Nur Gedanken

…Remember those famous last words John Lewis Gaddis added on the history of Cold War? Yes, afterwards we always know better what should have been done. Thanks to David Brooks we now know at least about the incredible haughtiness of New York Times columnists. In his today`s op-ed "Rumsfeld’s Blinkers" Brooks wrote:

Some weeks nothing happens; some weeks change history. The week of March 24, 2003, was one of those pivotal weeks. U.S. troops had just begun the ground invasion of Iraq. They were charging north, but hadn’t reached Baghdad. The Fedayeen had begun to launch suicide attacks and were putting up serious resistance in Nasiriya.

Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but immediately the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war.

He goes on blaming Rumsfeld and other officials for failing to stop the insurgencies, because they did not take serious all those pundits, and concludes:

That’s true in general, and it’s true in spades in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. "Cobra II" makes Rumsfeld and Franks each seem like Barry Bonds: a formerly intimidating figure who now just seems pathetic. Those two were contemptuous of the armchair generals and the TV kibitzers. But at the crucial moment in their lives, they got things wrong, and the pundits often got things right.

I’m sorry David, but the only pathetic guy around is you! Do you remember what you said back then? No? So just a quick reminder:

I’ve been surprised by how it is all going. We have the secretary of defense negotiating surrender terms before we even engage the enemy. We have a military that is trying to scare the enemy troops but not kill them. To me, the striking thing about this whole week is how political it has been.

Maybe you wrote some secret "critical" articles on the war against Iraq?