Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to No kidding

Can I at least get some idea of how we're scoring this?
TB — (archived)

Is this by number of predictions, quality of predictions, or what? Is there a correction factor for someone supposedly being an expert in the field?

That was quite a list of imaginary consequences in that Newsweek article, and it wasn't from some blogger or an amateur like me, but from Newsweek's Middle East regional editor. He made a number of predictions that didn't pan out, and, not to put too fine a point on it, assumed in the process that Saddam had active WMD.

I obviously screwed up on a lot of things, but the omniscience level on the other side wasn't that hot either, even from the professional media.

Maybe we've already forgotten about the "inevitable" Sunni-Shiite civil war from last year, Anbar being "lost," the surge "won't work," or the recent Sadr "victory" in the New York Times.

Often it's about moving goalposts, like "the surge was only about political progress" or just in the past few days on Kevin Drum's site, "Sadr didn't win but hey, neither did Maliki, really."

There's a bit of rewriting going on, too. I remember the initial phases of the war in 2003 when a lot of people assumed we'd be bogged down against the Iraqi Army for a long time, probably in months of lethal urban warfare with thousands of casualties in those months. Quagmires left and right.

The fall of Baghdad surprised everyone (heck, it surprised me). A couple of years later, try to find anyone who didn't know the whole time that we'd win the military battle in a "cakewalk."

And finally, a small truth at the base of it all:

The anti-war Left was never more furious than during that period when it looked like we had won easily.

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