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I'm going to give Bill Kristol a rest this week. I found today's column too boring and trivial to get very excited about, plus I hear it contains a major factual error, so he won't be needing me to try and make his life more miserable.
No, this time my weekly dose of New York Times ire is devoted to the op-ed page in general, or specifically, Sunday's five-year retrospective symposium, "Relections on the Invasion of Iraq." It's a hoot -- at least if you like your hoots with a jumbo dose of pathos.
Nine "experts" were invited to enlighten Times readers about the one aspect of the war that most "surprised" them, or that they "wished they had considered in the prewar debate."
And who were these "experts?" Five neocons -- L. Paul Bremer, Richard Perle, Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, and Frederick Kagan -- three ex-military officers (none of them named Anthony Zinni, Anne Wright, or Scott Ritter), and Woodrow Wilson School dean Anne-Marie Slaughter. Not "surprisingly," Slaughter is the only one who says anything that makes a damn bit of sense.
The finger-pointing is hilarious. Bremer blames the Pentagon, Perle blames the State Department, Pollack blames the White House, and Pletka, most weirdly, blames some kind of genetic deficiency in the Iraqi people. "Surge" architect Kagan, meanwhile, thinks that having "turned the tide of Iraqi opinion," everything's now going just swell. It's obvious none of these idiots has learned a friggin' thing.
I started mentally handing out awards -- Kagan, Most Delusional -- but I soon found the exercise too painful. I did, however, have to give a Most Ironic award to retired general Paul Eaton, a Hillary Clinton campaign adviser who used the opportunity to upbraid Congress for not asking the tough questions.
Not one mentioned the most obvious fact -- that no nation of brown people has gladly consented to being ruled by a distant nation of white people for, oh, at least 50 years or so. Not one typed the word "oil." Jeez, even the doddering, senile, economy-wrecker Alan Greenspan can see that.
Would it have been too much to ask to have one person represented who actually opposed this disaster from the start? Someone to speak for the almost 70% of us who think this war is about the worst mistake we've ever made? Are we that hard to find?
To have included the views of someone who was not "surprised" by anything that's happened over the last five years might have provided an interesting contrast.
