The Wrongness. It Burns.

Tim Lambert at Science Blogs has gathered predictions from conservative warbloggers at the height of the ramp up to the War on Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

If we go into Iraq, how many casualties do you expect to see (on the side of the US and our allies)

John Hawkins: “Probably 300 or less”
Charles Johnson:”Very few”
Henry Hanks: “Less than 200”
Laurence Simon: “A Few hundred”
Rachael Lucas: “Less than three thousand”
Scott Ott: “Dozens”
Glenn Reynolds: “Fewer than 100”
Tim Blair: “Below 50”
Ken Layne: “a few hundred”
Steven Den Beste: “50-150”

Yeah, we stand at over 4,639 American deaths right now. Casualties number over 25,000. Over a million Iraqis have died. A million. A million. Luckily, we are on track on pulling out of America’s biggest mistake ever, no thanks to those intellectual heavyweights above. Fabius Maximus wonders what the value of ‘winning’ in Iraq has been:

Let alone justifying the cost in blood (theirs and ours) and money. The monetary costs is probably over a trillion dollars, including future pay/benefits and replacement of equipment. We borrowed it from Asian and OPEC nations, and have no idea how to repay. They will demand repayment, eventually. Our children probably consider us to have been insane.

(1) There is little, almost no, evidence that Saddam was a threat to the US.
(a) Did we find those WMD’s? ….
(b) Saddam the terrorist threat to America….
(2) The insurgency was a result of our occupation, so defeating it brings no net benefit to the US.
(3) Will Iraq — or Iraq and Kurdistan — be allies of the US? Too soon to say. Kurdistan has so far not allowed US bases in their territory; most of their oil leases have gone to non-US companies. The Shiites running the Iraq government have long-standing ties to Iran.
(4) No, we have not gotten any oil. Nothing to date indicates that we — or US oil companies — will have ownership or preferred access to Iraq, Kurdish, or Sunni Arab Iraq oil.

I can hear the wingers, now, so I will preempt them. They will say we won a fledging parliamentary democracy. A democracy that is possibly doomed to failure since it did not spring up from within Iraq or Iraqis. You cannot teach or impose democracy. The ideal must evolve in a society. Look at Iran. Ironically, Iran has much more democratic ideals present in its society, as evidenced by the Green Revolution, then does Iraq.

But that is all beside the point. When the war began, our goal was not to win a democracy for Iraq. Our goal was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction that were such an imminent threat to the United States that we went to war over it. We also went to war over this vague notion, stoked by the lies of Republicans everywhere, but most notably the President, the Vice President and his national security team, that Iraq had ties to Al Queda and/or was in some way linked to the September 11th Attacks.

And we all knew that the war was going to be a walk in the park (and by we, I mean those conservative idiots above and anyone who thought like them). And anyone who did not think so and/or thought the war was a mistake was a idiot at best and a traitor at worst.

They could not have been more wrong if they were named Wrong W. McWrongfield, III. Seriously, you have to work at being as wrong as they were. Failing on such a massive scale makes most people fundamentally reevaluate their very existence. But what did these same conservatives all do? They supported Sarah Palin and championed anti-intellectualism in the last election. That is stunning. It is as if they were so wrong that somehow, they all think they were right, and that more of the wrong was required. Hence Sarah Palin. Now George W. Bush was unintelligent and anti-intellectual, but he is Mensa compared to Sarah Palin.

They have all learned nothing.