{"id":887,"date":"2004-05-07T20:16:37","date_gmt":"2004-05-08T03:16:37","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-05-07T20:16:37","modified_gmt":"2004-05-08T03:16:37","slug":"on-being-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2004\/05\/07\/on-being-right\/","title":{"rendered":"On Being Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.swarthmore.edu\/SocSci\/tburke1\/perma50504.html\" target=\"_blank\">A very good essay if you can stand to read it.<\/a>  Plan on being angry if you do.  Excerpt:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cStop with the hindsight\u201d, says one writer. \u201cBe patient,\u201d says another.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, no, let\u2019s not stop with the hindsight. Not when so many remain so profoundly, dangerously, incomprehensibly unable to acknowledge that the hindsight shows many people of good faith and reasonable mien predicting what has come to pass in Iraq. Let\u2019s not be patient: after all, the people counseling patience now showed a remarkable lack of it before the war.<\/p>\n<p>One of my great pleasures in life, I am ashamed to say, is saying \u201cI told you so\u201d when I give prudential advice and it is ignored. In the greatest \u201cI told you so\u201d of my life, I gain no pleasure at all in saying it. It makes me dizzy with sickness to say it, incandescent with rage to say it. It sticks in my throat like vomit. It makes me want to punch some abstract somebody in the mouth. It makes me want to scrawl profane insults in this space and abandon all hope of reasonable conversation.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s because the people who did what they did, said what they said, on Iraq, the people who ignored or belitted counsel to the contrary, didn\u2019t just screw themselves. They screwed me and my family and my people and my nation and the world. They screwed a very big pooch and they mostly don\u2019t even have the courage to admit it. They pissed away assets and destroyed tools of diplomacy and persuasion that will take a generation to reacquire at precisely the moment that we need them most. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2004\/5\/7\/15221\/51314\" target=\"_blank\">Via Meteor Blades at Daily Kos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very good essay if you can stand to read it. Plan on being angry if you do. Excerpt: \u201cStop with the hindsight\u201d, says one writer. \u201cBe patient,\u201d says another. Oh, no, let\u2019s not stop with the hindsight. Not when so many remain so profoundly, dangerously, incomprehensibly unable to acknowledge that the hindsight shows many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}