Take Two

On the Today show this morning, former vice president Al Gore called our involvement in Iraq the "worst strategy mistake in the history of the U.S.'' As a result, he said, "What we're seeing with this report is a situation in which there are no good outcomes.''

What Gore did not say, but might have, is, "As I've said from Day One...'' or, "To quote from my speech of April 2003...''

Yes, it is too late for a do-over of the decision to go to war. It's too late to go back to the days when many fewer Americans dared to question the wisdom of the invasion. But it is not too late to make some distinction between those who were flat wrong, like the president and so many of his advisers, those who knew better and went along anyway, like former secretary of state Colin Powell, and those who argued against involvement from the get-go and have been proved horribly right, like Gore.

That's not so we can do the "told you so'' dance that nobody ought to be much in the mood for. But unless we're clear about the facts of the last four years, we won't learn anything from them.

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus laid out some of these facts on Monday, in yet another of his buried treasures inside the paper's A section. "Although given little public credit at the time, or since," Pincus wrote, "many of the 126 House Democrats who spoke out and voted against the October 2002 resolution that gave President Bush authority to wage war against Iraq have turned out to be correct in their warnings about the problems a war would create.''

South Carolina Congressman John Spratt, for example, argued more than four years ago that the only sure outcome would be "to lose the peace and swell the ranks of terrorists who hate us.'' This was not unknowable; Spratt and others knew it, said it and suffered for doing so.

Another official who got it right - and got only derision in return -- was Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. Back when we invaded, it was generally accepted that diplomacy was for ninnies and the inspectors who found no WMD in Iraq plainly incompetent.

(More recently, Bush has suggested that his assessment of Annan's stroke has been upgraded rather dramatically. Back in July, an open microphone at a G-8 summit luncheon in Russia captured the president telling British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Annan could just pick up the phone and solve the world's problems - or at least, get Syria to halt attacks on Israel by the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah.

While chewing on a buttered roll, Mr. Bush remarked that he felt like telling Annan to just get on the horn with Syrian President Bashar Assad and "make something happen...See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over.')

The Iraq Study Group Report endorsing the diplomatic approach that Bush rejected out of hand four years ago coincided nicely with a private dinner at the White House last night, where Bush toasted Annan before he steps down as secretary general later this month.

Then there are those who got it wrong before they got it right. Even New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who probably convinced more moderates to support the invasion than anyone other than Colin Powell, wrote last week that, "Everyone asks what is our "Plan B' for Iraq. Answer: It's get out as soon as we can, with the least damage possible, just as Israel got out of Gaza. And then build a wall - not a physical wall, but a wall of energy independence that will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda, but without being hostage to the most malevolent.'' Of course, Al Gore has been saying that all along, too

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