David Brooks really must have no shame whatsoever. In today’s NYT column (reg. req’d), Brooks piously proclaims that if only Don Rumsfeld had listened to those insightful observers in the punditocracy, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out so badly. From today’s column:
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…. [W]hen you look at the commentary â at least during that week â you are struck by how smart a lot of it was, and how the commentariat responded sensibly to facts on the ground.
Funny thing is, as Greg Mitchell over at Editor & Publisher points out, Brooks himself wasn’t among those “smart” commentators who were “sensibly responding” to what was actually going on – although Brooks of course fails to mention that in his piece. To the contrary, Brooks was front-and-center criticizing those commentators who were criticizing the war, the administration’s lack of preparedness, or both.
Mitchell has the whole story, chapter and verse. Go read it.
UPDATE (3/17): Brooks was on NPR this evening again explaining how terrible it was that Rumsfeld didn’t listen to clever pundits like him back in 2003, and how fortunate it is that Bush appears finally to have changed strategies for success in Iraq after getting it wrong until now. Funny thing is, he’s been saying exactly the same thing for years. From his column dated September 9, 2003 (reg’ req’d):
The policy ideas Bush sketched out [in a recent speech] represent such a striking series of policy shifts they amount to a virtual relaunching of the efforts to rebuild Iraq…. Bush has finally signaled that the U.S. is going to hand over real authority to newly selected Iraqi ministers. Yesterday, Bremer released a seven-step process for handing power back to the Iraqis that reads like a treatment program for Imperialists Anonymous. If this process is carried out, Americans administrators will be serving Iraqi executives, not the other way around…. The essential news is that Bush will do whatever it takes to prevail, and senior members of his administration are capable of looking honestly at their mistakes.
What rubbish. David Brooks has been peddling this line for three years. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.
