As we prepare to hear the, what, fifth (?) announcement of a “plan for victory” in Iraq since “Mission Accomplished”, it’s instructive to wander down Memory Lane and visit the hollow reams of punditry that helped convince the American people that the war was a good idea. Particularly appalling are those arguments that seems based solely on a desire to pitch the biggest tent in the camp: As Tom Friedman wrote, “something in Mr. Bush’s audacious shake of the dice appeals to me.”
Radar has done a lot of the stomach-turning work, in a feature that compares the post-invasion careers of pundits pro and con. The verdict? The wrong have gotten rich (Friedman has since bought a $9.3 million mansion in Bethesda and a second home in Aspen) and the right have gotten squat (Jonathan Schell notes, “There doesn’t seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media”).