From the Wall Street Journal:

Three cheers for Chris Matthews, to our knowledge the first Iraq naysayer to admit publicly that he was wrong. (We don't count Nicholas Kristof's grudging, half-assed effort.) In an August column he wrote: "This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut and Somalia in the history of U.S. military catastrophes. What will set it apart for all time is the immense--and transparent--political stupidity."



The New Haven Register reports on his mea culpa:

"I was wrong about the war," Matthews said in a booming voice, immediately gaining the attention of 600 people at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale. . . .

"I thought there would be an Arab revolt, a tremendous uproar," he said. "Nothing happened. I hate being wrong, but I'm glad." . . . He also said he thinks that more antiwar critics should admit they were wrong.

Indeed they should. Most of them, however, are even more shameless than Kristof. They claim they knew all along it would be a cakewalk; they demand weapons of mass destruction right now (after arguing that Hans Blix and crew should have forever to find them); they harp on every little bit of bad news coming out of Iraq as if it were a disaster.

Remember all the hysteria about looting of hospitals? Now Agence France-Presse reports (you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the dispatch to read it) that according to Médecins Sans Frontières there is "no large-scale health crisis" in Iraq. "MSF has not found any reason to justify a major humanitarian medical program in Iraq," MSF international president Morten Rostrup tells the wire service.

And what about those revolting Shiites who've been all over the news the past couple of days? "Shias Stage Anti-US Protest" reads a BBC.com headline from yesterday. You have to read to the 10th paragraph to learn that "the anti-US demonstrations were small-scale, involving only a few hundred people."

In the interest of eponymy, we'll give the final word on antiwar doomsayers to The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last:

"Why should anyone take them seriously? They've been proven wrong on the question of the day and then failed to demonstrate any serious capacity for introspection. They're not public thinkers. They're not journalists. They're activists."