Clap Louder!

Tim F. over at Balloon Juice has a good post entitled “Tinkerbell Died.”  He expounds upon the growing Iraq meme among righties noted by Glenn Greenwald: “Iraq failed because the lefties didn’t clap loudly enough.” (All this talk of Tinkerbell and clapping alludes to a scene in Peter Pan where Tinkerbell is dying but will survive if enough people believe in fairies. In the play the
characters make a plea to the children watching to sustain her by clapping.)

Tim writes in part:

Hear that, moonbats? Criticizing the president has consequences. To
wit, it’s your fault if the negative consequences that you predict turn
out to be true.

. . .

[Those] who opposed Iraq basically said that the neocon objectives were
unrealistic and likely to fail. After neocon objectives proved unrealistic and began to fail the same folks, shockingly enough, said ‘told you so.’ In a fair world one earns intellectual credibility by
correctly forecasting the likely outcome of events that haven’t yet
taken place. If so, and I’m looking forward to the arguments against,
then the few prewar critics who correctly forecast what would happen,
Howard Dean among them, have immense credibility on the issue and the
rosy-scenario crowd has little to none.

It isn’t hard to
imagine why somebody would point out that they have credibility on an
issue. The war’s an ongoing problem and people who regularly got it
right maybe have a more realistic sense of what to do than the people
who got every single thing wrong. The long-term question hasn’t worked
itself out yet, true, but the folks whose short-term projections proved
so inept (WMD, AQ links, we’ll be greeted as liberators, reconstruction
will pay for itself, bureaucracy will go back to work right after the
war, candy and flowers, drawing the troops down to 30k within months,
‘last throes,’ no sectarian problems to worry about) will have a hard
time convincing most people that their long-term vision is on the money.