self-possessed chuckle) made while on your Blackberry phone, in your Range Rover, driving off to Starbucks for your Venti Triple Caramel Macchiato.