Kudos to Tim Noah
Glenn Greenwald directs us to...
Glenn Greenwald: Atrios notes some commendable observations from Tim Noah, whose mea culpa article is, by far, the most thoughtful in the Slate pile (a distinction easily achieved)...
Tim Noah:
Forget what I got wrong. Why did Mary McGrory and Barack Obama get Iraq right?: Why should you waste your time, at this late date, ingesting the opinions of people who were wrong about Iraq? Wouldn't you benefit more from considering the views of people who were right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part, that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S. entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently "serious" to explain why they were right.
Fortunately, this Lewis Carroll logic hasn't prevailed... in the... Democratic nomination.... Barack Obama, is winning primary votes partly on the strength of his having opposed the Iraq invasion. Another person who ultimately proved right on Iraq is Mary McGrory... Feb. 13 [2003]...:
[E]veryone needs a respite from the encircling apprehension and dread. Beginning with the president, all should take a deep breath and reassess. Colin Powell is working overtime to close the loop on Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. In his masterly U.N. speech he made the case against Saddam Hussein, but not the case for war. He needs a rest. The orange alert has worn everybody out.
McGrory repeated this sentiment in her March 6 column, addressed to readers who'd misconstrued her Powell column. A couple of weeks later, McGrory suffered a stroke, and 13 months later she died. But she leaves behind a lovely anthology, edited by her friend Phil Gailey. It can be read more profitably than this pile of tired mea culpas.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
