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Judging by Dave Weigel's response to my post below, I wasn't clear enough. Dave points out that Fred Kagan and Joe Lieberman have made bad predictions about Iraq. Well, yeah -- just about everyone who's spoken or written about the Iraq has made some bad predictions. "To say in early 2007 that Iraq war hawks were 'always wrong,'" writes Dave, "was more or less as true as arguing that salmon go upstream to spawn." But that wasn't what he said. He used the present continuous tense -- "These people are always wrong" -- rather than the past perfect -- "These people have always been wrong." The latter assertion, made 10 months ago, would be defensible (though not quite salmon-go-upstream obvious). The former assertion has been disproven. I had hoped it was clear that my conclusion to that post was sarcastic; my whole point was that one ought to proceed with caution before closing one's ears.

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Iraq