Finally finally finally, even Jonah Goldberg stops drinking the Kool-Aid. He admits that the Iraq War was a mistake. But his cognitive dissonance is such that he still can’t admit that people who opposed war all along were right. Watch this worm squirm:
The Iraq war was a mistake.
I know, I know. But I’ve never said it before. And I don’t enjoy saying it now. I’m sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that’s fine because I’m not joining their ranks anyway.
…I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
Jonah didn’t support the war because of logic or facts. He supported it because its his knee-jerk reaction to oppose whatever them libruls say.
Wanker.
Shorter Jonah Goldberg: If I admit we were wrong about the war, that makes me right about everything else.
Drum also takes Goldberg to task:
But Jonah says that even though it was mistake to go in, we still need to see it through. And then there’s this:
According to the conventional script, if I’m not saying "bug out" of Iraq, I’m supposed to….
To my surprise, the rest of the paragraph is a suggestion that we should hold a plebiscite asking Iraqis if they want us to stay. But that’s not at all what the conventional script requires. The conventional script requires that those who think we should stay need to suggest a way in which we can win. Otherwise Jonah will be writing this same column in 2009, except this time it will be, "If we had known then what we know now, we would have been better off pulling out when we could."
Well, we do know now what we know now. The civil war in Iraq is getting worse, our current strategy plainly isn’t working, there are no more troops to send over, the political situation in Baghdad is untenable, and the U.S. Army is still culturally allergic to counterinsurgency and security training ("Everyone in the U.S. armed forces knows that the way to the top is to command American units, not to advise foreign units," says Max Boot, and he’s right).
Basically, that’s what Goldberg is saying: "All right, all RIGHT! I was WRONG about Iraq! I ADMIT it! So that means I must be right about STAYING in Iraq to clean up the mess we made."