Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first
Intelligence: Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first
Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first
December 28, 2003
It's well known that pundits are always right. We never get a thing wrong. Everything that happens is something we foresaw. That's why you spend good money to read our scintillating thoughts, after all.
If you’d read the prestigious New Yorker only a couple of weeks ago, for example, you would have been informed of the near-impossibility of finding Saddam Hussein in Iraq: “The taskforce’s search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting. According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, it may have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to 1998, Ritter directed a special UN unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam's private telephone communications.
“‘The high-profile guys around Saddam were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him carrying a gun,’ Ritter told me. ‘But now he’s gone to a different tier — the tribes. He has released the men from his most sensitive units and let them go back to their tribes, and we don’t know where they are . . .’ The taskforce, in any event, has shifted its focus from the hunt for Saddam as it is increasingly distracted by the spreading guerrilla war.”
Days later, a tribal ally betrayed Saddam and he is now the most famous captive in the world. The analysis? Courtesy of Seymour Hersh, one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of our time.
Or if you’d read the liberal American Prospect last summer you would have seen the prophetic words: “Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What’s more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now — toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate’s charisma or fame.” Oh well.
At least they got the war right. Here’s Simon Jenkins in The Times on March 28. The title of the piece was: Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer. Here’s the key paragraph:
“In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall.
“It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taliban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get ‘difficult’ only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?”
So you can’t win them all. Robert Fisk, for one, is sometimes known to have let his disdain for the Americans overshadow the crimes of Arab tyrants like the great leader Saddam. Here he was, once again on the ball, fearlessly using his imagination in the thick of the Iraq war:
“Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have I seen the Iraqi army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are ‘degrading’ the country’s defences but there was little sign of that here on Wednesday.”
It’s worth remembering that Fisk is still published in semi-serious papers and magazines. A man who has got pretty much everything wrong about the Middle East, who spent much of this year writing complete gobbledegook about Iraq, is still a hero of the liberal journalistic class.
But Fisk was in good company this past year; 2003 was, perhaps, best remembered as the year of living erroneously. Even your humble correspondent, who predicted success in Iraq, a Schwarzenegger victory and a strong American economic recovery got a few things wrong. Yes, I thought there would be real, live actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Instead, we found merely the infrastructure, history, and plans for future development. Although the case for war rested on deeper foundations — namely, Saddam as the most dangerous weapon of them all — it behoves me to say I got it wrong.
So, of course, did the UN, Hans Blix, MI6, the French government, the CIA, The New York Times, the Democrats and — possibly — Saddam. Maybe his terrified underlings fibbed to him about what they had or didn’t have. Maybe he kept the lie going for fear of being revealed as a paper tyrant. All we know now is that he lost the bluff.
The biggest surprises? No one accurately foresaw the extraordinary rise of Howard Dean and the strength of his internet-based insurrection in the Democratic party. He remains the biggest domestic American story of the year.
No one predicted the amazing resilience of the American economy, powering back to an annual rate of 8.2% growth in the third quarter. Almost no one predicted the astonishing productivity gains either — gains that have kept the recovery relatively job-free but have brought the markets back to frothy exuberance.
Few foresaw the emergence of Schwarzenegger as the governor of the most populous state in America. Few would have predicted no large Al-Qaeda attacks in America. Few could have predicted that The New York Times would admit to having published dozens of fabricated stories by a young affirmative action product, Jayson Blair, in a scandal that helped bring down one of the most arrogant editors in that paper’s history. Or that in such a short time, Hillary Clinton would have emerged as a Democratic leader in her own right, swiftly out of the shadow of her presidential husband.
So, ahem, the predictions for 2004. Bush will be re-elected in a landslide, a revolution will topple the mullahs in Tehran, the Nasdaq will reach 2,500, and . . . oh, never mind.
You wouldn’t believe me anyway. And you shouldn’t. See you next year.
December 29, 2003 at 10:10 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink
| Top of page
| Blog Home
