I remember arguments with serious anti-war liberals who pre-war were seriously allergic to the suggestion that all this was bullshit. There was a wealth of information out there to say it was all bullshit. What you had to factor in was what being wrong would cost. Guess wrong, and you would have to listen to it for years. Guess right? You can see how much that means.

I'll acknowlege it was a guess. I guessed right. I guess I might even be be some sort of prophet because I looked at the thing and asked what it would look like before it started and I guessed "Lebanon". I guessed really, really, right, and no one is beating down my door to ask for my next guess.

You can catch out anti-war liberals to this day telling you how it doesn't matter one way or another to cover their ass for not calling bullshit on the whole affair back when it mattered. As a matter of fact the whole matter seems to be decided outside of people who really had opinions in the polls. What really seems to matter is if you were a damn fool in 2003 and your willingness or unwillingness to figure out that you were stupid and said a bunch of stupid things in that time frame.

Ed, what's your next guess?

Being right at the time and marginalized does not help. That the validation occured so quickly speaks to the huge complexity of modern society. It's time for many to rethink assumptions, key among them is the need to scale decision making to encompass more thinkers. Those that cna effectively scale will beat those that don't. Technological change increases the number of people who can work together effectively.

Team Bush did a much better job in selling, but like the dot com era companies they emulated, not having any implementation or actual product kills you in the end. Sure implementation gets in the way of sales, but without it a project devolves into orwellian insanity and everybody loses. Case in point, our current mess.

Given that this administration is thoroughly staffed by PNAC members and immersed in the baptismal waters of PNAC dogma, given that PNAC strategy was straight out of "Pinky and the Brain" and thus suspect as inherently delusional, given that the WMD intelligence was presented as a whole and a certainty rather than three separate sets of probabilities for bio, chem, and nuclear; and given that the scenario was presented alongside the transparently ludicrous "9/11-Iraq-Saddam-bin Laden" conflations, it should not have taken large amounts of scepticism on the part of the public to have smelled a cooked canard l'orange.

I've no idea what opinions were bouncing around the windowless halls of the CIA, but if the prevalent one wasn't "I got no frigging clue what's happening inside Iraq", we're, as taxpayers, being rather overcharged for what can only laughingly be called "intelligence".

Ed Marshall,

Yes:

What you had to factor in was what being wrong would cost. Guess wrong, and you would have to listen to it for years. Guess right? You can see how much that means.

This is something I've thought myself many times before. In fact, this built-in bias is one of the reasons I was willing to bet $1000 Iraq had nothing. If you're working at the CIA or a DC think tank, you'd pay an enormous price if you concluded Iraq had nothing and were wrong—whereas you'd pay little price if it were the other way around.

Still, I'm amazed the price for people who were wrong has usually turned out to be even lower than I thought. I.e., nothing whatsoever. Indeed, the only person I know of who's really paid a price is the guy I made the bet with.

patience,

Yes:

Technological change increases the number of people who can work together effectively.

This is one of the reasons I think the Bush administration had to resort to such an impressive amount of lies. Even just a decade ago they could have gotten away with a much smaller number. But technology made it possible to unmask each lie very quickly, so they kept on having to come up with new ones.

cavjam,

Well, we're being overcharged if you think the CIA exists to find out about the world. On the other hand, if it exists to keep a certain group of people in power, it's really pretty cheap.

This is one of the reasons I think the Bush administration had to resort to such an impressive amount of lies. Even just a decade ago they could have gotten away with a much smaller number.
a decade ago? i dont know. they started to dig into clinton's 'lies' around this time didn't they? but 2 decades ago? definitely. St. Ronnie got away with death squads in south america, so anything was possible back then.

And what exactly are the Republicans NOT getting away with today? This is Lakoff's Fallacy: the liberal belief that simply being correct is reason enough to be listened to. The truth will NOT set you free.

As you can see, I LIKE TO YELL, too.

You know, even at the time I considered it blindingly obvious how fabricated the case for war was. It was ABSURD. Saddam, with weapons of mass destruction, menacing the U.S. via an alliance with al-Qaeda? Only an absolute idiot would believe stupid shit like that, and I had nothing but contempt for people who swallowed that horseshit. Frankly I find it vexing that some of those people who are just now starting to cough some of that horseshit back up are being given any kind of respect. And never mind that people like Cheney are still trying to cram it back down our throats.

My next guess is the thing will continue to look like Lebanon and will end the same way. The occupiers will get bled to death and leave over the hill. The U.S. will wind up basing out of Kuwait the same way the the IDF pulled back to behind the green line (there may even be some Sheeba Farms parallel with the Kuwati border bulged out).

ROTFL! Great post, Jon. [what a wit!]

Good discussion above, too, to which [unfortunately] I have nothing to add! ;-)

Exactly. It will just get you mocked on Rush and O'Reilly and then placed across from some AEI shitball on TV so that "both sides" of the issue are presented.

In above post, I quoted the "truth will NOT set you free" language, but it got dumped.