Nobody Likes An "I Told You So"

But how do we feel about an "I told you the opposite"?

The NY Times, Jan 12:

Facing Facts About Iraq's Election

When the United States was debating whether to invade Iraq, there was one outcome that everyone agreed had to be avoided at all costs: a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that would create instability throughout the Middle East and give terrorists a new, ungoverned region that they could use as a base of operations. The coming elections - long touted as the beginning of a new, democratic Iraq - are looking more and more like the beginning of that worst-case scenario.

It's time to talk about postponing the elections.

And here is the much-discussed NY Times editorial from March 1:

Mideast Climate Change

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

From the paper of impressive track record.

Comments

[Frank Martin]

...But the insurgents are winning...

[Michael Ubaldi]

Cue The Theme Music

To what, Benny Hill?

[GM]

What's the name of that music for the Three Stooges?

[Frank Martin]

Three Blind Mice.

[ic]

That is why copyright laws should be enforced on the net, so that you cannot make such a biased right wing extremist comparison. We the left have first amendment rights to say whatever we want, however we want, responsibly or otherwise. You, mean-spirited right-winger, however, has no right to crticise us and laugh at us, you should be stopped. Just think, if no Iraqis showed up on Jan 30, would you do this side-by-side comparision? Would you? This proves beyond a reasonable doubt that you are biased, a right-wing extremist.

[Rjkjunkjmail]

Theme music from Dumb and Dumber?

[Bubba]

i gotta holt of one em new yawk times oncet. it left black stuff all over my ass!

[wrinkled time]

"there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power"...

... or if the New York Times had had its way.

[ScienceDave]

Predicting the future is hard, and kind of a fool's game. I love the willingness of the NYT to filter reality through a partisan lens, then immediately start making prescriptions ("Postpone the elections!") Then, when events prove them wrong, they half-heartedly admit it, then start prescribing again. I think Washington is doing OK without listening to the Times. Invading a country is hard, and getting something good to come of it is harder still. Sitting on the sidelines grousing looks pretty easy by comparison.

[Towering Barbarian]

But let's give them credit for being willing to say "Mr. Bush was right" however halfheartedly they did it! That does put them ahead of most of the Left and the good portion of the Right.

[Harold]

"In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering."

Only the NYT would call car-bombing, a post-election democratic maneuvering.

[AST]

How did an organization without any short term memory get to be the nation's newspaper of record?

I wonder if anybody has an archive of the entire blogosphere. Someone has to give historians something to go on besides the MSM.

[Devin McCullen]

Ah, Harold, I think they were saying that the "post-election democratic maneuvering" is what the insurgents were competing against, not the method they were using to compete.

[triticale]

"In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes with post-election democratic maneuvering for [the] headlines."

What they need is an editor with some knowledge of sentence structure.

[idi_amin]

hey give the NYT credit, they were 100% correct in predicting that Bush administration policies would lead to mass uprisings and discontent in the "Arab street".

[idi_amin]

hey give the NYT credit, they were 100% correct in predicting that Bush administration policies would lead to mass uprisings and discontent in the "Arab street".

[Wil]

Perhaps the music to "The Addams Family"...

[Jay]

I don't really see a contradiction in the two editorials. The first is pessimistic, and the second finds it "surprising" that things seem to be working out. It says "few in the West thought [Mid-East democracy] had any realistic chance," and doesn't imply that the NYT was among those few.

I'm on the same page with most of the accusations against the NYT, but not this one.

[big dirigible]

The first one is good old Time revisionism. I certainly don't remember everyone agreeing that a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims had to be avoided at all costs. That was the least of the potential problems. Remember all those millions of refugees about to flood over the borders? That was a potential problem I suspect everyone agreed on. "Instability throughout the Middle East" was a perpetual bugaboo of the Times, but not for Bush and his supporters, who realized that the "stability" that had been there for decades was part of the problem. And terrorists operating out of an ungoverned region would be worse than terrorists operating out of a governed region - how, exactly?

The second item isn't so bad. There are still some weird ideas there, such as the one that a mass murder every now and then is in any sense a "brutal insurgency" - it's a brutal mass murder, of no further significance than that. Nobody can possibly win a war by murdering a bunch of people standing around on a sidewalk. And I wonder a bit what the hell that line about smothering "fragile trends" (don't they wish - I still suspect the Arabs are going to show us all a few things about enthusiastic participatory democracy) in "a triumphalist embrace." Does that mean anything, or is it just unspecified carping? When the Times carps about specifics, it ends up looking foolish, so maybe it's switching to a more generic whine.

[tim wg]

Since we are talking about "I told you so", some people can't accept it anyways.

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=253202

Idea of the Week: Advancing Democracy (Democratic Leadership Council)

The truth is that the Bush administration deserves some credit for adopting the right stance toward democracy in the Arab Middle East -- even if it harnesses universal values like democracy and freedom to a foreign policy asserting America's unilateral and claim to interpret and apply those values. But Bush's pro-democracy push relies far too much on military force and mere rhetoric, as opposed to a real, consistent, constructive, and multilateral effort to systematize democracy promotion and economic engagement as central features of U.S. foreign policy."

"A good start for a truly systemic approach to the promotion of democracy is the Advance Democracy Act introduced yesterday by Sens. Lieberman and John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the Senate, and by Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) in the House."

"These steps would institutionalize and regularize democracy promotion as part of the ongoing mission of the State Department, instead of allowing this initiative to remain a political endeavor driven by the White House or, worse yet, a "psych-war" operation driven by the Pentagon."

"Promoting democracy, particularly in the Arab Middle East, is too important for this country's strength, security, and credibility to be carried out in a half-baked or half-hearted matter -- and also far too important to be copyrighted by any one political party. Certainly Democrats, as the name of our party suggests, should be front and center in this effort."

Gee, so Bush so too hawkish for them so let's get democracy in the United Nations style with diplomacy, consensus, and numerous committees. It doesn't work this way!!!

[Knemon]

The point isn't that there's a "contradiction" per se, just that they have a habit of making predictions that miss the mark, then stuffing that down the memory hole, switching gears and continuing to make predictions and suggestions without any (visible) examination of their errors.

This fault is of course by no means unique to them ...

[Anselmo Cardinal Trentino]

The NYT and Iraq memory holes here: http://www.atrentino.com/ConningFeb05.html

[Evil Pundit]

The New York Times is "the newspaper of record" -- according to the New York Times. And we know how reliable the reports are in that paper.

[TM]

Thank you, Knemon (and I will add your comment to the sound of my own nagging but generally ineffectual conscience); and the Cardinal is taking no prisoners.

[Neo]

Sometimes it takes a 2 by 4 to give a fresh prospective.

[Achillea]

While the State Department's fixation on the notion that talk can resolve any and all disputes doesn't really inspire my respect for their judgement, retasking them from their slavish worship of stability-uber-alles would probably be a good thing.

[Achillea]

While the State Department's fixation on the notion that talk can resolve any and all disputes doesn't really inspire my respect for their judgement, retasking them from their slavish worship of stability-uber-alles would probably be a good thing.

[David Nieporent]

The point isn't that there's a "contradiction" per se, just that they have a habit of making predictions that miss the mark, then stuffing that down the memory hole, switching gears and continuing to make predictions and suggestions without any (visible) examination of their errors.

The best was the one Stuart Buck pointed out last year: they basically called everyone who supported welfare reform back in the 1990s heartless puppy-kickers and baby-rapers -- but when it came time to reauthorize these programs recently, they called it a "no-brainer" without acknowledging that they opposed it the first time around.

Gee, so Bush so too hawkish for them so let's get democracy in the United Nations style with diplomacy, consensus, and numerous committees. It doesn't work this way!!!

Still, it would be nice if the State Department were on board with our nation's foreign policy, instead of acting as if their job were to sell the wishes of foreign governments to the president.

[KMan]

I hope W reads the Times' editorials, and takes their suggestions to heart.

And then does the opposite that they suggest.