Horses Mouth February 15, 2007 2:50 PM

FLASHBACK: Brooks Predicted War Foes Wouldn't Admit They Were Wrong
February 15, 2007 -- 2:50 PM EST // View Comments (134) // Post a Comment

Oh, man -- the fun just never stops with David Brooks, does it? As noted below, Brooks illustrated our Doctrine of Pundit Infallibility, or DOPI, in his Times column today by mocking those who, unlike him, were right about the Iraq war. And now we've unearthed a truly priceless gem from Brooks' oeuvre in which he predicted that despite success in Iraq war opponents weren't going to admit that they were wrong.

Here's what Brooks wrote in The Weekly Standard back in 2003 after the Saddam statue fell:

I'm curious about how all the war opponents are going to react if things continue to go well. Sure, they opposed Saddam, they will say. They just didn't want to do anything about him. They had no practical suggestion for how to end his murderous reign and spread freedom. They were tolerant. Tolerant of tyranny. They doubted, and continue to doubt America's willingness and ability to serve as a force for good in the world. That was their crucial mistake.
I suspect they will not even now admit their errors. I doubt the people of Europe will say: We were wrong. You really are the liberators of the Iraqi people. I doubt the Arab propagandists will say: We will never spread such distortions again. We will never again be so driven by resentment and dishonesty.

Sad to say, human nature doesn't work that way. The rump 15 percent of Americans who still oppose this war may perhaps grow more bitter, lost in the cul-de-sac of their own alienation.

No, human nature doesn't work that way, as we've since discovered. Special thanks to crack TPM reporter Eric Kleefeld for the find.

To visit the homepage of this blog, where you can see many more posts, click here.

-- Greg Sargent | Comments (134) | Post a Comment

COMMENTS:

In a just world, those comments, coupled with his complete lack of any apology whatsoever, should be enough to get him kicked off the NYT op-ed page and kicked off the NewsHour, at an absolute minimum!

Brooks better start listening closely to that alienated and bitter "rump 15 percent" of "liberal democrats" given how right they were on the Iraq War and how wrong he was.

Greg, you could go on for days investigating his columns in the NYT and comparing them to what he said and wrote elsewhere (PBS, NPR, various talking head shows on TV). He's like Jonah Goldberg, suffering absolutely no consequences for being a total clown, cheerleading us into oblivion.

Posted by: ohiomeister
Date: February 15, 2007 3:14 PM

seriously, Ohio! I think I might actually pull up more of his mockery of the people who were right, as nauseating as it will be to do...

Posted by: Greg
Date: February 15, 2007 3:15 PM

Seriously, Greg, can you call up the NYT, NPR, PBS, and some of the other shows and ask their reporters/producers/talent why, given how profoundly wrong he was, they still have him on their shows as a serious pundit? There must be some sort of minimum level of qualifications, right?

Right?

Posted by: ohiomeister
Date: February 15, 2007 3:16 PM

"spread freedom"

"serve as a force for good"

How hollow these ideas sound now!

"spread shame"

"serve as a force for graft"

Those are more like it! How sad.

Posted by: TheraP
Date: February 15, 2007 3:17 PM

Greg, look up the column, right after the 2004 election when brooks crowed about "a republican party in full."

He crowed right before they crashed and burned.

Thanks for your good work!!!

Posted by: TheraP
Date: February 15, 2007 3:19 PM

I would email them, but I'm sick of people not answering emails from this blog! But there may be a way to do it...and thx, TheraP, appreciate it...

Posted by: Greg
Date: February 15, 2007 3:23 PM

I particularly like this line:

"They were tolerant. Tolerant of tyranny."

Comic.

Posted by: D
Date: February 15, 2007 3:35 PM

Also, this is a classic idiot-trying-to-sound-smart-line:

"I suspect they will not even now admit their errors."

Use funny syntax and a dismissive tone and some people will think you have a powerful brain.

Posted by: D
Date: February 15, 2007 3:37 PM

I don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton but it has nothing to do with some presumed failure on her part to apologize or atone for her vote on the Iraq war resolution. She has said that she takes responsibility for her vote, that it was made on the basis of the information provided, that that information has been shown to be wrong and that the war is a mistake. I don't think there's really too much more to say, but I see a great deal of comment about this online and in the news. David Brooks is just taking advantage of this to write yet another 'see how the Democrats eat their young' sort of column. This is his specialty: denigration of the Democrats by implying they are fractured, self-hating, bitter, and --as we see above -- an unpatriotic minority that is unable to take pride in the real roots of our greatness. This is his shtick and he's annoyingly glib with it.

The counter to this is pretty straightforward, seems to me -- we've got a bunch of great candidates for 2008, none of whom want to continue this war, and at least two of whom voted against it. Can the Republicans say the same? Or do they want to keep pulling that statue down, over and over, and feeling all patriotic along with the bitter 15% who still think we can win? Be my guest, Davie.

Posted by: Aunt Deb
Date: February 15, 2007 3:49 PM

Too bad Brooks couldn't tell between is head and !@#$?, I mean rump. If he and his ilk could have made that distinction, then maybe Iraq would have never happened. Wait, who am I kidding.

Posted by: Todd
Date: February 15, 2007 3:56 PM

There was a very interesting article in the New Yorker a while back about the reasons for the Doctrine of Pundit Infallibility (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051205crbo_books1).

However, most of them have the sense to let their failures fade and be forgotten. It seems to be a special characteristic of neocons and their enablers that the insist on highlighting their failures and demanding that everyone acknowledge they were actually, in some sense, right.

Posted by: Jim E-H
Date: February 15, 2007 3:59 PM

I'm not a Doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but it is glaringly obvious that if a person has been diagnosed as a DOPI, one of the tell-tale symptoms is DICKY Syndrome.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: "You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do; the world is much safer today because of it."

You can take that all the way to your favorite oil well.

Posted by: Carole
Date: February 15, 2007 4:30 PM

Just last week it was a liberal blogosphere celebration of Jonah Goldberg Day.

Do what you can to make this one memorable as well. Huffington Post? Olbermann? Stewart?

Posted by: jerry
Date: February 15, 2007 5:21 PM

You gotta give him one thing, Brooks is giving all competition a very serious run for Wanker of the Decade.
Thanks Greg, made my day!

Posted by: jays
Date: February 15, 2007 6:14 PM

Great catch!

Now, just change "The rump 15 percent of Americans who still oppose this war may perhaps grow more bitter, lost in the cul-de-sac of their own alienation." to "The rump 15 percent of Americans who still support this war grow more bitter, lost in the cul-de-sac of their own alienation." and you have a pretty apt description of many Washington pundits, Brooks included.

Posted by: CT Voter
Date: February 15, 2007 6:18 PM

I suspect David Brooks will not even now admit his errors. I doubt the pundits of Washington will say: We were wrong. You really are the defenters of America's best interests. I doubt the Republic propagandists will say: We will never spread such distortions again. We will never again be so driven by resentment and dishonesty.

Sad to say, human nature doesn't work that way. The rump media blowhards who still support this war may perhaps grow more bitter, lost in the cul-de-sac of their own alienation.

Posted by: poliwog
Date: February 15, 2007 7:23 PM

They doubted, and continue to doubt America's willingness and ability to serve as a force for good in the world.

In the hands of the moralistic idealist, the desire to do good inevitably results in evil. Unfortunately, the punditocracy generally lacks the perception required to detect the presence of morons in the political process.

The problem with people like Brooks is that they generally get where they are through inheritance and preference. To they extent that they make their own way it is as performers, not thinkers. They have mastered the art of pleasing their patrons and paymasters, and they are adept at whipping together a pile of half-baked nonsense to shill for any dubious cause without ever developing a coherent thought about the matter. Everything they say comes straight from the performer's book of claptrap.

Posted by: antimatter
Date: February 15, 2007 7:38 PM

brooks is a mouthbreather, a blowhard, and an egomaniac. someone really should demand more of npr, pbs, and the nytimes. but then again, they can't all work for aei, can they?

Posted by: m
Date: February 15, 2007 7:45 PM

What I found of even greater interest was the succeeding line to "...of their own alienation.">

To wit:

"But, however things shake out over the next months and years, *this is the sort of day that represents what the United States is on earth to achieve. Thank God* we have the political leaders and the military capabilities to realize the ideals that have always been embodied in our founding documents."

The millennialist Christian Right must have feasted on that.

BTW, could someone point out where the Manifest Destiny conceit (a transcoding of the theological doctrine of omnipotence) is included in our "founding documents"?

TIA

Posted by: Propagandee
Date: February 15, 2007 9:35 PM

Brooks, and those of his ilk, have no choice but to
try to wallpaper over their drastic errors. The biggest foreign policy question of the last 2 decades, and probably of the next 2, costing thousands and thousands of lives, and they have been proven totally, inescapably wrong. Not an error in judgement either, but so a mindset and body of core assumptions that have been proven so fundamentally wrong that it discredits their entire ideology. So he really has no choice, if he wants to remain employed, but to pretend the whole thing never happenned.

Posted by: ontarioman
Date: February 15, 2007 9:38 PM

Greg, while Brooks and his fellow pundits were (a) wrong on the war and (b) still writing about the war as if they were right all along, let us go back to September 2002. 33 international relations scholars take out an ad in the op-ed section of the New York Times. Pretty much ever claim they make about why the war will be a bad idea holds true. Since the ad came out, one of the 33 (Thomas Schelling) won a Nobel Prize. And if two of them had not made a splash about AIPAC and its impact on American politics, the lot of them would have trouble getting one-tenth of David Brooks's attention.

Could just one media outlet decide that folks with, say, PhDs in international relations, with, say a positive track record for accurate predictions might make, say, good choices for pundits? Or would that be asking too much?

Posted by: Tim F-W
Date: February 15, 2007 10:15 PM

I wouldn't ask for infallibility in a Pundit. But the honesty and grace to admit that past opinions turned out to be wrong.

Posted by: Arun
Date: February 15, 2007 10:22 PM

Part of the reason Brooks gets away with it is his faux self-deprecating delivery. Very low key, very modest. Has to be a thoughtful guy, right. Right?

It's all part and parcel of the glorification of ignorance that seems to have taken hold. I wish I knew how to reverse it.

Posted by: ql in ny
Date: February 16, 2007 7:48 AM

Here's my letter to Mr. Brooks:

Mr Brooks:

In your defense of Hillary Clinton you keep a blind eye to the morality of allowing a tragic war, predicted by many of the same people you slam. And you completely miss the foolishness of surrendering the legislative branch's authority to George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Would it be too much to ask you to, at the least, show the slightest shred of respect and civility toward the people who spoke out against this invasion and occupation? You and your more coarse fellow travelers insulted us for exercising our American rights and liberties to oppose a foolish rush to war. But events have proved invasion opponents to be wise and thoughtful while war supporters were more of a panicked and frightened herd.

And yet you continue to heap your scorn upon us?

David Brooks, have you no shame?

Posted by: Andy Olsen
Date: February 16, 2007 10:20 AM

Not to speak of this gem from March, 2004 where, parroting Republican talking points, Brooks lambasted John Kerry for the nuance he now defense in Hillary Clinton:

Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. "There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong" in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, "There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing."
For you see, Kerry continued, "Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used."

See The Anonymous Liberal - http://www.anonymousliberal.com/index.html

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FLASHBACK: Brooks Predicted War Foes Wouldn't Admit They Were WrongFebruary 15, 2007 -- 2:50 PM EST // View Comments (134) // Post a Comment

FLASHBACK: Brooks Predicted War Foes Wouldn't Admit They Were Wrong
February 15, 2007 -- 2:50 PM EST // View Comments (134) // Post a Comment