One thing that's going to be kind of fun over the next couple years -- and I mean fun in a bleak, masochistic way -- is rereading some of the comments that Iraq war advocates made before the invasion. Some are already famous ("greeted as liberators," "cakewalk"), but there's a lot of undiscovered gems out there. Here's one from National Review's Jonah Goldberg, writing in April 2002:
So how does all this ... justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).Yeah, that does sound pretty entertaining. Do these guys sleep at night?
